This sleazy attempt to get Trump out of office illustrates what happens when one side refuses to accept the voice of the people in an election
Rex Murphy is Canada's best political commentator. His drifting to the right in
recent years resulted in the termination of a very long employment at the CBC.
Back in the days when it was obvious to all the oracles of the higher punditry that Donald Trump was on a quixotic quest towards the presidency, and when it was inscribed in the granite of fate that Hillary Clinton was going to thrash the rampageous outsider, some raised a caution: what if Trump, in violation of all standards of American democracy, refused, after losing, as he was surely going to do, to accept the election’s result?
Predictably, the answer was that it would be a horror, typical of Trump’s manic manner, and in Ms. Clinton’s own tweeted words a fundamental “threat to our democracy.” The standard has always been: the people vote, the votes are counted, and save in the most exceptional and absolutely vivid demonstrations of overt and blatant examples of fraud, the loser sighs and the winner goes on to Pennsylvania Avenue. Even after the nail-biter and hanging chads debacle in the 2000 election, did not Albert Gore himself accede to George Bush II, and Americans proceeded, in the most beautiful phrase in politics, “to put it all behind them?”
Not so when, so to speak, Alaric stormed the empire and reduced Rome to ruins, which is the only historic template for how progressives viewed and still view Trump’s successful march to the White House. The psychological shock was massive and unprecedented, the “pussy hats” were out marching in days, and opinion columnists sobbed over the trauma of voters who found themselves incontinent with rage and sorrow that Trump, the disruptor, had won.
It was not, among the virulently anti-Trump forces, supposed to have been this way. Within the coven of Clinton supporters a Trump victory was against nature; it could not be, the goddess of glass ceilings must have been, had to have been, cheated. Hillary herself over the months that followed unspiralled a vast catalogue of why she shouldn’t have lost and then fixed upon the No. 1 favourite. Trump and his lawless henchpersons had “stolen” or “manipulated” the process. And most particularly, most explosively, spun the story of how the dread Darth Putin and Trump had secretly, nefariously, maliciously colluded and “stolen” the election from Hillary.
From the elegant hostelries of Martha’s Vineyard to the sleek mansion-palaces of the Silicon Valley hyper-tycoons, the keening went on. And thus, as soon as Trump was installed, the charge was made, that Trump was in the White House only because he had “colluded” with the Russians, and therefore he was not “really” president. It went even more raw than that. Some of the cable networks, and most of the big press, became utterly absorbed in the effort to prove collusion. The most hysterical of the Russian conspiracy theorists, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, went on every night for two and a half years articulating every wild wisp of an allegation that Trump was an agent of Russia, Putin’s stooge — a president beholden to an enemy tyrant.
With that as context the move to impeach originated. It would not do to have a “Russian asset” control the government of the United States. And for close to two and a half years the Russian connection was investigated as the strongest possible, irrefutable reason to take him out of office: to impeach him, and rid the country of his Russian-contaminated presence in the White House.
Hillary Clinton speaks at the Jewish Labor Committee’s Annual Human Rights Awards Dinner on Dec. 9, 2019, in New York City. Jeenah Moon/Getty Images
So there were investigations without number, hearings without end, with Robert Mueller, the distinguished, highly respected Washington prestige-figure all the while doing the most detailed and rigorous dive into the whole mess. Mueller was going to do the job, bring home the bacon. No report was more anticipated. And when it did come: Nada, nothing, no American, no one in the Trump administration, not Trump himself or his auxiliaries had “colluded with the Russians to steal the election.” The Russian collusion fantasy collapsed. Democrats again went into mourning. Rachel Maddow checked in for aromatherapy and radical grief counselling.
But. The impeachment game itself was not the least affected. After Russia, Russia, Russia every day, almost within minutes the impeach brigade jumped on a phone call to Ukraine. I’m not going to detail this adventure save to note that the speed with which his opponents went from “having evidence of collusion with Russia” as the ground base for their impeachment efforts — the very speed of the switch to Ukraine, was or should be mind-blowing.
And now to this very week: when articles of impeachment have been drawn up to vote on, on Wednesday or Thursday, there are only two charges — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Where’s Russia, where’s Lord Putin, where’s treason and being a “stooge” of a foreign power? How can they leap, with such shameless ease, from the massive campaign of nearly three years insisting they had proof Trump was a tool of Putin, to this petty sideline of an allegation that Trump abused his power on a phone call to Ukraine?
A copy of the House of Representatives articles of impeachment resolution that Democrats hope to use to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump is seen after being released in Washington on Dec. 10, 2019. Jim Bourg/Reuters
All this sits alongside what has been revealed during this farce, that the FBI and its masters had set spies in Trump’s campaign, that they had used the Steele dossier — compiled by the Clinton camp and utterly discredited — to obtain the famous FISA warrants, that they had played pat-a-ball with Hillary on her server, and the Clinton Foundation’s octopus relation with foreign “investors.” That, in fact, the whole predicate of their investigations came from a paid-for, confected, Clinton research dump, with some of the most salacious, unverified and to-be-proven-false allegations ever to rise against a president. The immortal charge came from the head of the FBI himself, and was repeated in his book tour: “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” he said. “It’s possible, but I don’t know.” Of course James Comey didn’t know — that’s the off-ramp of every sly insinuation.
So now this week, the move to impeachment proceeds but is reduced from the melodrama of Russian collusion, the word Russia not even in the two articles of the impeachment itself. And what are these two? Nothing more than a formless and flowing river of hot fudge and mostly composed of the same materials, so vague they could be hauled out on a thousand occasions.
Members of the House Rules Committee hold a hearing on the impeachment of U.S. President
Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
But no Russia. That’s the big take: It is what is not in the charges, which assures anyone looking at this that the desire to impede, demean and entangle Trump, not “high crimes and misdemeanours,” was and is the whole and only motive behind a transparent travesty. The impeachment process as we have observed turns, with vicious irony, on something Hillary Clinton herself warned about, when she was “certain” and half the country was, too, that she was going to win. That not accepting the result of an election was a grave threat to American democracy.
She was right. The past three years, clouded daily by this sleazy attempt to get Trump out by means other than by democratic vote, is the full illustration of what happens when one side — the Democrats — refuse to accept the voice of the people in an election. And there is an additional irony attached: the impeachment mania may well increase support for Trump and give him a second term. As was said of old: He who diggeth a pit shall fall into it.
If Trump's phone call with Zelensky is grounds for impeachment, I guarantee there is not one President who ever sat in the Oval Office who didn't deserve a similar fate. And many have committed far more outrageous travesties, but no-one is looking into those.
It should be noted here that the Republicans did exactly the same thing during the first term of Obama. They attempted to distort and prevent everything he tried to do, not on the basis of individual merit, but because they so intensely disliked him, whether for his colour, his progressiveness, or his preference for Muslims over Jews. They certainly did not respect the people's choice. Whoever wins next year, should expect more of the same, only, perhaps, worse.
