THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 13
COMMENT
DOINGTRUMPA FAVO R
T
he sordid truth of the impeachment
trial of Donald Trump is that it will
end with the Senate Majority Leader,
Mitch McConnell, doing him a favor:
delivering the votes, with little regard for
the facts. That is sadly appropriate, be-
cause Trump’s favors—the ones he cov-
ets, the ones he demands—and the terms
on which he extracts them, remain the
trial’s most contested issue. The House
managers cited Trump’s statement to Pres-
ident Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine,
in their phone call on July 25, 2019—“I
would like you to do us a favor though”—
as the crux of a corrupt scheme. Trump’s
lawyers countered that he was talking not
about his “personal interests” but about
America’s. In their trial brief, they argued
that Trump “frequently uses variations of
the phrase ‘do us a favor,’” and cited
examples. “Do me a favor,” he said he’d
asked Europe. “Would you buy a lot of
soybeans, right now?” “Do me a favor,”
he said he’d asked North Korea. “You’ve
got this missile engine testing site....
Can you close it up?” The lawyers could
have added Trump’s claim that, before
choosing Alexander Acosta to be his Sec-
retary of Labor, he’d worried that he was
related to the CNN reporter Jim Acosta,
so he told his staff, “Do me a favor—go
back and check the family tree.”
But, of course, what Trump was ask-
ing from Ukraine wasn’t about soybean
farmers’ livelihoods, or arms control, or
even genealogical information. He wanted
dirt on a political opponent and was will-
ing to hold up military aid for an ally in
order to get it. Trump’s core belief seems
to have been that Ukraine, by receiving
aid from America, incurred a debt that
should be paid to him personally. That
equation works only if, as Adam Schiff,
the lead House manager, put it on Wednes-
day, “you view your interests as synony-
mous with the nation’s interests.” And
Trump does. He has no conception of
where he ends and the country begins.
Nor, apparently, do his lawyers, most
notably Alan Dershowitz. “Every pub-
lic official that I know believes that his
election is in the public interest—and
mostly you’re right!” Dershowitz told
the senators. And so, “if a President did
something that he believes will help him
get elected, in the public interest, that
cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that
results in impeachment.” With that,
Dershowitz provided a pseudo-intellec-
tual scaffold for Trump’s self-delusion.
Somewhere in there is the distorted
echo of a real argument. A President
should at least consider the electoral effect
of what he does, not because his contin-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
ued tenure is so important but because
the opinions of citizens are. They are the
ones who have to fight the wars and bear
the burdens. Voters can be wrong, but
even then they can still be helpful in dis-
cerning the public interest. That is the
basis of democratic accountability. But
Dershowitz was talking about manipu-
lating the election process itself. In re-
sponse, Senator Angus King, Indepen-
dent of Maine, asked if a President could
extort an Israeli Prime Minister into
charging the President’s opponent with
anti-Semitism. In fact, by Dershowitz’s
logic, a President could not only seek
foreign assistance in a campaign; he could
unleash any number of investigations
into his political opponents, declare spu-
rious emergencies to prevent their par-
ties’ political gatherings, engage in sur-
veillance, or take measures to limit access
to polling stations—suppressing, rather
than amplifying, voters’ voices.
Dershowitz was arguing that, as Schiff
said on Thursday, if the President be-
lieves that a deal is in his political in-
terest, “then it doesn’t matter how cor-
rupt that quid pro quo is.” Schiff was
not exaggerating when he called this ar-
gument “a descent into constitutional
madness.” It may even prove more per-
nicious than the simple fact of Trump’s
acquittal—which was preordained, given
the Republican majority’s fealty to him—
because the standard it sets for Presi-
dential accountability is so degraded. It’s
easy to imagine defense teams playing
a video of Dershowitz’s presentation at
a future impeachment trial, in an effort
to exonerate another rogue President—
perhaps one who has hung a portrait of
Trump in the Oval Office. One thing
