The political divide in the country over President Trump is wider than ever. While 87% of Republicans approve of Trump in the latest Gallup poll, only 5% of Democrats and 34% of independents do.
These numbers are the context for impeachment and the 2020 presidential election. They indicate that politics over the next year are going to be raw, combative, and mean-spirited in a way that most of us have never imagined, much less experienced.
First comes the Democratic effort to impeach Trump. With 52% of Americans in favor of impeaching and removing the president from office, according to Gallup’s latest finding among “national adults,” Democrats are unlikely to back down from an aggressive effort to drive him out of the White House.
But they’ve made the impeachment process as controversial and nasty as possible by turning it into a partisan campaign against Trump. House Democrats are operating secretly, then leaking what they say is the testimony of witnesses in private hearings. The media, largely anti-Trump, are going along with this process.
The White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent Democrats a memo reminding them of how the impeachment cases against Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were carried out in a fair, public, and civil fashion (though Nixon resigned before that process ran its course). That may not be a legal precedent, but it’s the norm. Democrats have shown no interest in adopting this practice, nor has the media called for it.
Assuming the president is impeached, the scene shifts to the Senate, where Republicans have a 53-47 edge. Even if there are GOP defections, Trump should easily survive since a two-thirds Senate vote is required to convict him. For that to happen, it would take the disclosure of powerful evidence of wrongdoing by the president — that is, considerably stronger stuff than the text of Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukrainian president.
Next comes the election. We’ve never had an impeached president running for a second term. Might Trump step down to avoid putting the country through this ordeal? Knowing what we do about him, there’s no chance of that. The 2020 race will be a fight to the death.
What about debates? The Commission on Presidential Debates has already scheduled three presidential debates and one involving the vice presidential candidates. And it has selected the college campuses where the debates would take place.
But the commission can’t compel any of this. Political commentator Hugh Hewitt has urged Trump to reject both the commission and its plans and “announce that if any debates will be held at all in 2020, it will be only after extensive, direct negotiations between him and the eventual nominee of the Democratic Party and their respective designated representatives.”
There was more to Hewitt’s plan. The negotiations “should begin from a premise that the Republicans will no longer play by the biased rules of a deeply unbalanced Manhattan-Beltway media elite,” he wrote. “Explicitly articulating the declaration of intent now, along with the possibility that, as in 1968 and 1972, there won’t be any debates, would do both the public and the elite media great service.”
Democrats and the establishment press are sure to balk at Hewitt’s proposal, but Trump can be expected to embrace it. There’s no obvious middle ground between these notions of how to set up presidential debates. So, next year’s election may lack televised confrontations.
The gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown since Trump’s election. Many Republicans were skeptical about Trump’s presidency since it was unclear how conservative he would be. But they have been pleased by his accomplishments: cutting taxes, reducing regulations, nominating conservative judges, rebuilding the military, and reviving the energy industry.
Democrats and the political Left, on the other hand, have been talking about impeaching Trump from the day he was elected. Their expectation that he had colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign didn’t materialize. But they’ve turned to other grounds for impeachment, notably the Ukrainian tie.
While sticking with Trump, many Republicans have been appalled at his personal behavior. “It does the president no favors to pretend that there are not still a significant number of people who have an uneasy feeling that … he is yet too bombastic and evidently egocentric to maintain the dignity of his great office,” Conrad Black, a Trump supporter, wrote.
But a rebuke of the president’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria was joined by 129 Republicans in the House — two-thirds of the GOP members. Was this an ominous sign, an indication of slippage in across-the-board backing of Trump on policy disputes? That isn’t clear yet.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
