Remember when President Bill Clinton was fighting impeachment for offenses committed to hide his sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky? Remember his response to the furor? Here’s a comment from the president:
“My affair with Miss Lewinsky was PERFECT…Democrats don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable….NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”
The reason the words are familiar but you don’t remember Clinton saying them is that they are a lightly modified version of a tweet from President Trump. He sees Democrats trying to hound him from office and wants his own party to join him in absolutely repudiating allegations of wrongdoing, rather than retreating into a redoubt where he and they must parse whether an acknowledged wrong is or is not impeachable.
Trump repeatedly claims his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president was “perfect.” When the Washington Examiner interviewed him in the Oval Office last month, I asked if he would assemble a strong impeachment defense team. No, he replied, because unlike Clinton and Richard Nixon, I’ve done nothing wrong.
Although for a long time Clinton implausibly denied his liaison with Lewinsky, his most effective defense was, rather, the repeated refrain of surrogates that the president’s wrongs did not “rise to the level of impeachment.” It drummed into the public mind the idea that vindictive Republicans simply wanted to oust a duly elected president they detested. Democrats went on to win the 1998 midterm elections, which was widely seen as voter punishment for GOP overreach. Senators then had all the cover they needed to acquit Clinton the following January.
Clinton and his underlings played very different roles. He mostly stayed above the fray, announcing micro policy initiatives and nurturing the impression that he took his presidency too seriously to join the down-and-dirty melee of political gutter snipes.
This isn’t Trump’s way. He never stays above the fray, never delegates dirty work. That is part of his appeal. What many of his 2016 voters found so refreshing about him was that he didn’t belong to that Washington caste that talks of politics as elevated “service.” He mocked and humiliated those who did.
Some smart people argue that Trump’s refusal to acknowledge impropriety in pressing Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is a blunder that has resulted in Congress poring over the details and calling a parade of partisan witnesses to air their concerns on TV. But the hearings may have helped Trump, for none of the witnesses produced new information that changed the impeachment calculus.
This suggests that the contrast between Trump’s “perfect” defense and the alternative tactic of “confess and avoid” is really a distinction without much difference, a continuum with no bright dividing line. The president’s mostly Republican defenders argue either that his phone call was wholly unconcerning or else not sufficiently concerning to overturn his election. Meanwhile, Democrats and the resistance counter that the call was either sufficiently concerning or absolutely damning, either of which warrant Trump’s removal from office.
The witnesses, all selected by impeachment panel Chairman Adam Schiff to do maximum damage to Trump, express their “concern” about a conversation they were not part of and which the president does not dispute. All that they, lawmakers, and the public are left with is a difference of opinion.
Several of the prosecution witnesses are like Amb. William Taylor, who is known to be what one former senior State Department official described to me as “a big Democrat” suffering additionally from “big time clientitis.” That’s another way of saying he lost sight of the fact that he wasn’t working for Ukraine but for the United States, and he hates the president. He didn’t like Trump’s brief suspension of aid (aid Trump himself had introduced) and now wants to help congressional Democrats couch the change as a high crime or impeachable misdemeanor.
Will the public buy this?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi calculated long ago that it wouldn’t, especially as Democrats have been trying one impeachment gambit after another since Trump was sworn in. Pelosi was probably right, even though she could not, ultimately, head off the impeachment demands of the party base. I suspect Democratic excoriation of the president now falls on the public ear as so much “yadda, yadda, yadda.” Voters have punished impeachment overreach in the past. Will they do so again?
Democrats rolled the dice on Russia collusion and got snake eyes. Now they’re rolling again. It has the feel of a desperate gambler asking for double or nothing.
