An ass on Twitter told me last week that the collusion case against President Trump was “irrefutable,” even though special counsel Robert Mueller had just comprehensively refuted it. There are people of the Left — California Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell spring to mind — so hooked on the falsified collusion narrative that they can’t give it up.
But most of Trump’s tormentors are more fickle, or tactical, in their affections and have ended their two-year devotion to the bogus conspiracy theory with alacrity. They’re like jilted lovers who pretend they never cared for the object of their mooncalf obsession. They’ve moved blithely on, as Mueller himself did more than a year ago, to obstruction of justice and, in particular, to the president’s repeated lies and his orders to his subordinates, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, to lie to investigators.
[Related: Trump denies he ever ordered McGahn to fire Mueller]
This is more fertile ground, not for a convincing case of obstruction, but to damage the president while he’s seeking 2020 reelection. There’s much impeachment talk, but that too seems largely tactical. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party remember how impeaching President Clinton backfired on Republicans, so they want to avoid putting Trump on trial but convince the electorate that he nevertheless deserves removal from office.
This is our system, and Democrats are not behaving wildly beyond the bounds of historical precedent. Impeachment is a political process dressed up as a judicial one for appearances’ sake. Criminal obstruction charges couldn’t have held up against Trump in court, and Mueller’s refusal to draw a conclusion on that subject was a cynical gift or invitation to Congress to pursue the matter untrammeled by strict burdens of proof — all it lacked was a prettily tied ribbon or copperplate calligraphy.
If Democrats genuinely thought encouraging subordinates to obstruct federal investigators with falsehoods disqualifies a president from office, they’d have attacked rather than defended Clinton for coaching of Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and others to lie about Monica Lewinsky. Democrats and Republicans alike huff and puff about principle, but what we are watching is a power game, pure and simple. Trump is brutish, vulgar, ignorant, and not a character one would choose for the Oval Office, but such qualities haven’t troubled politicians of either party in the past. The only actual qualifications for being president are to be American, to be 35 years old or older, and to win the Electoral College.
Trump did all that, and pretty much the entire Democratic Party refuses to accept it. So everything you’ll see from them until the election or the crack of doom (whichever is the sooner) is about nothing other than getting voters to reverse the decision they made in 2016.
I’ve spent no time this week promoting our magazine content, but it’s great stuff. Let me quickly urge you to read Jim Antle’s cover story on Trump’s acting Cabinet, Jerry Dunleavy on the Notre Dame fire, and Martin Kaufmann on Tiger Woods changing his stripes.
