Despite what the demagogues on the House committees might think, impeaching President Trump won’t be easy.
The Ukraine phone call transcript, though it did provide evidence of willful wrongdoing on the part of the president, wasn’t the smoking gun they wanted. And it might not be enough either way. Impeachment isn’t a legal process. It’s a political one. And as such, Democrats will need more than proof of corruption to get rid of Trump; they’ll need public opinion.
Trump, too, is completely dependent on how voters react to both the Ukraine scandal and Democrats’ response to it. What’s striking is how underwhelming voters’ reaction to the news has been. It’s as if no one was surprised to learn Trump had asked a foreign official to dig up dirt on his political rival. Perhaps that’s because few voters understand the gravity of the allegation. Or if they do, they don’t care — at least, not as much as they care about the Democrats’ attempts to take down Trump’s presidency.
But it’s important to note, as the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan did, that not even Trump’s sycophants defended his actions on the basis of their likelihood. There was no “Donald Trump would never do that!” Noonan writes, “That will be the president’s problem as public opinion develops: everyone knows he would do it, everyone knows it is like him. There’s no mystique of goodness to be destroyed.”
Still, it’s difficult to imagine voters who turned out for Trump in 2016 abandoning him. They know who he is — they elected him. He’s a businessman, a political outsider, a heavyweight who isn’t afraid to throw the book and make his own rules, even if those rules get him in trouble.
But that could change. Recent polls do, in fact, indicate a shift in public opinion, albeit a small one. Support for impeachment proceedings rose 7 points this week, according to a new Morning Consult poll conducted on Sept. 24-26. Opposition to impeachment, on the other hand, dropped 6 points. Another poll conducted by NPR/PBS/Marist released Wednesday found similar results: 49% of voters said they approved of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry while 46% disapproved.
If Democrats want to keep this momentum, they need to conduct themselves with caution. Impeachment is a serious business. We’re talking about removing the sitting president out of office and potentially circumventing the will of the people. To win the public over, Democrats must prove that this is more than just a partisan hit job.
Right now, they’re failing. Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib is selling “Impeach the motherf—er!” T-shirts and the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are trying to cash in as well. (As are Trump and the Republicans, for the record.) The Democrats are not taking this seriously, with the exception of, perhaps, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And why would they? Trump has always been an illegitimate president in their eyes, and the voters who put him there are just as “despicable,” to borrow a phrase from presidential hopeful New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker.
They’re all conviction and no substance, and they risk repeating their 2016 mistake. Because if they don’t wise up and tone down the rhetoric, Democrats will isolate the very same voters they need to win over to make impeachment work.
Neither party seems to understand how fundamental public opinion is to this process. If Democrats were smart, they’d make this more about national security and less about Trump’s persona. And if Trump wants to stay in the Oval Office, he should stop engaging in the mudslinging so the Democrats have less to work with.
