THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 27
COMMENT
AFTERIMPEACHMENT
O
n January 23, 2017, Donald Trump’s
fourth day as President, he met
with congressional leaders in the State
Dining Room of the White House.
“You know, I won the popular vote,” he
started off, and then repeated the cal
umny that Hillary Clinton had re
ceived three to five million illegal votes,
owing to fraud. “That’s not true,” Nancy
Pelosi replied, according to “A Very
Stable Genius,” the recently published
account of the Trump Presidency by
the Washington Post reporters Philip
Rucker and Carol Leonnig. “If we’re
going to work together,” Pelosi said, “we
have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.”
Steve Bannon, then Trump’s chief strat
egist, who was in the room, whispered
to colleagues, “She’s going to get us.
Total assassin.”
Pelosi did become one of Trump’s
most unflinching adversaries, in part be
cause she grasped early on that invita
tions to his White House are often just
call sheets for unscripted television; her
fingerjabbing readiness to get in Trump’s
face has made her a recurring meme of
the Democratic resistance. She offered
her most vivid performance yet on Feb
ruary 4th, during the President’s third
State of the Union address. As Trump
spoke, Pelosi, wearing suffragist white,
sat behind him in the highbacked chair
reserved for the Speaker of the House
of Representatives, and conspicuously
shuffled and reshuffled a printed copy
of the President’s speech. After he
finished, she tore the text in half. Twit
ter blew up, as the Speaker had clearly
intended; she explained that she had
abandoned decorum because Trump’s
speech “was a manifesto of mistruths.”
Hashtag wars are the President’s ter
rain, however; the conflict between Pe
losi and Trump matters most for what
it says about the questionable health of
the Constitution’s system of checks and
balances. After the 2018 midterm elec
tions, when Democrats regained con
trol of the House but not the Senate,
Pelosi, who will turn eighty in March,
was elected House Speaker, overcom
ing opposition from progressive and
younger representatives by promising
to relinquish her post by 2022. Last year,
as the Mueller investigation wound
down, Pelosi resisted calls from many
Democrats to launch an impeachment
inquiry. She argued that the idea lacked
public support, even as the Mueller re
port turned out to be damning, partic
ularly in its litany of examples of likely
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
obstruction of justice. Pelosi’s judgment
seemed to be grounded in political real
ism: even if the President were im
peached, the chances remained slim to
vanishing that the Republicancon
trolled Senate—cowed by Trump’s base
and by allied demagogues on the air
waves—would convict and remove him
from office by the necessary twothirds
vote. Why impeach Trump if he could
describe an acquittal as vindication, using
it to denounce his enemies and to rally
his following?
Last September, after the Ukraine
matter broke, Pelosi concluded—at the
urging of both progressives and cen
trists in her House caucus—that this
time the evidence was different. Trump’s
abuse of U.S. military aid and economic
power to coerce Ukraine to investigate
Joe Biden, she said, had crossed a line
from “bad behavior” to presenting “a
challenge to our Constitution.” The
House hearings that followed, despite
a hurried schedule and White House
obstruction, created a convincing record
of Trump’s blithe disregard of a Presi
dent’s duty to place the national inter
est before his own. For all its political
risks, Pelosi told the Times early this
month, the impeachment investigation
succeeded, because it “pulled back a veil
of behavior totally unacceptable to our
founders.... The public will see this
with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye.”
She implied that such clarity would
shape the judgment of voters in No
vember, but she also seemed to acknowl
edge uncertainty about the coming elec
tion: “Whatever happens, he has been
impeached forever.”
When the Senate exonerated Trump,
