The Second Impeachment Has Mortally Wounded Trump

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump mortally wounded Donald Trump as a political force (although not the Republicans, or Trump’s version of their racist nationalist ideology). This is a prediction, but it is not a guess.

It is evident from the way that Republicans did not defend Trump at the time, and have not since, that the case for Trump’s guilt was decisively made, even to many Republicans. This outcome is in contrast to the first impeachment over blackmailing Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, that appears to have changed far fewer minds. (I have seen no reporting on changes of opinion in either impeachment. It may be difficult to measure, perhaps because polls throughout Trump’s presidency suggest to me that conservative voters will pretend to pollsters that they support everything their party and leader do, even when they privately disagree or are conflicted.).

The impeachment charged Trump with inciting an insurrection against the US Congress by motivating (with his Big Lie about the election being ‘stolen’ by widespread voter fraud), assembling and then inciting/directing the mob to violently assault the Congress building on January 6 2021. The mob searched out legislators to intimidate into reversing the result of the presidential election, and/or to hurt, or even kill, those who were deemed to be traitors to Donald Trump because they refused to do so. The impeachment began in the House in his last days in office, and was completed with a trial in the Senate several months after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election (although the Republicans mostly won in Senate and House elections).

The January 6th Second Impeachment Trial Has Mortally Wounded Trump. But the Republican Party and Trumpian Ideology Still Stand Strong as a Danger to Democracy.

In this post I will first suggest several reasons why the second impeachment case against Trump was broadly persuasive, while the first impeachment was rather less so. Then I will list a number of things that the more recent impeachment reveals about fundamental problems with both the impeachment procedure and the US version of liberal democracy. All of these observations support my conclusion that American progressives should distinguish themselves by being systematic advocates of the need for a much more democratic ‘new constitution’, not mainly defenders of the existing one.

(1) Why did the January 6 impeachment case ‘sell’ so much better than the Ukraine blackmail impeachment?

(a) The biggest reason is that the election was over (and the Republicans had mostly won, and had no interest in calling into question their own success on literally the same ballot that Trump was saying was fraudulent). Therefore, finding Trump guilty had absolutely no effect on who was in political power, individually or in terms of party.

In the Ukraine impeachment, the conviction of a sitting president (and leader of the Republican party) on charges of cheating in the already underway 2020 presidential election looked, to people on all sides at the time, to be very much capable of changing who would be in power after the 2020 election – certainly in the presidential race, and maybe also in many Senate and House races. This alone made the first impeachment appear to be a partisan attack by the Democrats – for the very good reason that it would have powerful partisan consequences.

The Biggest Reason that the Second Impeachment ‘Worked’ at all was that It Had Absolutely No Effect on Who Was In Political Power.

(b) A second reason had to do with the substance of the two cases themselves. The January 6 events were both easier for most Americans to understand, and easier for them to care about, than the Ukraine events. Easier to understand because many of the violent events inside and outside the Capitol building were either on TV on the day itself, or were captured on subsequently released media or security and police video.

Easier to care about, because January 6 was an attack on American institutions that threatened (and took) American lives – including, and especially, the lives of those who Republicans and conservatives see as ‘their people’, notably Vice-President Mike Pence and the Capitol police force. The blackmailing of Ukraine only involved people in a foreign country. The only things that were hurt by it were the ‘reputation’ of the USA in the eyes of foreigners, and perhaps the partisan chances of the Democrats in an election ten months after the trial.

(2) What are the observations about the January 6 impeachment that lead to the more general conclusion that the US left should adopt a stance of fighting for a ‘new constitution’?

The first observation is that the impeachment mechanism in the US constitution is of little or no practical use in removing a president who has committed serious wrongs, and is still in office. The partisan stakes of impeachment are simply too high. And if the top people in a president’s party really want to remove him, they can take other (behind the scenes) actions to pressure him to resign. Yes, the threat of impeachment may have led Nixon to resign in the Watergate scandal, but the impeachment process did not go forward. So we do not actually know whether the legislators for the president’s (Republican) party would have impeached their own leader if Nixon had refused to resign.

Watergate Did NOT Prove that Impeachment Can Hold Presidents Accountable. Impeachment is a Substitute for New Elections and is Inevitably an In-House Partisan Purge.

One of the few examples of impeachment that succeeded in removing a sitting president is the December 2015 impeachment of Brazilian president (and Workers Party leader) Dilma Rousseff. It provides further proof that impeachment does not work to oust a corrupt leader. The parliamentarians who voted to remove her were in fact directly implicated in the crime themselves. They were engaged in a cynical blame-shifting partisan maneuver (some in the Workers party were corrupt too, but not Rousseff).

(3) Recognizing the inevitably partisan nature of impeachment brings to the fore a much more basic problem with the US constitution – the basic guiding principle underlying the whole political system is the idea of ‘checks and balances’ by an almost always ‘divided government’. At least one of the four main branches of government – President and Cabinet, Supreme Court and lower courts, Senate and House – will check the others, will veto its actions, if it does serious wrong.

In eighty federal elections since the end of the US Civil War there has been only one time (1952) when all four were controlled by (perceived) supporters of the same party. This is lauded as evidence of the superiority of the American political system. The argument is that other systems, notably parliamentary systems, are more vulnerable to the tyranny of a majority party controlling the legislature, especially when the legislature can pass laws to overrule the courts, rather than the other way around as it has come to be in the US.

The Deeper Problem is the Existing US Constitution. It Mandates ‘Divided Government’. There is Always At Least One Separate Branch of Government that Can Veto Legislation and Serve Minority (i.e. Ruling Elite) Interests.

The argument is that the US constitution is realistic about the human tendency to seek all power for oneself unless checked by another body, with a separate grounding for its power that can actually veto. The argument is that the US system forces each of the four branches of government (nominally three, but the Senate and House are very much constituted to be different, and are often controlled by different parties) to uphold the interests of ‘the minority’ when ‘the majority’ threatens to impose its will on them. The argument is that the US constitution forces elected legislators to accommodate to the other party, to be ‘bipartisan’, and that this is almost always a good thing.

There is another way to read this argument about the need for multiple siloed political structures that have sufficient independent power to veto laws and policies in order to protect the rights of a minority. It is to recognize that the minority being protected is almost always the minority that owns property and has wealth, private society power and/or status group privilege (e.g. race, gender) to protect. Read any progressive history of the United States or of its political institutions to see endless examples of this (e.g. Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate or his other volumes of the biography of Lyndon Johnson; or any of Eric Foner’s books on Reconstruction and slavery; or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States; or probably These Times: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore (WW Norton, 2018) although I have not read it yet!))

And a veto to protect minority interests is not the same thing as accountability to the people. In the case of the Trump impeachment, the American system does not allow for the legislature (the House) to simply replace the top government leader, as happens frequently in parliamentary systems. The presidency is a separate silo of power, and while it can be ‘vetoed’ and ‘checked’, it is not forced to be accountable to either the legislature or to the voters if, as used to happen routinely in a parliamentary system, a challenge to the ruling party and prime minister led to dissolution of parliament and an early election. This lack of accountability to the House by President Trump was flagrant in the White House refusal to provide witnesses or documents to either of the impeachment proceedings. Holding earlier elections are simply not allowed in the rigidly timetabled American system.

Being Vetoed or ‘Checked’ by a Separate Branch of Government Does Not Lead to Accountability to the Legislature (House) or to the Voters (in an Election).

(Parliamentary systems are only less bad than US type presidential and divided power systems. Unfortunately, all existing parliamentary systems have become ‘Americanized’ in recent decades, ie. the prime minister and his/her Executive have centralized power, and have greatly reduced any role for elected legislators. And courts and systems of arbitration and various other technocratic bodies have been given the power to veto the elected legislature’s decisions, or simply to bypass them on the spurious grounds that the elite bodies need to be independent of political interference. See the European Union for a textbook example of this transfer of power from voters and legislatures to weakly accountable president-like government leaders and courts and pseudo-courts.)

(I will return to this topic in posts soon to come in the series on democracy and populism. See a similar argument made in ‘Failure is an Option’ by Seth Ackerman in Jacobin (Fall 2020, No. 39, pp 7-10). See also a different but complementary set of points in ‘Don’t Blame Polarization’, an interview by Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in the same issue (pp14-24).).

(4) The second impeachment will likely have a more progressive impact on public opinion than the first impeachment, because it shone a spotlight on the undemocratic actions of a Republican party president and the extreme right groups that were numerous among his mass supporters on January 6. The first impeachment argument relied on the implication that the Cold War was still in progress, and Trump was consorting with Russia, which most Americans still see as a left-wing enemy.

On the other hand, the Democrats acted the same way in both impeachments in three respects that kept the whole operation as a battle between ruling elite actors within ruling elite controlled institutions. First, the pitch was aimed almost exclusively at Never Trump Republicans and voters. Hence there was little or no critique of the Trumpian presidency or the substance of his administration’s policies from the left, only points about how he had betrayed the ‘bipartisan consensus’ about the sacrilized values embodied in the existing constitution.

The Democrats Could Have Encouraged Local Mobilizations to Debate How Best to Defend and Extend Democracy. They Confined Themselves to Putting On (an Admittedly Excellent) TV Show for Voters to Watch.

Second, the need to separate Trump from other supposedly winnable Republicans also meant that they did not criticize the actions of Republican Party politicians at every level across the country in support of Trump’s lies and reactionary actions.

(Third) To be fair, it would be very difficult to do this without descending into narrowly partisan arguments. And the Senate proceedings are supposed to be a ‘trial’ before notionally ‘impartial jurors’, albeit a political one with political rather than criminal code criteria for deciding guilt or innocence. What the Democrats could have chosen to do, but did not do, in both impeachments is conduct a legalistic trial in the House and Senate, while separately having Democrats and allied actors organize meetings and debates at the local level everywhere (more difficult because of COVID, but still doable in the second impeachment). This would mobilize people outside the elites in Washington. This could be done in a way that was not crudely partisan, if the issues debated were bigger ones about democracy and corruption and accountability implicating all political actors. But the Democrats were afraid to be perceived as ‘agitators’ stirring up trouble, and even more comically, afraid of being seen as ‘biased’ in the conduct of the impeachment.

The end result, in both impeachments, was a Team Red vs Team Blue legal-on-the-surface-but-obviously-partisan battle between elite actors that confined the American people to the role of passive viewers.

(5) Regardless of the weakness of impeachment as any kind of tool for accountability of the top government leader to the people, and the shortcomings of the ways the Democrats chose to make their case (and to whom), Nancy Pelosi’s decision to impeach Trump a second time was an absolutely necessary one to defend the existing American system of liberal democracy. Progressives have quite correctly supported Pelosi’s decision, because we must defend existing democratic practices and institutions to the extent that they are actually democratic.

The 2nd Impeachment Defended the Existing Constitution and Democracy. Why Not Fight for a New Constitution and A Lot More Democracy?

But that begs the question, because real existing democracy is not an unchanging static system. American democracy under both Democrat and Republican administrations has been changing, and mostly in the direction of becoming less democratic in process and consequences. Hence, my major conclusion: progressives should distinguish themselves by advocating a ‘new constitution’ approach to (liberal) democracy. But, absent such a movement with that goal and argument, we should support those who at least uphold the democratic principles in the existing constitution.

Having said that, the second impeachment has accelerated a process which likely would have happened anyway, but is desirable to happen quicker nevertheless – the exposure of King Trump as an emperor with no clothes. (That is too optimistic – his ideology is only slightly exposed, but his con artist nature as an individual who uses others to advance himself and lets them go to jail for him has been somewhat exposed.). More precisely, Trump has been a useful idiot for big business and other ruling elite institutions for the past four years. He has provided a populist sheen and legitimation for continuing neoliberal and American imperialist (America First) domestic and foreign policies, Team Red Republican Party version. The January 6 events themselves might have punctured the charismatic halo of Trump on their own, but the brilliantly presented case by the Democrat House managers in the Senate TV trial framed it in ways that brought home Trump’s betrayal of his own conservative allies to anyone who wasn’t in extreme QAnon type denial.

Because Trump lost in 2020, he no longer is in office and can no longer use the powers of the presidency to punish those who are disloyal to him and reward loyalists. His diminishing power is confined to his ability to continue to direct Republican voters to support one candidate versus another in primaries and elections. That will almost certainly disappear as soon as other Republicans, including those who openly declare that they are Trump Republicans, start running for president themselves.

Trump Can No Longer Use the Power and Money He Had as President to Either Deliver the Goods to Elite and Mass Supporters Or to Punish Those who Fail to Do His Bidding.

Conservative elites get this, and his mass supporters will almost certainly figure this out soon enough. Out of governmental power he can no longer deliver any practical deliverables to his base. And he will no longer get money from big corporate donors, because he cannot provide deliverables to them either. He is too cheap (and maybe his businesses will soon be too broke) to finance a separate party, or even a Tea Party type faction within the Republican Party on his own. He is the Wizard of Oz who still has legions of supporters who want him to be their Saviour and cult leader, but he does not have the power or money to sustain the Wizard mask for too much longer.

It is true that Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican establishment wanted to purge Trump from their party, because he is now a loser who could not help them win again in 2024, and the Democrats have now done that for them. And it is true that Trump may be replaced as leader of the Republicans by another demagogue who is more dangerous that Trump, because s/he would be more competent and more motivated to implement reactionary policies than Trump, who was more interested in pretend change than real change. But bringing Trump down is nevertheless a desirable outcome of January 6 and the second impeachment trial.

(6) To sum up, the January 6 events, brought home powerfully to the American people by the televised second impeachment trial, have likely succeeded in puncturing Trump’s balloon enough that he is a declining political force. This a good thing for the real existing American liberal democracy that Trump spent his entire presidency undermining and attacking.

Is Returning to the Bipartisan Normal That Existed Before Trump Good Enough? Why Not Campaign for a New Constitution That Really Delivers ‘Of the People, By the People, and For the People’?

Even though the Democrats mostly made explicit arguments pitched at conservatives, the trial came down to a contest between two implicit master Narratives: On one side, those who bought the Republican 2020 campaign argument (stressed by the Trump lawyers in their Senate trial argumentation) that the real violent opponents of American democracy were antifa and Black Lives Matter in cahoots with the ‘radical left’ that is taking over the Democratic Party; On the other side, those who say it was Trump, the Republicans who supported him, and the white supremacist extreme right who tried to assault elected legislators in the Capitol on January 6 who are undermining democracy, including with violence and threats of violence masked as acting for Law and Order.

But the political lessons delivered by the trial are still superficial. They still imply that all that is necessary to do to have a democracy that is actually ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ is to return to a bipartisan Normal that supposedly existed before Trump. It is the task of progressives and democrats to call for a ‘new constitution’ that formalizes a better version of democracy based on the three principles embodied in that Lincolnian phrase:

Of the people: The people are sovereign, not any of the institutions of the State except to the degree that they are ultimately accountable to the sovereign people.

By the people: all key decisions of substance must be made by the people themselves as voters or by their representatives, not by courts or technocratic bodies or even elected bodies that cannot be held to account in a reasonable period of time by the voters. And that is not to mention the need to combine representative with participatory democracy in as many institutions in society as possible as well as in political ones.

For the people: Democracy is not politically or socially neutral. It is part of a project for Progress based on the principles of (at least) Liberty, Equality, Democracy, Peace and Justice for All.