The Case for a Fast, Focused Trump Impeachment

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

28 September 19

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the strategy behind the impeachment proceedings, the widening circle of the Ukraine cover-up, and how the media might aid in Trump’s defense.

Two principles apply here: (1) When a runaway boulder is heading toward you, get out of its path. (2) When Nancy Pelosi commits herself fully to a strategy, ditto.

The boulder was set loose when the White House’s pseudo-transcript of Trump’s shake-down phone call with the Ukrainian president, even in its no-doubt doctored form, pointed to the commission of a crime and confirmed the whistle-blower complaint released 24 hours later. This latest Trump violation of the Constitution is a gripping and representative story that is simple to grasp, doesn’t require reading a “report,” is replete with a coverup at least as felonious as the crime itself, and is packed not only with well-known wack jobs like Rudy Giuliani but obscure players who are about to be yanked out of the shadows for close-ups in prime time. That latter category includes flunkies in the State Department like the ambassador Kurt Volker and the delightfully named Mike Pompeo adviser T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, who witnessed crimes and may well be guilty of abetting them.

No one needs to hear from me that Pelosi knows what she’s doing. She surely recognizes that one of the problems with a multi-strand impeachment inquiry is that there are so many potential charges against Trump and the grifters in his White House circle (family included) that it could take a decade to get to the bottom of them. She also has to reckon with the reality that there isn’t a ton of talent in her caucus that’s up to so demanding a job. For every capable and focused inquisitor like Adam Schiff, there are many more who, as we saw in Thursday’s hearing with the acting National Intelligence director Joseph Maguire, are prone to showboating, losing the forest for the trees, repeating each other, and, in general, hiding rather than advancing the prosecutorial ball.

There’s no time for this. Speed is of the essence for several reasons. In a nation attuned to binge watching, we like our stories to play out without interruption. What’s more, speed is the organic pace of a modern impeachment. Less than eleven weeks separated the opening of the House Judiciary Committee’s formal impeachment hearings on Richard Nixon in 1974 and the committee’s first vote on an article of impeachment. That same process took just under ten weeks in the Bill Clinton impeachment of 1998. Both efforts were narrowly focused even though in both cases the sitting presidents’ adversaries had other charges they were panting to adjudicate.

In both cases as well, the calcifying of public opinion sped up in tandem with the narrative, leading to a clear majority verdict and forcing cautious party loyalists to fall in line. The slow burn of the Nixon impeachment narrative may foreshadow Trump’s. It took until three months before Nixon’s resignation for three Republican senators to muster the nerve to call for his exit ?— three senators, not so incidentally, who were up for reelection that year. In Clinton’s case, his approval rating started skyrocketing in direct proportion to Newt Gingrich’s impeachment putsch, leading to the failure to convict in the Senate and a GOP political debacle. In the instance of Trump, we are already seeing the start of a shift in the polls, with major surveys this week showing for the first time that the country is evenly divided on impeachment rather than opposed.

Another argument for speed is that it’s a smart play to strike when the White House is on the mat. It’s an indicator of the overall disarray that Trump released the incriminating phone readout without even recognizing how incriminating it is. The ranks of the presidential bubble/bunker have dwindled down to heel-clicking sycophants who didn’t even think to put an impeachment war room in place. The fact that Corey Lewandowski’s name is being floated as its potential general indicates the bargain-basement caliber of talent available for such an assignment. It’s indicative of the shortfall that Trump and his GOP defenders have been reduced to recycling nearly half-century-old lines from Watergate. The Nixon White House spokesman Ken Clawson ?— to take one representative example ?— decried that investigation as a “witch hunt” ginned up by “people who were completely rejected at the polls” and were “trying to bring down this presidency.”

This week we’ve also seen the White House accidentally send its pathetic talking points to the Democratic congressional leadership and then, even more haplessly, attempt to “recall” the errant email once the blunder was revealed. The president who has declared war on leakers can’t even stop his own staff from leaking in broad daylight via a mass email blast. And let’s not forget the farcical White House effort at the start of the week to throw Rudy under the bus: Instead of making Giuliani the fall guy, Trump and his lackeys have instead spurred him on to grab any and every media opportunity to compound the charges and underline Trump’s guilt.

As the wheels are falling off at the White House, so they are spinning out of control in Trump’s already addled brain. It’s hard to see how his threatening whistle-blowers with death or calling Adam Schiff “sick” accomplishes anything beyond making the case that he is incapacitated and should be removed by the 25th Amendment ?— a solution also considered by some Republican senators as an impeachment alternative for Nixon. A Washington Post article this week quoted a former presidential aide as worrying that Trump’s fury “may lead to less structured output from the White House.” Given that there’s already no structure in the White House “output,” it beggars the imagination to wonder what’s in store.

The whistle-blower’s complaint is aimed primarily at Trump, but also mentions incriminating details about Attorney General Bill Barr, White House officials who tried to bury knowledge of Trump’s call with Ukraine, as well as Giuliani. Trump has also made comments attempting to rope in Mike Pence. Will any of them make it out of this intact?

No one will emerge with his reputation intact. But as we reach the every-lawyered-up-man-for-himself mode, the race is on to see who will emerge with limited or no criminal exposure. It’s worth noting that at least four lawyers may have been part of the Ukraine cover up ?— whether the effort to bury Trump phone-call transcripts in a top-secret computer server or the attempts to bury the whistle-blower’s complaint: Barr, Steven Engel (the director of the Office of Legal Counsel), Brian Benczkowski (head of the criminal division at Justice), and Pat Cipollone (White House counsel). This is another Watergate rerun. There were 14 lawyers brought down by Nixon administration scandal, including Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, and two attorneys general, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst. All were punished ?— either with prison time, disbarment, or suspension of their license to practice law.

As for Pence: If Trump goes down and he goes down with him, Pelosi becomes president. Just saying.

Noting the assistance that disinformation and “both-sides” reporting has given to Trump during past crises, media critics are noting that Trump’s defense may rely heavily on how events are framed by both the right-wing and mainstream media going forward. Is today’s media ecosystem up to the challenge?

The consternation about today’s media ecosystem failing to meet the challenge is nothing new. People are tending to forget that the Lewinsky scandal broke when partisan and competing 24/7 cable-news operations were new inventions: Both Fox News and MSNBC made their debuts in 1996, ending CNN’s monopoly just in time to pour gasoline on the growing flames of impeachment. They did not exactly distinguish themselves in the ensuing frenzy, and they were joined by such right-wing organs as the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which published conspiracy theories that included implicating Bill Clinton in alleged drug-related murders in Mena, Arkansas.

Toss in the internet and today’s full panoply of warp-speed social media, including the Russian-enabled schemes of the Trumpist far-right, and it’s not going to get better! Still, there is some fun to be had at Fox News, where, as Gabriel Sherman has reported for Vanity Fair, open warfare has broken out among its onscreen personalities. But Fox won’t be reformed, and it’s safe to say that it won’t be determinative in the Trump saga: Its viewers are the voters who will remain loyal when he pulls out that gun on Fifth Avenue, and nothing will change that. Nearly a quarter of Americans remained loyal to Nixon even after he resigned.

More happily, we have two great news organizations locked into a competitive battle to get this story right. The New York Times has every incentive not to repeat its history of losing Watergate scoops to the Washington Post. We all benefit from both papers’ nonstop journalistic enterprise. But there’s a caveat: These organs aren’t perfect, and they are at their worst when their efforts to show “both sides” leads to journalistic malpractice. The Post, for instance, countenances the regular contributions of Hugh Hewitt (also a contributor at NBC News), who this week could be found tweeting out an unsubstantiated allegation about Hunter Biden’s sex life (in America, not Ukraine) that even if true would be irrelevant, given that he is a private citizen who is not running for public office. That should be a firing offense. The Times, meanwhile, is under rightful ridicule for its anecdotal articles in which ordinary voters in homespun rural settings explain their loyalty to Trump in terms that often sound lifted from either Hillbilly Elegy or the collected works of that ubiquitous Trump-voter media chronicler Salena Zito. The good news is that this week a humor columnist at the Post, Alexandra Petri, may have demolished the genre for good with a piece headlined “Trump’s Getting Impeached? I Defy You to Convince Anyone at This Cursed Truck Stop.” If you’re seeking a laugh in this grim week for the Republic, look no further.

Why Bernie Sanders Matters

By Seth Ackerman, Jacobin

28 September 19

The rationale for Bernie Sanders’s brand of politics has always been that it’s better to aim at shifting the basic parameters of American politics — however difficult that may be — than accepting those parameters and trying to maneuver within them.

ew York magazine’s Eric Levitz — probably the sharpest liberal political commentator writing today — has a few bones to pick with Jacobin writers on the subject of Bernie Sanders versus Elizabeth Warren.

The case for Warren as a force for progressivism, Levitz says, is stronger than we’ve allowed. Whatever differences exist between the two candidates will probably end up moot if their policies ever reach the floor of Congress anyway. Moreover, Levitz questions our conviction that Bernie Sanders has the potential to transform American politics in any real way — at least any more than Warren does. Given the country’s legislative stasis and its conservatizing political institutions, he argues, such optimism about any politician is ill-advised.

None of these points is completely wrong, and yet there’s something perverse about this two-and-a-half-cheers-for-Warren case. Somehow, the very fact that Sanders’s post-2016 ascent triggered a historically unprecedented leftward lurch in Democratic Party discourse — a development for which Elizabeth Warren’s rise is Exhibit A — is used to argue that Bernie Sanders has no particular monopoly on the ability to push American politics leftward.

According to Levitz, Sanders has already “persuaded many 2020 Democratic hopefuls to stop worrying and learn to love social democracy” — therefore, he concludes, Sanders must now be dispensable. It’s like saying that since there’s never been a break-in at Fort Knox, there must be no need for all those armed guards.

Yet even as Levitz sees Sanders’s mission as all but accomplished, he also wants to argue that the Vermont senator has accomplished very little. “Sanders has had a national platform for three years now,” Levitz writes. “He has built up an independent organization and traveled the country proselytizing for class struggle. And none of it has been sufficient for his acolytes to dominate Democratic primaries, or to win him a broader base of support for his 2020 run than he had in 2016, or even to keep his approval rating from slipping underwater.”

It’s true that Sanders has not decisively conquered the American political system for socialism in the space of three years. Socialism is seldom built in a day. Between its first electoral outing and its second, the British Labour Party went from 1.8 percent of the vote in 1900 to 5.7 percent in 1906; the German Social Democratic Party from 3.2 percent in 1871 to 6.8 percent in 1874; the French Workers’ Party (whose first election manifesto was co-written by Karl Marx) from 0.4 percent in 1881 to ...0.4 percent in 1885. All three of these parties, in some form, went on to transform their countries’ political landscapes — just not in three years.

However, a startling indication of how much Sanders has already changed US politics was recently reported by Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California Irvine. Every four years since 1956, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has asked voters to describe, in their own words, what they like or dislike about the two parties. It was on the basis of these interviews that the political scientist Philip Converse reached his famous verdict in 1964 that ordinary Americans are, broadly speaking, “innocent of ideology” — that they don’t think in ideological terms.

Political scientists have generally accepted that judgment ever since, along with a corollary notion about American public opinion, advanced in 1967 by the politics scholars Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril: that Americans tend, on the whole, to be “operationally liberal” (favoring specific liberal policies like Social Security and Medicare) but “philosophically conservative” (rejecting broad expressions of left-wing ideas).

In a widely noted 2016 book, the political scientists Matthew Grossmann and David A. Hopkins elaborated on this idea, showing that American public opinion is “asymmetric,” with Republican voters embracing broad conservative ideology while rank-and-file Democrats avoid abstract ideas —thinking mainly in terms of which particular social groups will be helped or harmed by each party’s policies.

In the long run, Democrats “suffer from not forthrightly making ideological arguments,” Grossmann argues; “partially as a result, [the] public maintains conservative predispositions.”

But Wattenberg’s detailed analysis of the ANES voter interview transcripts has led him to conclude that in 2016 something fundamental changed in American public opinion:

Past research has shown that Republicans are substantially more likely to be ideologues whereas Democrats are much more inclined to conceptualize politics in terms of group benefits. This pattern was quite evident in the 2008 and 2012 American National Election Study (ANES) responses that I personally coded.

However, two developments occurred in 2016 that dramatically reshaped the partisan nature of belief systems. First, the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party evidenced a great deal of ideological thinking, thereby pushing Democrats to a record percentage at the top level of ideological conceptualization.

“Far more than most Democratic presidential contenders,” Wattenberg continued, “Sanders openly discussed and emphasized ideological concepts, proudly promoting progressivism and democratic socialism.” “What we saw in 2016,” the scholar explained in a recent interview, “was sort of a legitimation of talking in those terms. Bernie Sanders said, ‘Progressivism, democratic socialism, these are good things.’ For the first time, I’m really seeing that in the interviews.”

For a single candidate, in a single campaign, to leave such an imprint on mass opinion is remarkable; Obama didn’t manage that, and by all indications neither would Warren. Maybe Levitz is right when he posits that a President Warren would be able to “get senators like Jon Tester and Kyrsten Sinema to swallow marginally more progressive legislation in 2021” than a President Sanders. Maybe. But to embrace that as our political horizon would be a counsel of despair.

The rationale for Sanders’s brand of politics has always been that shifting the basic parameters of American politics — however difficult that may be — is a better aim than accepting those parameters and trying to maneuver within them. Both the bitter disappointments and the fragile hopes of the last decade of politics have tended to prove that strategy right. Lowering our sights now would be a world-historical mistake.