By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 09, 2019
In response to news reports over the weekend that at
least one additional administration whistleblower has come forward to say what
he or she knows about President Trump’s Ukrainian schemes, South Carolina
senator Lindsey Graham tweeted, “I’ve seen this movie before — with Brett
Kavanaugh. More and more doesn’t mean better or reliable.”
Graham’s raw political spinning has a fatal flaw.
Graham wants to tar the whistleblowers as part of a
partisan campaign. But their motivation is largely irrelevant now because the
bulk of the allegations have already been corroborated by the rough phone call
transcript released by the White House and by the statements of the president
and his aides. So while it’s still possible that the whistleblowers are part of
some elaborate Democratic or “deep state” plot to take down the president, the
plotters are using truthful information to do the deed. Graham surely knows
this but is opting to pretend that there’s no there there.
The most charitable view of Graham’s sycophancy is that
the president has put him and GOP senators in general in a no-win predicament.
The political hell most Senate Republicans have found
themselves in since 2016 can be described as the chasm between how Trump wants
them to behave and how they believe they should govern. Virtually none of these
senators can get reelected without the third of Republicans who adore Trump,
but the vulnerable ones need more than just the Trumpers to get across the
finish line. This means they have to attract less single-minded voters who are
often more Trump-skeptical — mostly suburban, college-educated Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents. But because the president and his most ardent
fans will not brook any criticism of the president, the senators have been left
trying to thread a very narrow needle: Differentiate yourself from Donald Trump
while not actually criticizing Donald Trump.
The impeachment drama is shrinking the needle’s eye even
more, and from both sides.
On one side is the president. For instance, going by
published reporting, my own conversations with senators and Senate staffers, as
well as straightforward common sense (as opposed to the fantasy reasoning one
finds in some corners of cable news and Twitter), I can tell you with a high
degree of confidence that virtually no GOP senator agrees with the president
that his July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelenskiy was, as Trump likes to say, “perfect.” Beyond that, opinions differ,
but it’s a safe bet that most Senate Republicans think the conversation could
have gone better and would dearly love for the president to say so.
Past presidents in the crosshairs of scandal have
resorted to apologizing. Ronald Reagan admitted that “mistakes were made” after
he stumbled on the facts during the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton initially
denied everything, then told the nation, “I have sinned,” and asked for
forgiveness for the conduct that led to his impeachment.
Trump is determined to go another way and to punish those
who disagree, as he has already tried to do with Utah senator Mitt Romney.
That’s why Graham, Iowa senator Joni Ernst, and Florida senator Marco Rubio
find it necessary to hide behind various parsing rationalizations. Rubio’s
response to Trump’s calling on the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden is now the
official safe harbor for Republicans: He didn’t really mean it; he’s just
trolling the press. Ernst says, in effect, that criticizing the president won’t
change his behavior, so why bother?
Meanwhile, the Democrats have bungled the impeachment
issue. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, in particular, has
never missed an opportunity to burn any credibility he might have as a sober
and honest investigator. Democratic partisans may like his red-meat rhetoric,
but they lose sight of the fact that trolling Trump just makes the president’s
job easier. Schiff’s entirely fictional account of Trump’s conversation with
the Ukrainian president, read into the congressional record, may have
infuriated the president, but it also gave Trump a talking point and an excuse
for Republicans to hide behind the unfairness of the process.
If impeachment is going to be anything other than a
partisan protest immediately swatted down by the GOP-controlled Senate,
Democrats need to carefully and methodically make their case through serious
fact-finding — an investigation that not only persuades at least 20 Republican
senators but also a sufficient number of the voters those senators need to stay
in office.
Short of that, the safer path will be for Republicans to
continue to pretend everything is “perfect.”
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