What every single Republican in Congress needs to understand and prepare for is that no matter what the articles of impeachment that Democrats draw up look like, the national media are going to declare it “a devastating case against President Trump.”
They could be drawn on a napkin in pink jelly pen with little hearts as dots for the i’s and yet still, CNN and the New York Times will blare headlines that the Democrats’ case provides “A Damning Account” of the president’s misdeeds.
If Republicans can get over that in advance, it will make defending the head of their party — who maintains hardened support among their own voters — a lot easier.
The default position of all elected Republicans tends to be on their knees, begging the media not to say mean things about them. This is not a time for that. They’re going to have a lot of mean things said about them if they put up any sort of fight against Democrats’ effort to impeach the president. Get over it.
Look at what happened with the Robert Mueller report. It concluded that there had been no conspiracy between the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russian government, and it declined to state one way or another whether the president had obstructed justice (a snooty way of admitting the case, if pursued, would have been extraordinarily weak). But any Republican in Congress who states those facts is asked over and over by an indignant media, Why won’t you stand up to Trump?
Look at what happened with Brett Kavanaugh. The allegations he faced — from a woman who can’t remember anything except that he tried to rape her 30 years ago — were over-the-top ridiculous. Yet all the media could do was point out, over and over again, that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee couldn’t possibly administer a fair hearing, being “old white men.”
The inevitable impeachment articles will look very scary — “quid pro quo,” “abuse of power,” “obstruction” — and the media are sitting by, eager to call any Republican who disputes them cowards.
That’s not fair, but who cares? This entire impeachment gag has been unfair. Republicans have a job to do, and it’s to defend the president. That job will be less difficult if they can accept now that the media won’t like them until they’re out of power.
