In the impeachment saga, Trump Derangement Syndrome is destroying the Democrats
In politics, as in life, hatred can get in the way.
And the base of the Democratic party, even more than its leadership, hates Donald Trump beyond reason. Over the impeachment saga, hatred is killing them.
There are, of course, myriad reasons — some of which I share — to despise the President. Trump’s ugly braggadocio, open disdain for long-established American political norms, and impulse control of a toddler rightly enrage millions.
But never forget that beneath the President’s personal failings, there is a strong ideological cast to the Democrats’ collective disdain.
Trump’s seismic 2016 presidential victory upended the lazy, settled world view of most of the people living on both American coasts, calling into question their understanding of how the world works. Trump’s very existence threatens Democrats ideologically to the marrow of their bones.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a powerful and destructive force. In the present impeachment imbroglio, it is crystal clear that the Democrats haven’t moved on from their election defeat. More than anything else, impeachment — the trial for which begins in the Senate tomorrow — is the culmination of a multi-year process centred around the refusal of the Democratic party to accept the results of the 2016 race.
Of course, TDS has significant real world political risk consequences too. To start with, over impeachment the Democrats are (to use a Vietnam-era jibe) burning the constitutional village in order to save it.
Ironically, they are endangering America’s great founding document in the very ways they are accusing their great hate object of doing.
The Democrats — surely in thrall to TDS — announced that, rather than merely using all their might to politically oust the unsavoury President in 2020, the constitutional dangers of Trump remaining in office were simply too great, making immediate removal a dire necessity.
The Democratic-dominated House has denied Trump his right to due process by not letting him call exculpatory witnesses during their investigations. For example, House Republican defenders of Trump were denied permission to question the whistle-blower, who started the impeachment wheel rolling, over his purported anti-Trump bias.
Compounding the error, speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also denied the President the right to a speedy trial for almost a month by refusing to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate, in a failed effort to influence the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to solely set the terms of the trial.
After impeaching Trump for supposed obstruction of the House, Pelosi in turn seemed to be obstructing the Senate.
This was a fateful procedural and political error. Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, as shrewd a tactician as Pelosi herself, had the speaker’s number, and he has been grimly clear in response to the issue of Pelosi trying to leverage him: “We will not cede our (Senate) authority to try this impeachment. The House Democrats’ turn is over.”
In withholding the articles, House Democrats were undercutting one of their primary arguments for impeachment in the first place: the need for urgency in removing Trump. As Democratic senator and staunch Pelosi ally Dianne Feinstein even-handedly said of the House withholding the articles of impeachment: “The longer it goes on, the less urgent it becomes. So if it’s serious and urgent, send them over. If it isn’t, don’t send it over.”
There is little wonder, given such obvious intellectual contortions, that not a single Republican member of the House voted for either article of impeachment. For everyone ought to be able to agree that even Trump deserves the protections of the constitution — protections that these procedural shenanigans have imperiled.
Predictably, the polls have not rewarded the Democrats for revealing that, in their hatred, they are merely shopping for a crime (any crime, however tenuous) to convict and remove the President.
A Gallup poll released just before the impeachment votes in the House on 18 December found the President’s approval rating up, while support for impeachment and removal has been dipping. To put it mildly, the rest of the country simply isn’t buying the Democrats’ self-serving impeachment narrative.
Even more alarmingly from the Democrats’ point of view, a Firehouse Strategy poll on 8 December found that Trump was ahead of all of his primary Democratic rivals for the first time in the three battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — with impeachment providing the impetus for the change.
Whereas before the President was struggling in all three states, after the circus-like atmosphere on Capitol Hill, voters in these pivotal contests for the presidential election of 2020 have changed their minds.
In their emotional folly, the Democrats are engaging in an act of great political self-harm — ironically improving the President’s chances for victory in November.
Hatred has its price. It seems that the Democrats’ TDS, manifested in this impeachment farce, has mighty political consequences.
Main image credit: Getty