30 United States The EconomistNovember 30th 2019
A
fter a coupleof false alarms, Donald Trump’s “Watergate”
moment has arrived. On December 4th the House Judiciary
Committee will begin a process of deliberation that will probably
lead to it drafting articles of impeachment against the president by
the end of the year. Whether a hot-button charge of bribery—the
most specific ground for presidential dismissal described in the
constitution—will make the list is unclear: Democratic leaders say
it might. Yet the case against Mr Trump, that he sought to shake
down a foreign leader for political favours using military aid and
other state resources as leverage, is essentially already proven.
The White House record of Mr Trump’s “Do us a favour” call to
President Volodymyr Zelensky was the smoking gun. The public
hearings House Democrats conducted in November mostly under-
lined that. They also revealed how many of those around Mr
Trump—including Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney and Mike Pom-
peo—knew of or facilitated his scheme. Having conceded their
original defence (that there was no shakedown), Mr Trump and his
supporters have therefore fallen back on a line that takes less ac-
count of the Ukrainian matter in hand: the president is the victim
of a vast left-wing conspiracy. This is nothing less, writes a colum-
nist in American Greatness, a pro-Trump publication, than a “de
facto, three-year-long singular effort to delegitimise and ultimate-
ly remove Trump from office before the 2020 election.” Mr Trump
calls the congressional probe into his behaviour a “coup”.
Although the liberal backlash against Mr Trump has been over-
board and self-defeating at times (starting with the handful of
Democrats who talked about impeaching him from the very begin-
ning), this is not a credible defence. It is plainly designed to dis-
tract from and minimise the specific charges the president faces,
which he and his advisers are at the same time striving to discredit.
(Mr Pompeo’s statement this week that he had a “duty” to investi-
gate the president’s damaging and untrue claim that Ukraine, not
Russia, was behind the 2016 election hack was especially dismal.)
Tellingly, their partisan attack-line was also used by Richard
Nixon and his supporters as the evidence against him mounted.
“Watergate was a coup d’état that...destroyed a president who had
humiliated the liberal establishment,” fumed “Pitchfork Pat” Bu-
chanan, a Nixon aide and sometime Republican presidential can-didate,fully 40 years later. Though Watergate is known for the bi-
partisan moment when Republican support crumbled before the
proof of Nixon’s crookedness, the grievance his investigation and
removal stirred on the right lasted long after that moment passed.
Mr Trump’s accusers can take three, somewhat contradictory,
lessons from this historical echo. First, tough political outcomes
always look easier in retrospect than they did at the time. Partisan-
ship, an older blight than many recall, has made most things worth
fighting for highly uncertain at times. If the impeachment experts
that the Judiciary Committee will convene at its first hearing make
a strong case that Mr Trump warrants the ultimate constitutional
check, history might therefore seem to recommend it.
Yet the Watergate comparison also shows how much harder
dislodging Mr Trump would be than removing Nixon was. He is far
more popular with Republicans. Having governed as a centrist,
Nixon endeared himself to conservatives only when his progres-
sive accusers started to seem more threatening than his support
for civil rights and detente with China had. And today’s Republi-
cans are more ideologically aligned, and thus tribal, than they
were then. That is largely a product of the grievance-powered con-
servative media bubble, currently thrumming with anti-Ukraine
and anti-left conspiracy theories—which is in turn partly a re-
sponse to Nixon’s removal. The genius behind Fox News, Roger
Ailes, was a former Nixon aide driven by a determination to create
a counterweight to the liberal establishment that did him in.
Fox and its peers were designed, in other words, to go to war for
a conservative champion at such a time as this. And in Mr Trump
they have a champion to die for. This is his biggest advantage in an
impeachment knife-fight. Where fulminating against the libs was
something Nixon mostly did alone with his Scotch bottle, until it
became his last-ditch defence, it is Mr Trump’s main method. In
his policies and rhetoric he governs like a wartime president, as
the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein puts it—forever rallying his suppor-
ters against the enemy that is the other half of America. Whether
an impeachment trial could actually strengthen him, as he claims,
is hard to predict. A small majority already wants to see the back of
him. But Mr Trump is uniquely well prepared to survive it.
That might argue for abandoning the effort, whatever the ex-
perts advise. Some nervous Democrats want this. Yet the compari-
son with Watergate also points to the rising possible cost of such a
retreat. Although Nixon and then Bill Clinton considered their ac-
cusers malevolent and tried to block them, illegally at times, nei-
ther disputed that a president can be subject to investigation. Mr
Trump, who has ordered his administration not to comply with the
congressional probe and says the constitution lets him do “what-
ever I want as president”, disputes this every day.The right of kings
A growing number of conservatives agree with him. Indeed Mr
Trump’s argument is a logical extension of the post-Watergate
view on the right that checks on the presidency are illegitimate
when wielded by the other side. That was the essence of Mr Bu-
chanan’s rhetoric and also of a recent speech by William Barr, the
attorney-general, in which he asserted that the president’s accus-
ers were subverting the constitution and undermining the rule of
law. Mr Barr is known for taking an expansive view of executive
power—but only, it seems, when a Republican is in charge.
If Democrats want to leave him the field they know what to do.
They have only to refrain from impeaching Mr Trump, not because
it would be unwarranted, but because it would be too hard. 7Lexington Impeachment endgames
Lessons from Watergate for Donald Trump and for the Democratic Party