By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Trump supporters are right to feel vindication after
Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress. At times the special counsel seemed
unfamiliar with the contents of his own report. He came across as aloof and
confused and often unable to answer both Democratic and Republican questions to
the lawmakers’ satisfaction. The same media figures that began the day saying
Mueller’s appearance might be the game changer ended up calling it a flop.
“Democrats now have one option to end Trump’s presidency,” read the headline of
Dan Balz’s analysis in the Washington Post. “The 2020 election.” Trump,
as always, put it more memorably: “truth
is a force of nature!”
The real truth is Mueller’s testimony was never going to
interrupt preexisting trends. Support for impeachment has been stable for a
year at around 40 percent in the Fox News poll of registered voters. Fox asks,
“Do you think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, or
not?” In June 2018, 39 percent of respondents answered yes. Last week, 42
percent said the same. Opposition to impeachment has hovered around 50 percent
during all this time. When the most recent Fox News poll asked if Mueller’s
testimony might cause voters to change how they felt about Trump, only 8
percent said there was a strong chance of that happening. Forty-nine percent
said not at all.
Views of President Trump are cast iron. Mueller might have
overturned this equilibrium by offering new evidence incriminating Trump or by
saying definitively that Trump obstructed justice. He did neither. Nor was he
going to. It was clear from his May press conference that Mueller did not want
to appear before Congress and that he had said all he was willing to say in his
report. The negotiations over his testimony that stretched into midsummer, the
sudden delay of his testimony by a week, and the addition of his chief of staff
as counsel further indicated his reluctance as well as his lack of assurance
before the cameras. The presence on the committee of Republicans hostile to
Mueller’s investigation and to his findings meant that the hearing would not be
entirely favorable to Democrats. Sure enough, Mueller’s performance was a
disappointment.
But President Trump and Republicans would be wrong to
assume that the Democrats’ drive to impeachment has ended. The will to overturn
the 2016 election never depended on Mueller. He was merely the most likely
instrument of Trump’s undoing. Democrats have called for impeachment since
Trump’s inaugural. What they have lacked is the means. Maxine Waters raised the
idea in February 2017, months before Trump fired James Comey and set in motion
the train of events culminating in Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.
Tom Steyer launched Need to Impeach in October 2017, a year and a half before
Mueller filed his report. Last January, on the first evening of the House
Democratic majority, Rashida Tlaib declared her intention to “impeach this
m—f—r.”
The impeachment resolution the House voted on last week
had nothing to do with Mueller or his report. It found Trump guilty “of high
misdemeanors” and “unfit to be president” because of his “racist comments that
have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of
color.” The measure didn’t even pretend to have a relationship with actual
criminal or civil law. It received 95 votes nonetheless, all Democrats,
including the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The same man who,
after Mueller’s belly flop, argued before the Democratic Caucus that he has
enough material to begin impeachment right now. Mueller’s testimony might not
increase the number of House Democrats for impeachment from less than half (40 percent)
to a majority. But it’s not as if that percentage is about to decrease, either.
Democrats overwhelmingly support impeachment. Forty
percent of adults in the most recent Economist/YouGov survey say
Congress should try to impeach President Trump. That number rises to 70 percent
among Democrats. It is no wonder why. Trump is a one-man rebuke of
progressivism, of political correctness, of a humanitarianism that does not
recognize citizenship or national borders. Since 2016 an entire media-political
infrastructure has been built to push the messages that Trump’s election was
illegitimate, Trump’s actions in and out of office are criminal, and Trump
ought to be excised from the government as quickly as possible. Even if Mueller
and his report fade from view — and there is no guarantee they will — the
president’s adversaries will continue to search for the annihilating angel who
will deliver them from Donald Trump.
Why? Because the impeachment debate is not about what
Trump has done, is doing, or might do. It is about whether he and the social
forces he represents are entitled to rule.
No comments:
Post a Comment