The EconomistFebruary 1st 2020 United States 25F
or metropolitantrendsetters and the masses, the impeach-
ment trial of Andrew Johnson was the great event of 1868. The
Senate galleries were crammed for it, with “the most lovely as well
as the most distinguished ladies of Washington...in daily atten-
dance”, according to one record. Police officers meanwhile strug-
gled to control the crowds that heaved outside the Capitol, “contin-
ually asking questions, making appeals and muttering threats”.
Entering the Senate this week, by contrast, your columnist spotted
a single, lonely protester wearing a sign that read: “Donald Trump
is going to pee on you.”
Considering the passions that the president stirs, for and
against, most Americans’ lack of interest in his trial may be its
most remarkable feature. The public gallery has been half-empty
for most of it. The few dozen anti-Trump protesters who have gath-
ered outside the Senate are nothing to the hundreds who flocked to
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. The trial’s open-
ing two days drew a modest prime-time tvaudience of 7.5m. That
is similar to the audience for Bill Clinton’s trial, once an increase in
average viewership is factored in, though Mr Trump’s is taking
place in a far more feverishly politicised environment. It is also
more popular than Mr Clinton’s trial was. Only a minority of Amer-
icans thought Mr Clinton should have been impeached for lying
about sex; a small majority think Mr Trump should be sacked for
trying to extort personal favours from his Ukrainian counterpart.
Even Republican senators who denounce Mr Trump’s impeach-
ment as a “political sham”, in the phrase of James Inhofe of Okla-
homa, seem slightly piqued by the public’s disregard. Quizzed on
the thin showing in the gallery, the Oklahoman hyper-partisan
told one newspaper he was “really surprised...because this is kind
of historic”. He shouldn’t have been. The reason most Americans
find Mr Trump’s trial tedious is because they know how it will end:
with the president, though guilty—as even some Republicans ac-
knowledge in private—nonetheless acquitted by them.
A last-ditch wrangle—as this column went to press—over
whether Mitch McConnell might allow testimony from John Bol-
ton, a former national security adviser, would make that scarcely
less likely. It raises no prospect of the requisite 20 Republicans
joining the Democrats in a vote to remove Mr Trump. Immaterialtotheoutcome,thekerfuffle is therefore mainly indicative of the
extent to which the Republican Senate leader has otherwise con-
trolled the trial and so predetermined its outcome.
Mr McConnell claims to have modelled it on Mr Clinton’s trial,
which relied almost exclusively on evidence sent up by the House
of Representatives. Yet the circumstances of the two trials are
quite different. The evidence against Mr Clinton was gathered dur-
ing a nine-month-long criminal probe, backed by a grand jury,
which allowed its investigators to secure the testimonies of nearly
a hundred witnesses, thousands of documents, and a sample of
the president’s blood. The evidence against Mr Trump consists of
an edited White House transcript of a phone call between him and
Volodymyr Zelensky, testimonies from the handful of mostly mid-
level officials who were prepared to defy the administration’s non-
co-operation order, and the president’s Twitter account.
Additional evidence against Mr Trump is available—including
a leaked account by Mr Bolton, first reported by the New York
Times, which appears to demolish the president’s defence. But, as
Mr Trump’s lawyers noted this week, it is inadmissible. Testimony
from the former national security adviser, a plain-speaker with a
grudge against Mr Trump and a book to sell, would be more infor-
mative—and probably fraught for some, such as Vice-President
Mike Pence, allegedly complicit in Mr Trump’s ruse. Yet a single ex-
plosive testimony would probably leave little mark on Mr McCon-
nell’s whitewash. The fact that a few moderate Republicans may
demand to hear from Mr Bolton should be understood in that con-
text. Were they also to request testimony from Mr Pence, half a
dozen other cabinet members and, naturally, the president, it
would look like a serious bid to uncover the truth and confront
their voters with it. Inviting only Mr Bolton, on the legally irrele-
vant basis that he is willing to testify, would look like virtue-sig-
nalling to the independent voters they fear to alienate.
It is of course no mystery why that is as much as they may be
willing to contemplate. To stand against the president is suicidal
in the Trump cult their party has become. Mr Bolton, a feared baby-
eating bogey of the left for over three decades, has already been de-
nounced on Fox News, his former employer, as a “tool for the left”.
It should also be acknowledged, as is so often the case, that while
Republicans may be setting new records for shamelessness, the
Democrats are not blameless either.
Chuck Schumer is also trying to extract political benefit from
the trial, by trying to force Republicans up for re-election this year
to make embarrassing defences of the president. Having largely
achieved this, some suspect, he may be quietly willing to bring the
trial to its inevitable conclusion rather than risk damage to his
party by prolonging it. In that case, neither party would be com-
mitted to its oath to try the president and hold him to account.Running down the Capitol
No wonder Americans seem disengaged from the Senate trial. In-
deed, though you would not know it from the polished grandeur of
its atriums, or the lofty bonhomie with which its members, of both
parties, still hail each other there, the Senate is an institution hur-
tling towards irrelevance. Its tradition of debate is long dead. Un-
der Mr McConnell, it barely passes bills; this Congress could be the
most unproductive in half a century. And meanwhile the populist
furies that propelled Mr Trump, and which he has done so much to
exacerbate, are not dissipating. Dissatisfaction with democracy
was reported this week to have increased by a third in America
since the 1990s. It will have gathered more steam last month. 7Lexington Voting with their eyeballs
The biggest indictment of Donald Trump’s sham trial is that most Americans have ignored it