Senate Republicans only have a few work days left before the November midterms, but fear not: They’re still hard at work on the president’s priorities. This morning, for instance, the Judiciary Committee is hauling in former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw several criminal investigations into Donald Trump, in the hope of finding some pretext for charging him with crimes.
“I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others,” Smith plans to tell the committee, according to his prepared remarks. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.” Happy Tuesday.
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Why Not Impeach Him?
by Andrew Egger
Our Will Saletan has a great article this morning breaking down Donald Trump’s latest outrageous act: filling America’s airwaves with self-glorifying ads on the taxpayers’ dime. The White House has spent $1.7 million so far from some undisclosed pot of government money on such “public service announcements,” which feature Trump looking awesome and bragging about defeating “communism, socialism, and Marxism,” about presiding over “the golden age of America,” about defeating “globalists,” “warmongers,” “the fake news media,” “the deep state,” “the sick political class that hates our country,” and so on.
It’s pure MAGA propaganda. It’s blatantly illegal. And it’s right there in public, being beamed out to an audience of millions.
Watching it, I couldn’t help but think: Remind me why we shouldn’t impeach this guy again?
Conventional wisdom among Democrats today is that pursuing a third Trump impeachment would be a mistake, both now and if Democrats surge back to power in Congress next year. “Democrats have the evidence to call for Trump’s impeachment,” Austin Sarat wrote in a column for MSNOW earlier this year. “But that’s not what they should pursue.” Last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) sounded a similar note: “What I will encourage my colleagues to not do [if they win Congress], especially those who have more fire in their belly in this area, is don’t be impeaching anybody. Let’s just get back to work.”
Even some of Trump’s most firebreathing foes agree. Yesterday, I spoke to Norm Eisen, who served as counsel to House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment and now spearheads Democracy Defenders Action, a group dedicated to fighting Trump’s abuses in court. “He’s more deserving of impeachment than he was when we impeached him, or after January 6th when he was impeached a second time,” Eisen said. “What could be worse than prosecuting people who you know to be innocent, but who are your political adversaries? That is as low as any leader can sink. It is the very definition of tyranny.”
“In a sane world,” Eisen added, “he would be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. But these senatorial lapdogs in his own party are not going to do the right thing. So you simply have to temper the aspiration against that reality.” He thinks Democrats should aim for “lower-hanging fruit” and impeach not Trump, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
And hey: Maybe he’s right. But before that conventional wisdom solidifies into Democratic doctrine, let me make the counterargument.
The conventional wisdom that Trump would slide through impeachments unscathed began in the aftermath of his first one, in 2019. Democrats had a strong case to bring those articles: The president’s conditioning of military aid to Ukraine on the Ukrainian government helping him dig up dirt on Joe Biden was an astonishing abuse of U.S. foreign policy. His refusal to comply at all with Congress’s investigation was clearly sufficient reason for his impeachment for obstruction of Congress.
But in retrospect, it’s clear that that particular impeachment was a difficult one to sell the public on. It involved our policy toward a small nation halfway around the world, one that didn’t (yet) loom large in the popular consciousness. It was rooted in the testimony of a sequence of public servants, from Gordon Sondland to Fiona Hill, who the public hadn’t previously known. The actual facts of what made Trump’s conduct so rotten were a bit difficult to explain.¹ And crucially, the whole thing played out against a backdrop of relative economic good vibes. It was easy enough, in retrospect, for Trump to turn the whole thing into a political Rorschach test: They say the phone call was bad, but I say it was perfect, so who are you gonna believe?
Trump’s second impeachment came pretty close to working—yeah, it was ten votes short of actual conviction, but it was the biggest majority for convicting a president in American history. And that was in a Senate with fifty Republicans.
A future impeachment would be different—and not just because there might be more Democrats. So many of Trump’s open abuses of power over the last two years are easy to comprehend and have played out right in the open. It would simply be a matter of congressional Democrats picking their favorites.
Since returning to office, Trump has constantly tried to gobble up federal powers that Congress never gave him, resulting in repeated smackdowns by the courts. He has turned the Justice Department upside-down in his single-minded quest to prosecute his enemies, casting multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices into chaos to install lackeys who would bring sham prosecutions against the likes of James Comey and Letitia James.
And he has carried himself as every bit the autocrat he wants to be: enriching himself and his allies at the public expense, turning the federal government into his personal propaganda machine.
And crucially, he has done all this at a time of worsening economic conditions. This is perhaps the biggest difference between today and 2019. Voters no longer see Trump’s out-of-control behavior as some sideshow to the real story of his basically competent governance. Today, they have begun to wake to the fact that America has a genuine maniac at the helm, one who has bogged down the economy with pointless tariffs and begotten an energy crisis with a pointless war in Iran. Spotlighting his criminal and authoritarian behavior today intensifies these concerns, driving home the notion that Trump is running the country into the ground because he is focused on punishing his own enemies, padding his own pockets, and soothing his own vanity.
So by all means, Democrats: Go out and win your blue wave. But when you come back to Washington, let’s not write off the possibility of working to toss out America’s aspiring dictator.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Man Who Would Inherit MAGA… JD Vance has spent years sucking up to the “five families” of the New Right. But, JOSHUA TAIT asks, does the vice president actually believe anything?
Congratulations, You’re a Trump Campaign Donor… Your tax dollars are funding his TV ads. And the White House says you should be proud to pay, writes WILL SALETAN.
They’re F*cking Thieves… The Trump administration stole our tax dollars to run a campaign ad during NFL games on Sunday.