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| Impeachment Day showcased five hallmarks of Trump’s governing style | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE BIG IDEA: In the Age of Trump, even the extraordinary has become ordinary.
After he was impeached 21 years ago today, Bill Clinton spoke on the South Lawn of the White House. “We must stop the politics of personal destruction,” he said. “We must get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity and uncontrolled anger. That is not what America deserves.”
When President Trump was impeached on Wednesday night, he suggested during a campaign rally in Michigan that John Dingell, a Democrat who represented that state in Congress for six decades and stood behind Clinton on that December afternoon in 1998, might be in hell.
“This lawless partisan impeachment is a suicide march for the Democratic Party,” Trump told a crowd of 10,000 at an arena in Battle Creek, Mich. “After three years of sinister witch hunts, hoaxes, scams, tonight House Democrats are trying to nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans.”
Trump talked for two hours and one minute, a show of stamina that would have impressed Fidel Castro.
At one point, the president criticized Rep. Debbie Dingell (D), who holds her late husband’s seat, for voting to impeach him. “A real beauty,” Trump said, recounting how the widow thanked him for agreeing to provide special funeral honors when he passed away in February. “She calls me up. ‘It’s the nicest thing that’s ever happened. Thank you so much. John, would be so thrilled, he’s looking down,’” Trump recalled.
“Maybe,” Trump mused, “he’s looking up.”
Going to Michigan and suggesting that the longtime dean of the House might be in hell? Only Trump would do that.
The congresswoman responded:
It was a petulant coda to a momentous day that captured in miniature five hallmarks of the Trump presidency:
1) Governing as perpetual warfare
With us-against-them rhetoric, Trump consistently focuses more on inflaming his base than soothing the country or reassuring independents who don’t identify with either tribe.
Trump’s reelection campaign blasted out a barrage of fundraising solicitations on Wednesday, all under the president’s name, asking supporters to chip in to help him raise $2 million for the day. “Before the upcoming vote, I want to post another HUGE fundraising number to ensure that we have the resources to win this IMPEACHMENT WAR,” Trump wrote in one of the emails. “I’m calling on my most FIERCE and LOYAL defenders to step up. … Remember, this is WAR and America’s future depends on us winning.”
A few minutes after he started speaking in Michigan, an aide held up a poster board to show him the final vote count in the House. “Whoa, every single Republican voted for us,” the president told the crowd, which roared with approval at what history will remember as a defining low point of his tenure, even assuming he’s acquitted in the Senate. “We didn’t lose one Republican! … The Democrats always stick together.”
Trump went out of his way to thank his diehard supporters who travel like groupies to all his rallies.
He has shown little or no desire to transcend the deep divisions of the country over the past three years. Trump wants to build a wall, not bridges. His deliberate disregard for customs and niceties also endears him to his most ardent boosters, even as it annoys a GOP establishment that tries to look the other way. He’s the disruptor-in-chief who took office with a mandate to shake up business as usual.
“Impeachment was so partisan that there were as many members who switched party over impeachment — two — as there were other crossover votes,” Aaron Blake notes. “Those party-switchers were Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), who went from Republican to independent, and Rep. Jeff Van Drew (N.J.), who is moving from Democrat to Republican. Van Drew remained a Democrat at least for Wednesday and was joined in voting against both articles by Rep. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.), who represents the most Trump-friendly district (Trump won it by 31 points) of any Democrat.”
The only other crossover was Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who “split the baby” by voting for the first article on abuse of power but against the second article on obstruction of Congress. Trump won his district by 10 points.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), the struggling presidential candidate who failed to qualify for tonight’s debate, voted “present” on both articles because she prefers for Trump to be censured.
As a point of comparison, five Democrats voted to impeach Clinton and six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
2) Governing by exhaustion
“In the life of Trump, 10 months is an eternity,” Trump said at the rally. He was explaining why he’s “not worried” about suffering politically from impeachment.
Sometimes it feels as if Trump is waging a war of attrition against longstanding norms as he seeks to dismantle various guardrails on his power. Many of the president’s critics have been worn out or ground down. That was reflected with relatively paltry turnout at most of the pro-impeachment protests organized from coast to coast on Tuesday night.
The reality TV president supercharged the celebrification of politics, but people are changing the channel. This week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 62 percent of Americans said they were closely following the impeachment story, down from 82 percent who said the same on the eve of Clinton’s impeachment. “At the other end of the spectrum, 18 percent say they are not following Trump’s impeachment too closely and 20 percent say they are not following it at all. In 1998, only 5 percent reported paying no attention,” Marc Fisher notes.
“Chris Cannon, a former Republican congressman from Utah who served as a House impeachment manager during the Clinton proceedings, said the country is now divided into two dueling factions — the ‘I’m going to wear my MAGA hat and punch you in the face if you disagree’ group and the ‘I’m going to punch you in the face because of your MAGA hat’ group,” Marc reports. “That political and cultural gulf virtually guarantees that this impeachment cannot end with any consensus like the one that emerged after the proceedings against Nixon and Clinton — that the system had worked. …
“Americans have become so jaded that misdeeds that once had the power to shock across ideological lines now seem to have little or no impact. ‘This time,’ Cannon said, ‘you have a guy who said he’d grab women by the privates, and America looks at that and says that’s locker room trash talk, and they elect him. So nothing can shock the American people about him. … There’s so much coarseness now, it makes you want to cry.’”
“Even I don’t watch this stuff,” retired congressman David Bonior, a Democrat from Michigan who was the House minority whip during the Clinton impeachment, told Marc. “If it bores me, and I’m a political person, it’s going to really bore a lot of other people.”
3) Governing by grievance (and hyperbole)
Trump seems to take every slight as a personal affront. His speech last night oozed with grievance and victimhood. The president noted that he once contributed to the campaign of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who has just replaced the late Elijah Cummings as chair of the House Oversight Committee. Then he said he wants her to refund his “damn money” after she voted for impeachment.
The president likes hyperbole. He’s always talking about how this or that is the BIGGEST or the BEST. He has set the tone for the tenor of his party’s defense of him, most notably with the six-page letter he sent on Tuesday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials,” Trump wrote.
During yesterday’s 11-hour debate on the House floor, two Republican lawmakers likened the impeachment of Trump to the crucifixion of Jesus. “Before you take this historic vote today, one week before Christmas, I want you to keep this in mind: When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). “During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) responded: “The president was given the opportunity to come and testify, to send his counsel [and] to question witnesses. He declined to do so.”
Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.) recalled how Jesus, on the cross, asked God to forgive those who were about to kill him. “I want Democrats voting for impeachment today to know that I’ll be praying for them,” he said. “From the Gospel of Luke, the 23rd chapter, verse 34: And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) compared Trump’s impeachment to Pearl Harbor, when 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,143 more were wounded in a sneak attack on America that started World War II. Standing literally feet away from where Franklin Roosevelt told the country that December 7, 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy,” Kelly declared: “Today, December the 18th, 2019, is another date that will live in infamy.”
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said Democrats will be remembered as the “Senator Joe McCarthys of our time” for trying “to plunge America into darkness for raw political gain.” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) criticized Democrats for conducting depositions in a secure briefing room at the Capitol, which he referred to as “Chairman Schiff’s chamber of secrets,” a Harry Potter reference.
“I have descended into the belly of the beast,” added Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.). “I have witnessed the terror within. And I rise committed to oppose the insidious forces which threaten our republic.”
4) Governing by defiance
When a reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday whether he feels any responsibility for the part he played in creating this predicament, the president replied: “Zero.”
When was the last time Trump took personal responsibility for doing something wrong?
No contrition. No apologies. No remorse.
That’s his M.O.
One of the articles of impeachment that passed was for obstruction of Congress, something Trump certainly had a hand in. The president declared publicly that he would refuse to comply with any and all subpoenas, and he directed his aides not to testify.
“We did nothing wrong, nothing whatsoever,” Trump said at last night’s rally, defending the July 25 call with Ukraine’s president. “This was just an excuse.”
Then he compared Ukraine-gate to Watergate. “With Richard Nixon, I just see it as a very dark era, very dark, very old,” Trump said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time!”
5) Governing with “alternative facts”
Muddying the waters has helped the president fight the public debate over impeachment to a draw. Studies show that, if you repeat disinformation enough times, people start to believe it, even if they’re told at the start that it’s totally false. We’ve seen that during this process.
This pattern dates to the first days of the administration, when counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway defended Sean Spicer’s false claims about the inauguration crowd size by suggesting that the White House was entitled to its own set of “alternative facts.”
Every president is the storyteller-in-chief. They use their bully pulpit to weave a narrative as helpful as possible. Trump, who used a Sharpie to edit a weather map this summer, serves as his own White House communications director. He tweeted 49 times on Wednesday. The rally and the tweets reflect his adeptness at bypassing the traditional filters of the legacy media.
Dan Balz, our newspaper’s chief correspondent, reflects in a story today on everything that’s changed since the Clinton impeachment. “A consistent theme of analysis focused on the broken politics of the time, the rancor and rank partisanship that had taken hold in Washington,” Dan writes. “The stories that day provide an echo of what is being said and written about this moment, but few today see the period of two decades ago as equivalent to what the country is going through now. Whatever conditions existed then have grown worse. Many factors contribute to the mix: the velocity at which information moves; the endless news cycles; the fractured and more partisan media; the toxicity of social media. … America was certainly polarized two decades ago, but it is worse today.”
One of the most striking elements of the House debate washow few Republicans made an effort during their speeches to engage directly with any of the number of allegations related to Trump’s abuse of power, specifically the charge that he personally ordered the freeze on military assistance in an attempt to coerce a foreign government into announcing an investigation into a domestic political rival.
“I’ve heard several of my colleagues in a row now, and it’s interesting to see how very few of them want to address any of the facts of the president’s misconduct,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said during his closing argument. “They don’t want to defend that conduct. So instead, they say, ‘Oh, Democrats really want to impeach the president,’ or, ‘Democrats don’t like the president.’ But what they can’t say is that this president’s conduct was ethical. What they can’t say was that this president’s conduct was legal. What they can’t say was this president’s conduct was constitutional.”
Rep. Doug Collins (Ga.), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, responded to Schiff. “We’ve beat the facts back all the time,” he said.
THE WOMAN AND THE HOUR HAVE MET:
-- Impeachment demonstrated how Pelosi has emerged as Trump’s most powerful political adversary. Paul Kane reports: “A caucus filled with younger Democrats who questioned the 79-year-old’s liberal bona fides now stands firmly behind her. … Pelosi presided over the chamber, wielding the gavel that Trump once doubted she could reclaim. … That power dynamic left the president fuming … ‘Will go down in history as worst Speaker,’ he tweeted. ‘Already thrown out once!’”
Most of the Democrats who opposed Pelosi becoming speaker at the start of the year now sing her praises. “I thought it was time for new leadership, and I’ve got to tell you: Thank goodness, thank goodness, that we have Nancy Pelosi speaking for the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who flipped a suburban seat long held by the GOP in the Twin Cities.
“I admit she has rehabilitated her image from 2006, 2008, 2010,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee last year. “I don’t know that I know exactly where all this goes, but I know that the bright spotlight is on her again. And sometimes that melts Icarus’s wings.”
-- The brooch Pelosi wore during the debate was a declaration: The Republic will survive this, writes fashion critic Robin Givhan: “The woman in charge, Madam Speaker, arrived on the House floor wearing a black sheath with bracelet sleeves and matching pumps. … As she spoke, it was impossible to miss the large golden mace brooch pinned to the left side of her chest. It is an eagle with its wings spread, perched on a pearl mounted on a sheath of gilded rods. … Pelosi dressed for a funeral and her tone was dire. But her glittery brooch made clear that it was not the republic she had come to bury.”
-- Pelosi said after last night’s votes that the House could at least temporarily withhold the articles from the Senate — a decision, she suggested, that could depend on how the other chamber chooses to conduct its trial on Trump’s removal. “We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side,” she said, referring to the House “managers” who will present the case for removal to the Senate. “So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us. So hopefully it will be fair. And when we see what that is, we’ll send our managers.”
“Pelosi would not answer questions about whether she was entertaining an indefinite hold on the articles,” Mike DeBonis reports, which could push a trial until after the 2020 election. “Under the rules the House adopted Wednesday for consideration of the impeachment articles, a resolution naming the impeachment managers — and authorizing the transmittal of the articles to the Senate — can be called up at any time by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) or a designee. There is no time limit on that authority; the House is expected to recess for the winter holidays as soon as Thursday and not return until Jan. 7. …
“The withhold-the-articles gambit gained some traction inside the left wing of the House Democratic Caucus this week. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) on Wednesday … said that he had spoken to three dozen Democratic lawmakers who had expressed some level of enthusiasm for the idea … ‘At a minimum, there ought to be an agreement about access to witnesses, rules of the game, timing,’ Blumenauer said of a Senate trial. The notion has been most prominently advocated by Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who has advised the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment process. … Republicans have scoffed at the notion of the House withholding the articles, noting it hardly counts as leverage to deny the GOP the ability to remove a president that the party wants to keep in place.”
-- Mitch McConnell, who has resisted allowing any witnesses to testify, joked that the trial will be “good therapy” for senators: “Just one thing that may make senators impatient to get it over with is [that] in an impeachment trial, they can’t speak,” the majority leader told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “They have to sit there quietly and listen. … This’ll be good therapy for a number of them.” McConnell also pushed through the confirmation of 13 more federal judges as the House debated on Wednesday, CNN notes.
-- Meanwhile, a federal appeals court wants answers about what impact impeachment may have on the House’s ongoing legal efforts to obtain records and testimony bearing on alleged misconduct by Trump. From Politico: “Less than an hour after the first impeachment vote was gaveled to a close, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a pair of orders directing House lawyers to indicate whether lawmakers are still seeking testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn and portions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report containing information gleaned from secret grand jury testimony. Both orders raised the issue of whether the pending appeals may be moot and whether the cases, set to be argued on Jan. 3, should still be considered on an expedited basis. The court is demanding answers, and views from the Justice Department, by Monday afternoon.”
-- More team coverage:
-- Commentary from The Post’s opinion page:
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