All reasonable people agree that this year’s midterms mark an epochal shift for America. The problem is, “all reasonable people” is a lousy pundit. Sometimes what looks like regime change turns out to be a mere tantrum: Newt Gingrich harnessed Republican indignation against Bill Clinton to win a landslide victory in 1994 – but what the country ultimately got was a merger of its two parties. Sometimes a tantrum has elements of revolution: the Tea Party was presented in the media as an incontinent bunch of racist hicks when it rose up in 2010 against Obamacare and the Republicans who enabled it – but what the country ultimately got was Donald Trump.
So another shoe is about to drop. This election could be a nothingburger. After all, the result has little to do with the Democratic party. It happened at a time when a handful of Democrats were espousing a more rigorous form of socialism, one heretofore considered a relic of the 20th century… but these people are a minority in the party and their positions enjoy no widespread popularity. If, once the discipline of campaigning wears off, Democrats revert to their 21st century race-and-gender obsessions, their kudos won’t last.
In another sense, though, this election could turn out even more consequential than even the most euphoric Democrats understand it to be. The possibility is coming into view that Trump could be impeached and removed from office.
The President finds himself vulnerable in a way he never was before, not even amid the national revulsion at his conduct that followed the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The more closely one examines the vote, the more amazing it is. When you see pickups of forty or more seats in the House – such as the Republicans enjoyed in 1994 (+55) and 2010 (+63) and Democrats in 1974 (+49) and 2018 (+41) – it usually means the President’s party had been holding many seats that it had a very weak claim on, often because they’d been swept up in the coattails of a big presidential win two years earlier. Most landslides are built on seats falling back into the lap of the party to which they “naturally” belong.
But that is not what happened this year. Democrats’ gains (roughly +50 in the House) resembled those in presidential elections. Relatively few seats and governorships are simply falling back into their natural partisan alignment. They are Democratic conquests of Republican places. Unlike most landslides, this one has no silver lining for the losers: barring an eventual favorable recount in Alaska, Republicans will have won none of the most contested seats.
The shift is magnified, and may even be partly caused, by a generational transformation. The baby boomers are starting to die in large numbers – more than 2.5 million this year. It has always been clear that, at some point, they will lose the electoral leverage they have relied on to defend their entitlements and their ideological obsessions, and that a new, more youth-driven politics will ensue. That may be what is happening now. The average age of senators kicked out in this month’s election is 69. The average age of their replacements is 55.
Hence the danger for Trump. In the House it will be easy to impeach him (that is, to level charges against him), which requires only a majority of members. But to actually convict and remove him requires the vote of two-thirds of senators. Here Democrats would be about a dozen votes shy, unless Republicans joined them. After January 6, seven senators did just that, braving censure from their voters and their state parties. Times have changed. This month, in such heavily Republican states as Texas, Ohio, Kansas and Iowa, voters seemed to declare that even abetting Trump is grounds for removing a politician. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a popular Trump ally elected three times, lost his race by seven points. J.D. Vance’s slashing post-election tweet, blaming the electoral debacle on Trump’s decision to attack Iran, shows his assessment of the present situation: swallowing one’s misgivings and loyally serving Trump can be detrimental to one’s career. The same logic will hold for the Republican senators who must decide whether Trump stays or goes. What is important is not the public’s rage at Trump but the public’s rage at his elected defenders.
What is important is not the public’s rage at Trump, but the public rage at his elected defenders
It is about to get worse for senators. Democrats have promised to hold hearings on Trump administration corruption – dozens of instances, from quid pro quos to dealings with the various sleazy sheikdoms that now seem to be America’s most treasured allies. There is the Boeing jet given by Qatar, along with the investments made by the United Arab Emirates spy chief in the crypto firm started by the families of Trump and his counselor Steve Witkoff. While the criminality of this activity is as yet to be determined, all of it violates the spirit of the constitution.
We’ve grown used to the idea that these investigations will come to nothing because the President has an unlimited constitutional authority to issue pardons, which Trump has promised to use liberally. But this creates strategic dilemmas for him. Presidents traditionally issue pardons on the last day of their presidency not because that is some kind of holiday or jubilee but because pardons are tremendously unpopular. What is more, a pardoned citizen loses his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. So for Trump, hiding his own involvement in his irregular dealings might require exposing his family to a merciless grilling in Congress.
There is a final complication. Since Watergate, the American system has been straining toward a more European, prime ministerial one, in which a head of government can be removed in midstream. It appears that, as long as President Trump is in power, he will be a campaign asset for whichever Democrat wins the party’s nomination in 2028. The question may arise for nervous Republicans: do you want to go into the 2028 elections under President Trump or President Vance?
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