By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, December 27, 2019
Nancy Pelosi’s fecklessness has ensured that Americans
understand impeachment to be a purely political matter, and as a purely
political matter impeachment is as dead as your leftover Christmas turkey.
Only a few days after the impeachment vote, President
Donald Trump hit his best job-approval rating ever in the Quinnipiac
poll. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is ready to slap the process
around like a housecat tormenting a sparrow. The magic bullet missed, and now
Democrats have to make a more ordinary case against Trump.
The problem is: They don’t know how.
The case against Trump in 2016 was that he is unfit for the
office. The case against Trump in 2020 is — or should be — that he is not very
good at his job.
In 2016, Trump promised Americans sustained 3-percent
economic growth, but the economy has not met that standard. He promised a
shrinking trade deficit, but the trade deficit has grown. He promised to build
a wall along the southern border and to make Mexico pay for it, which he has
not done. Which is to say, on the core issues of economic growth, trade, and
immigration, President Trump is a failure by his own criteria.
But the Democrats are poorly positioned to take Trump to
the woodshed on these issues.
Consider immigration. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders
toured Iowa union halls with an immigration message that was not too different
from Trump’s. He denounced “open borders” as a billionaires’ plot to flood the
U.S. market with cheap labor. At the time, Democrats still talked about illegal
immigration like it was . . . illegal.
In 2020, ascendant Democratic primary candidate Pete
Buttigieg has just published a plan that would reduce the deportation of
illegal immigrants, including those guilty of certain categories of crimes, and
Democrats as a whole have invested a great deal of political capital in
opposing Trump’s efforts to control illegal immigration.
Why? A majority of Americans say they personally worry
about illegal immigration, and a large majority — 77 percent in the most recent
Gallup poll — say they see illegal immigration as a “critical threat” or an
“important threat.” Trump has thrived on the issue of illegal immigration, and,
in response, Democrats have taken a position that is both bad policy and bad
politics.
On trade, Democrats have done the opposite: Rather than
blindly opposing a basically good policy, they have adopted the worst of
Trump’s ideas. Senator Elizabeth Warren apes Trump’s nationalist posturing,
insisting that trade is a question of “loyalty to America” and charging that
American businessmen “have no patriotism.” Her proposals would essentially
prohibit trade deals with China and Mexico, among other countries. But two-thirds
of Americans say Trump’s trade war is unlikely to improve their lives and a
third say it will leave them worse off, according to a Hill/HarrisX survey.
Warren is unlikely to outdo Trump on a nationalism agenda, but nonetheless she
has maneuvered herself into a position that is both bad policy and bad
politics.
On the economy, Trump has seen modest success after tax
cuts and deregulatory efforts. The Democrats oppose these for ideological
reasons, but also because they have the stink of Trump on them.
A more intelligent approach for Democrats (and for us
lonely few anti-Trump conservatives) would be to concede that the president’s
positions on issues such as illegal immigration and trade speak to concerns
that are genuine and legitimate while pointing out that his actions have been
in the main ineffective or genuinely destructive. But the Democrats are so
committed to their exotic fairy tale — Trump is a monster, Trump is a Nazi,
Trump is a white nationalist, etc. — that they have forgotten how to run an
ordinary campaign against an ordinary failure.
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