Judging by their public words and actions, it feels like President Trump wants impeachment more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
It’s been pretty clear since Democrats took over the House of Representatives that Pelosi has been desperately trying to avoid impeachment. She’s remained resistant even in the face of increased calls by rank-and-file members to at least launch some sort of impeachment inquiry. It’s pretty clear that Pelosi wants to pursue a strategy of keeping up congressional investigations to embarrass Trump, while passing various parts of the Democratic agenda that are publicly popular and have consensus support among Democrats but that Republicans will block, thus teeing up the argument for 2020.
Despite Trump’s unpopularity, multiple polls have found that a majority of the public opposes impeaching him. The release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report actually made impeachment less likely, because its inability to establish Trump campaign coordination with Russia or to recommend obstruction charges, made it a lot easier for Republicans to oppose impeaching Trump. Even if we assume Senate Republicans would protect Trump from being removed from office no matter the evidence, if the evidence were more powerful, they’d have to do so at much greater political cost than they are able to now. At the current moment, even Sens. Susan Collins and Cory Gardner, the two Republican incumbents up for reelection in states won by Hillary Clinton, have not felt any pressure to impeach.
It seems that Trump and Republican political strategists have reached pretty much the same conclusion as Pelosi and the rest of Democratic leadership: impeaching Trump would backfire and be a tremendous political gift. Were Democrats to pursue impeachment, it would suck up all the oxygen in Washington and allow Trump to wrap up all accusations against him into an impeachment gambit that does not have any public support. He’d be able to rally his base around him while Democrats are divided, and would argue it proves that the Democrats have no agenda beyond obstruction. And he knows it could never actually succeed given that he has the protection of Senate Republicans.
We’re already starting to see some of these arguments get trotted out. Trump has repeatedly argued that Democrats want impeachment because they know they can’t win in 2020. On Wednesday, he argued:
Everything the Democrats are asking me for is based on an illegally started investigation that failed for them, especially when the Mueller Report came back with a NO COLLUSION finding. Now they say Impeach President Trump, even though he did nothin wrong, while they “fish!”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 22, 2019
The House Republican Conference’s rapid response team sent out an email Tuesday with the subject line, “The Democrats’ Agenda Is Impeachment.” It read:
Despite the fact that they have failed to produce on any of the issues that truly matter for the American people, Speaker Pelosi is, as noted on CNN today by Politico’s John Bresnahan, now under tremendous pressure to devote all their time and attention to impeachment.
In sum, impeachment is set to become their entire agenda, full stop.
If Trump were eager to avoid impeachment, it seems he would guarantee his ability to do that by throwing a few bones to congressional investigators in terms of document requests or access to testimony that wouldn’t actually do him any harm. That would bolster Pelosi’s argument within her caucus that it’s worthwhile to let investigations run their course. Instead, Trump has vowed to fight all of the congressional subpoenas and is following through. This has put Democratic leaders in the position of tap dancing around the question, trying to both portray Trump as really, really, really, really crossing the line, but then stopping short of impeachment. The results have been pretty amusing actually.
Pelosi said Trump was “becoming self-impeachable.” Asked about this, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., went off on a tirade about how Trump’s defiance of subpoenas was “a way of neutering Congress, of making sure that Congress can’t do its job, of turning the country into a dictatorship of a monarchical president.” He said that it was a “constitutional crisis,” and yet when asked about the prospects for impeachment, he said, “Impeachment is a decision for down the road.”
We seem to be witnessing this bizarre game of political chicken over impeachment, with Trump eager for a collision and Democrats absolutely petrified of the prospect.
