Democrats are experiencing their sixth nightmare of the Trump era.
The first came the day Donald Trump was elected. The second began the next day as the economy stirred and didn’t stop. Nightmare No. 3 occurred as the Republican agenda of tax cuts and deregulation took hold. The fourth emerged as Trump justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh gave conservatives dominance on the Supreme Court. The fifth, the Mueller report, shot down the dream of exploiting Trump collusion with Russia. There wasn’t any.
Impeachment of Trump was supposed to wipe the tears from Democratic eyes after so much sorrow. He would be made unelectable in 2020. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, impeachment is the sixth nightmare.
Democrats talked of impeaching Trump on charges of bribery, corrupting next year’s election, and endangering national security. But that’s not what they’re charging him with. Democrats have settled for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. To call those counts weak is putting it mildly. After the buildup by Democrats and media hype, they’re wimpy.
And they are all the more flimsy with the absence of a connection to actual Trump crimes. Crimes aren’t required for impeachment. But the case against Richard Nixon involved a break-in and Bill Clinton was accused of lying to a federal grand jury. Even Andrew Johnson broke a federal law in 1868. The link to a real crime bolsters the argument for impeachment and makes it more credible.
The abuse of power relates to Trump’s effort to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into whatever the Biden family did in Ukraine. Trump was up to no good in raising this in a phone call with Zelensky while delaying military aid to Ukraine and not scheduling a visit by the Ukrainian leader to the White House.
“Trump correctly points out that he did not pressure Zelensky in their July 25 conversation, [and] Zelensky says he never felt any pressure,” Andrew McCarthy notes in National Review.
Besides, the president “gave Zelensky an audience — albeit in New York City at the high-profile U.N. meeting, not at the White House,” McCarthy writes. And “the claims that Trump pressured Ukraine to interfere in our domestic politics and thus undermined our elections bump up against the stubborn fact that, in the end, nothing of consequence happened.” The aid was released.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew better than to allow the impeachment to be unleashed. That’s why she blocked it for months. After special counsel Robert Mueller acquitted Trump of collusion, her fears that taking on the president would prompt a backlash appeared to increase.
But she couldn’t hold back the tide of heavy-breathing Democrats bent on bringing down Trump. She’s a strong leader but not a dictator.
To make things worse, she made the mistake of putting Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, in charge of the crucial first round of impeachment hearings. He turned it into a partisan necktie party, with Trump the victim. This was no surprise to Republicans, who regard Schiff as slippery and ruthless. The media, however, love him.
Schiff had no interest in giving the hearings even a whiff of bipartisanship or fairness. He reneged on his plan to bring the “whistleblower,” who had revealed the Trump-Zelensky phone conversation, before the committee for questioning. Schiff claimed he didn’t know the informer’s identity, though his staff did.
Nor did Schiff do anything to mask his party’s motives in going after Trump. Democrats had been clamoring to impeach Trump from the moment he was inaugurated. They put signs in their front yards that proclaim, “Hate Has No Home Here.” But they hate Trump.
Pelosi’s efforts to show that Democrats care about more than impeaching Trump were to no avail. The flip slide of this, persuading independents and casual voters to join in cracking down on the president, hasn’t worked either. For Democrats, this is an alarming development.
Little by little, the campaign to impeach Trump has been losing ground. The House hearings rarely sparked interest. Stacking panels with witnesses hostile to Trump didn’t inspire the uncommitted to turn on the TV. They had little impact for a simple reason: The stacking was obvious.
Schiff, for one, has grown worried. He declared the president should be impeached to keep him from being reelected. Pelosi contradicted him, but Schiff’s gaffe consisted of telling the truth.
Trump is hardly out of trouble. But Democrats squandered the opportunity to deepen the hole he’s in. On the contrary, he’s better off now than he was when the Democratic hearings began. His prospects for reelection have inched upward. And if he wins, that will the seventh nightmare for Democrats.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
