The Donald Trump Impeachment Fantasy

Wishful thinking is in the air: this presidential incompetence is intolerable, it cannot last. Let us take bets on how long Donald Trump will last before he is evicted from the Oval Office by those who cannot put up with his trigger-happy tweeting, his brazen exploitation of the highest office in the land for personal financial gain, his reckless attacks on the independence of this land’s judiciary, his bizarre, unhinged, deployment of illegal executive orders, his juvenile foreign policy. Trump will be impeached before the year is out, before his term is over.

This is an exceedingly curious fantasy to entertain. Impeachment of a president requires the House of Representatives to vote to do so. (It also requires the Senate to conduct a trial and issue a verdict.) Do the proponents of these bizarre speculations imagine that a House of Representatives which is controlled by the Republican Party will ever float such a motion and act on it? And that a Republican Party-controlled Senate will issue an impeachment verdict to follow up? This the Republican Party that, lest we forget, has voted in lockstep to confirm all of Trump’s cabinet nominees, each one more spectacularly unqualified for the task. (So dogged has its defense of this cavalcade of incompetents been that yesterday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell invoked a slavery era rule–during Black History Month–to prevent Senator Elizabeth Warren from reading a letter by Coretta Scott King, written back in 1986, which had opposed Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship because of his civil rights record.) This is also the Republican Party that has expressed virtually no public opposition to any of Trump’s policies–they’ve all either been cowed down by his relentless tweeting, or they do not find anything objectionable in his policies. After all, as McConnell put it, ““I think there is a high level of satisfaction with the new administration.”

This is not a party that is going to impeach.

These fantasies remind me, all over again, of the feverish frenzy that broke out during the election season when commentator after commentator wrote about the ‘implosion’ of the Republican Party, its death-throes, its being torn apart by the conflicting impulses that had been induced by the Trump candidacy. Precisely none of that happened. The Republican Party rolled on, won the election, maintained its majorities in both houses, and found itself a new President, who now sits in the Oval Office.

One of the biggest mistakes made by political pundits in writing about the Trump candidacy and the Trump presidency has been to imagine that there is a separation between it and the Republican Party, that this administration represents some radical break with the past, that Republicans of yesteryear were milder, less ideologically unhinged, less racist, less xenophobic, less invested in taking this country to the cleaners. It has let the Republican Party off the hook; but Trump is their creation, he is of a piece with the history of this party. This present moment does not represent a discontinuity or disjuncture with the past; it represents its logical continuation.

Trump will not be impeached by the Republican Party. To hope or wish for it is just that, a fantasy. There are far better fantasies to inform your politics with.