Given the poisonous antipathies and tribal loyalties of Washington, it’s no surprise that President Trump’s supporters and opponents fall instantly into line whenever controversy erupts. Thus, as we note in our impeachment editorial, the president’s backers regard the transcript of his phone conversation with Ukraine’s leader as exculpatory and the whistleblower complaint as flimsy, tendentious hearsay. Trump’s detractors say the former is a smoking gun and the latter a brave and scrupulous effort to expose evident wrongdoing.
So far, so predictable.
But this pattern is one not only of partisanship. It also reflects a recurring feature of Trump scandals; there always seems to be enough evidence of presidential impropriety, or Trumpian norm-shattering, to be troubling to an unbiased observer, yet not nearly enough to make an open-and-shut case of intentional wrongdoing, let alone for impeachment and removal from office. So when Washington’s tribes rush to battle stations, they arrive armed with ammo to defend their positions and attack those of their adversaries.
To take a historical example, the Steele dossier was implausible and subsequently proven to be stuffed with lies intended to frame Trump as colluding with Russia. Given that a substantial proportion of the case against him was false, we can surmise that it was also malicious. But then there are also such outrages as Trump’s 2017 Helsinki press conference with President Vladimir Putin, a disgrace that suggested an almost pathological desire to please the Kremlin tyrant.
With something for everyone, Washington is whipped into a frenzy.
Likewise, on Ukraine. Trump implicitly predicated aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, apparently hoping for an electoral advantage. This is wrong. But Biden predicated aid on Ukraine’s willingness to fire a prosecutor charged with probing a company that paid Hunter $50,000 per month while his father ran U.S. policy toward Ukraine. It is not wrong to want that looked into.
Impeachment will drag on toward the election. Barely a third of the public supports it at present, and voters punished Republicans in the 1998 congressional elections for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Democrats calculate that bespattering Trump with dirt and doubt will help them on Election Day. That’s debatable.
To retake the Senate, Democrats will have to oust Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona. She was appointed to the late Sen. John McCain’s seat. She is ready for a bitter fight and, in our cover profile by Philip Klein, says, “Bring it on!” Elsewhere, Stephen Gutowski examines the fiasco of Democrats’ gun confiscation plans, Nic Rowan profiles former tea partyer Bobby Schilling, who is trying to return to the House as a Trumpist, Jazz Shaw exposes lamentable blue-state moves to ban travel to red states, and Grant Addison plays a new socialist version of the board game, Monopoly.
