Impeachment

Joe Biden is officially a victim of the new rules that every Democratic president is going to face from here on out. That's thanks to his party’s overzealously tying an impeachment around Donald Trump’s neck before the 2020 election. Both Biden and the Democrats are not going to like where those new rules lead when the Republican party, in all likelihood, takes back the House of Representatives in early 2023. Traveling back in time for a moment, remember that Donald Trump’s first impeachment was based on a third-party whistleblower who notified Rep. Adam Schiff of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Americans enjoyed a tremendous sense of solidarity in the days following 9/11. People gathered on street corners, at subway stops, holding small candles, and for a time we quite forgot about politics. I had expected something like this to happen now, during the corona pandemic. But it hasn’t, and this has made me think that the country’s breakup is even more likely than I had thought when my book, American Secession, was published in January. One difference, of course, is that we’re not supposed to be together during an pandemic. We’re supposed to be six feet apart, the length of a hockey stick. We don’t do group hugs anymore. If you’re a misanthrope, these are the glory days.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Spring term, 2170. Professor Hankins assigns an English translation from the 22nd century’s most authoritative historical survey, The Beijing Universal History. This week’s course reading is from Volume VIII: The Far Western Hemisphere — North Central American Province. Chapter 33 The Era of Impeachment, 2020-52 At this time the North Central American province was still independent and under the system of governance known as ‘liberal democracy’, described in Chapter 29.

I see that various pundits are competing to write the political epitaph for Joe 'son-of-a-bitch' Biden. That’s entirely understandable. It’s been clear for some time that Biden is on the threshold of senility, and it is only my charitable disposition that prevents me from speculating about which side of the threshold he occupies. And then there was the desolation wrought by the Democrats’ impeachment entertainment. From the start, it was clear that the chief casualty of that amateur theatrics was going to be Joe Biden and his sniff, sniff, sniffing son Hunter. Everyone who is not Bill Kristol understood that the bullet of that purely partisan hit job would miss President Trump.

It was all going so well for Donald Trump. Then came Mitt Romney. The Utah Republican stole the show. In announcing that he would vote to find Trump guilty of abuse of power, he blew up Trump’s plan to claim that impeachment was simply a partisan affair. The president, he said, was guilty of an 'appalling abuse of public trust'. One person Trump never trusted was Romney, whom he humiliated during the 2016 transition period when he forced him to eat frog legs at Jean-Georges restaurant in the Trump Tower and cursorily dangled the post of secretary of state before him. All along Romney, who denounced Trump during the campaign, has been a thorn in Trump’s side. He finally got his chance to ventilate his frustration with Trump on the last day of the impeachment trial.

One of the many things that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that sound good but isn’t true is this: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Consider the life of Donald Trump. Five years ago he was a dubious real estate developer and professional celebrity. Now he is not only president of the United States, but he is, three years into his first term, the most ostentatiously successful president in memory. Donald Trump is a walking refutation of what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s second most quoted line. Possibly Fitzgerald’s first most quoted line is this: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That isn’t true, either.

The Senate is not going to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and to all appearances the whole thing is nearly over. Acquittal is imminent, and supposedly serious commentators are on Twitter wailing in unison with Democratic activists. But what they are saying does not make any sense — it’s contradictory. On the one hand, they say that the case against Donald Trump is open-and-shut: so utterly persuasive in objective terms that only the Senate Republicans’ bad faith has prevented them from admitting it.

The Senate leaders have stated their positions clearly and constantly. Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority, is demanding that John Bolton testify. Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans’ narrow majority, responds that the Senate already has enough evidence to vote. If more was needed, the House should have gotten it when it had the chance. Anyway, the House managers have repeatedly boasted they have 'overwhelming evidence'. The president’s lawyers add that, if any witnesses are called, they want to call some, too. They want to hear from former Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, the whistleblower whose complaint started the impeachment, and Rep. Schiff and his staff, who apparently worked with the whistleblower.

Podcaster Andrew Espitallier, who hosts a channel called The Right Latino with his friend Alex, took to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to ask average New Yorkers their impressions and opinions on President Trump’s impeachment trial. He traipsed 30 blocks, from Times Square to Union Square, for over three hours, put a microphone in the face of hundreds of people, and couldn’t find a single one who was even remotely interested.‘Here I am, in the middle of ultra-liberal New York City, and literally no one cares. I was shocked’, he told me.When my pal Buck Sexton asked if I would come on his radio show to discuss impeachment, I apologized and told him he might want to ask someone else.

The first sentence of the New York Times report on John Bolton’s tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House contains a bombshell — but not the one that everybody thinks. The real revelation is that it suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him. Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported on Sunday that Trump 'wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

President Trump’s woman troubles never seem to go away. A recording aired by ABC News today indicates that Trump himself demanded the ouster of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, during a dinner with Lev Parnas, whom he claims he never knew. He did. Trump declared at an April 30, 2018 dinner that included Parnas, 'Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.'It took a while but eventually Trump’s paladins did. They understood that by 'take her out', the president didn’t mean ask her to go to a fine restaurant or the ballet. They had other ideas. Eventually, Yovanovitch was dismissed and replaced by William Taylor. Look how well that turned out.

The first day of impeachment hearings, and everyone has questions. I’m as confused as anyone else. So I phoned Alan Dershowitz, who’ll be testifying for President Trump’s team on the constitutional implications of impeachment, and cross-examined him on the case against Trump, the constitutional rights of the president, and whether he’d like to see Hunter Biden testify.DG: Adam Schiff says that you’re not a constitutional lawyer, you’re a criminal lawyer.AD: I’ve taught constitutional criminal procedure for nearly half a century. I’ve taught a seminar on impeachment, I’ve written three books on impeachment, I’ve written several other books on constitutional law and numerous articles.

It’s actually sort of cute, at least from a distance. There the Democrats are, playing on their hobbyhorses with all the other neighborhood children. Wobbly Chris Matthews is there, rubbing his leg and shouting. Hello, Chris! There’s Don Lemón and Rachel Maddow and Pastor David French and Bill Kristol all in a circle with their little friends from the New York Times and the Washington Post. They’re doing their nervous war dances, sending smoke signals, and hopping along on their make-believe mares, tilting at that giant windmill called Donald Trump, the evil genie they assemble daily to subject to ritual excoriation. What would they do without him?

The single most important thing to understand about the Senate impeachment trial is that it is all for show, meant to influence the November election. Yes, the House managers and president’s attorney will present formal arguments to the Senate. The real argument, though, is intended for the public in 10 months. It always has been. That argument will play out in the media and on the campaign trail.There are three sets of elections that matter: presidential ballots in six or seven contested states (the industrial Midwest, Florida, and a few others), Senate ballots in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina (where Republican incumbents are vulnerable), and about 30 Democratic House members in red districts, whose fate will decide the next Speaker.