The most interesting part of President Trump’s impeachment trial is not the stuff the media is focusing on: the partisan performance art, the tedious drip-drip-drip of coordinated leaks and fake-news “bombshells,” and certainly not the hypocritical debates about Senate procedure.
The most interesting piece of this sham impeachment is the origin of the Democrats’ case.
Their case isn’t based on the once vaunted, now discredited, Mueller investigation, or any scene from the Left’s “Russiagate” fever dreams. It isn’t about the president’s business career, which was once the object of so many media conspiracy theories. There is neither a “smoking gun,” nor even “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
What there is, at the bottom, is a policy dispute. The Democrats’ whole case against the president, from the phone call, to the whistleblower, all the way to the House impeachment managers, really comes down to a disagreement about United States policy toward Ukraine, and, more generally, about the setting of U.S. foreign policy in the first place.
Don’t be fooled by the pious speeches. Democrats don’t care that presidents have discretion to adjust the timing or targets of certain federal spending. It happens all the time under presidents of both parties. It happens in foreign spending, in domestic spending, at the Pentagon, and every other agency. In recent years, for instance, foreign aid has been held from Pakistan, the Palestinians, Honduras, Lebanon, and other countries.
So, what makes Trump’s delay of aid to Ukraine different? Something called “the interagency consensus.”
What’s that? It’s an informal group of unelected bureaucrats at various federal departments — the departments of State and Defense, the CIA, the National Security Council, various ambassadors, etc. From time to time, they get together and talk about foreign policy. When you hear people talk about “the Washington establishment,” or, more colloquially, “the swamp,” it’s clubs like this they’re talking about.
When this particular club comes to an agreement, they christen it the “interagency consensus” and slap capital letters on it. It sounds imposing, and that’s the idea. But in truth, the “Interagency Consensus” is make-believe, a constitutional irrelevancy.
The purpose of the “interagency consensus” is not to give the president a menu of policy options. It’s designed to take options away so the president feels pressured into obeying his staff instead of the other way around. If a president disagrees? The “interagency consensus” does what they’re really good at.
First, they lie.
They tell the president that terrible, terrible consequences will come if he doesn’t do what they say. Think about the fearmongering they indulged in when the president wanted to pull troops out of Syria or the dire predictions when he wanted to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
If lying doesn’t work, they leak.
They call friendly journalists and give them catty gossip to embarrass the president. Look at the excerpts, published earlier this month in the Washington Post, about Trump rejecting the globalist advice of senior foreign policy advisers. It’s a revealing episode. The excerpts show the president chastising the men and agencies responsible for decades of strategic military futility in the Middle East, yet the leaking sources somehow think the scene makes the president look bad, not them.
Finally, if the president won’t obey them, they actively work to subvert him to implement their policies over his objections.
This game has worked for years. That’s part of the reason Trump was elected. Like most of the country, he is not impressed or intimidated by the foreign policy establishment. He knows it is full of frauds and failures.
They have no great record of success. They think because they went to the right schools and hold the right jobs that it absolves them of starting and losing the wrong wars.
The “swamp consensus” now trying to take down Trump is the crowd that whiffed on al Qaeda, on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and botched a nuclear deal with Iran and trade deals with China. They’re the people who have orchestrated a multiadministration conspiracy to conceal their debacle in Afghanistan from public accountability.
Trump’s real sin is not that he ignored the “interagency consensus.” He embarrassed them. By putting America First, and succeeding, he showed the world that they are expendable as the rest of the swamp.
This impeachment is their revenge. They think it will prevent Trump from being reelected and usher in a new era when they will be back in charge. If history is any guide, they’re going to be wrong about that, too.
Jim DeMint (@JimDeMint) is chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute. He’s a former U.S. senator from South Carolina.
