By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
On January 21, the United States confirmed its first case
of the coronavirus. The nation’s political and media elite obsessed over Mitch
McConnell’s just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of Donald
J. Trump.
On January 23, China locked down the city of Wuhan. Cable
news in America lit up with praise for the epic, nay historic, performance by
House impeachment manager Adam Schiff in the trial’s opening arguments.
On January 30, the World Health Organization declared a
world health emergency. The U.S. Senate prepared to vote on impeachment
witnesses.
On February 5, the cruise ship Diamond Princess
quarantined thousands of passengers after a major outbreak on board. Mitt
Romney announced that he’d vote to convict Trump on one of the two counts
against him, and the Senate voted to acquit on both.
If the Senate had approved additional impeachment
witnesses, the trial would have stretched into February at least, overlapping
even more with the epidemic.
Trump closed off travel from China while the trial was
still ongoing, the day after senators asked their final questions of the
impeachment managers and the White House defense team. Only two and a half
weeks after the trial, the White House requested $1.25 billion in emergency
coronavirus funding from Congress.
If the trial hadn’t ended expeditiously, the Senate
easily could have been still seeking the testimony of, say, former White House
counsel Don McGahn about the details of the non-firing of special counsel
Robert Mueller — at the same time that everyone expected the administration to
be shifting into wartime footing against the virus.
In that circumstance, the impeachment trial obviously
would have been immediately shelved, because a discretionary national crisis
can’t compete with a real, unavoidable one. Political melodrama must give way
to a potential public-health catastrophe. Purportedly historic events that were
going to be forgotten within weeks can’t compare with days that genuinely might
define our era.
For more than three years, American national politics has
been constantly on a crisis footing over presidential tweets, two-day
controversies, and dubious storylines whipped up by the media and Trump’s
genuine outrages. Little of it has been enduring, or nearly as important as the
intense, wall-to-wall attention at any given moment suggested.
Trump and his opposition have been engaged in a
performative dance of mutual animosity that is angry, hysterical, and,
ultimately, inconsequential.
The Mueller probe constituted the tent pole of this
period. For years, it drew wishful comparisons to Watergate in the media, but
it came up empty, since its premise of a Trump conspiracy with the Russians was
always a progressive phantasmagoria.
After all the energy devoted to inflating the Russians
into a clear-and-present danger to the workings of America here on our shores,
that threat has instead proved to be China, which loosed a virus on the world
that has temporarily crashed the American economy and shut down much of
American life, including elections.
After we spent months pretending that Trump would somehow
be ousted from the presidency by his own party in the Senate, not only is he
still the president, all people of good will are rooting for him to perform as
ably as he can in this crisis.
After acting as though we had endless time and energy to
waste on nonsense because the stakes were so small in what was, until the day
before yesterday, a time of peace and prosperity, we have been jolted into a
period when our national decisions really matter, and time and resources are of
the essence.
In short, the epidemic has put in stark relief the
pettiness and absurdity of much that has taken place in our national life since
Trump won the presidency. This crisis is the unmistakable punctuation mark on
that post-2016 era and the beginning of something new.
How Trump performs now — finally without Mueller or
impeachment, artifacts of another time, dogging him — will determine how this
time is remembered.
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