By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, December 21, 2019
President Trump ends 2019 in a better position than when
he started. The year began with the swearing in of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of
the House. The Mueller probe dragged on. The legislative agenda of Trump’s
first two years in office had petered out. The Democratic frontrunner, Joe
Biden, was beating him by double digits in the polls. A little more than
halfway through the year, bond prices signaled recession.
Look where things stand now. Pelosi’s decision to impeach
Trump already has cost her a seat and stands zero chance of resulting in a
Senate conviction. Not only has Mueller shuffled off the stage, but Michael
Horowitz’s report on FBI malfeasance also raises serious doubts about the
credibility of the government and media elites who spent years arguing that
Trump and his associates were Russian agents. Mitch McConnell blocks liberal
bills from the House while confirming additional conservative judges. Biden is
damaged, and the problems of his candidacy manifest as he sleepwalks toward his
party’s nomination. The economy is gangbusters.
Nothing the Democratic majority has done has hurt Trump’s
approval rating. At this time last year, he stood at 42 percent approval and 52
percent disapproval in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. As I
write, the RCP average of Trump’s approval rating is 45 percent and disapproval
is 52 percent. Trump’s numbers are remarkably stable and closely track
President Obama’s at this point in his presidency. Biden began the year with
big leads over Trump. Since then his margin has dwindled to 4 percent. And
that’s before Trump drops $1 billion in negative social media on him (or
whoever the nominee is) next year.
Of course, Trump cannot say that he has been consistently
popular. The opposite is true. And a 4-point victory for Biden still would be a
victory — though not necessarily under the rules of the Electoral College. What
Trump can say is that efforts to remove him from office have failed, or
are about to fail, and have not prevented him from delivering the disruptive
change that his supporters desire. Trump’s destiny is not to be a broadly
popular president, if that is even possible anymore. He has been a
consequential president. And may well be a reelected one.
Trump’s opponents have contributed to his success ever
since he became the focal point of our national life in 2015. He fashioned
himself into a political bulldozer and rolled over decades-old dynasties,
demolished Republican shibboleths, ground into dust codes of presidential
behavior, and plowed through entrenched obstacles to conservative policymaking
in the bureaucracy and courts. Throughout it all, he has benefited from the
contrast between his policies and results on one hand and the possibility of
the “bold, structural change” desired by woke Democrats on the other. He also
has made the most of his adversaries’ weaknesses: not just the character traits
he turns into nicknames but the zealotry that manifests itself in overreach and
radicalism.
The hinge point of Trump’s good year was Friday, March
22, when the Justice Department acknowledged receipt of the Mueller report into
Russian interference in the 2016 election. Two days later, Attorney General
William Barr released his summary of the report’s contents. The full report was
made available to the public on April 18. It was clear by then that despite all
of the time, energy, resources, and indictments and convictions, Mueller had
not uncovered a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia and
was not willing to assert that the president obstructed justice. Mueller’s
testimony before Congress on July 24 was a flop. The Russia investigation that
had begun in the summer of 2016 and consumed the media since it was made public
the following year ended in a whimper.
It was shortly after Mueller’s appearance on Capitol Hill
that Trump had his “perfect” call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. The
whistleblower complaint that was filed with the intelligence community
inspector general afterward, and made public on September 26, set into motion
the president’s impeachment, culminating in Wednesday’s House vote. No
president wants to be impeached, and no president ought to be impeached in the
absence of compelling and damning evidence, but there is an argument to be made
that in some ways impeachment has benefited Trump.
For one thing, impeachment has focused Trump’s attention.
In between the end of the Mueller investigation and the beginning of the
impeachment inquiry, President Trump engaged in a series of incendiary battles
with left-wing Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and
the late Elijah Cummings. While Ocasio-Cortez and Omar are unpopular, the
controversies nevertheless stirred up issues of race and gender that make
suburbanites extremely uncomfortable.
Absent impeachment, these last few months might have been
spent in endless social media flame wars with celebrities, progressives,
wayward Republicans, and whoever else wandered into the crossfire. Instead,
President Trump and the GOP have been “on message” against the whistleblower,
Adam Schiff, and Nancy Pelosi to a degree that is nothing short of remarkable.
Think about what they might accomplish if Republicans were similarly focused on
the state of the economy.
Impeachment crowded out all else. This made freshmen
Democrats from districts Trump won in 2016 anxious. Pelosi had to give them
something in return for impeachment that they could take back to their
districts. That something was the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which
just happens to be a top priority of the president’s. At the end of this
process, Trump will have kept his job through at least January 2021 and
pocketed a significant diplomatic accomplishment and campaign promise. No small
feat.
Impeachment also distracted from the Democratic primary.
There are six weeks until the Iowa caucuses and hardly anybody besides the
candidates and their immediate families seem to care. The Ukraine scandal
involves the Democratic frontrunner but in an unusual way. Trump’s desire that
President Zelensky look into the energy company Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat
on the board, confirmed Joe Biden’s status as the preeminent threat to Trump.
But it also reminded people that over the years members of the Biden family
have benefited from Joe’s high office. And Biden’s clumsy response to
allegations of unseemly profit-seeking was another reminder of his weaknesses
as a candidate. This flawed frontrunner, already defined by his son’s influence
peddling, maintains his lead in the polls because Democratic primary voters see
his 14 rivals as too radical or unelectable.
President Trump heads to Mar-a-Lago impeached but
defiant, with a new NAFTA and a “Phase One” China deal, Space Force, 185
federal judges, the lowest unemployment in half a century, a stock market that
has increased by 50 percent since Election Day 2016, a unified party, and an
opposition barreling toward a confusing and bruising primary. Trump won 2019,
but this is the preseason. The real game begins in 2020.
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