If This Isn't Impeachable, Nothing Is
By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic
22 September 19
The president reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against Joe
Biden.
The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign
government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his
office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall
Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be
impeached and removed from office immediately.
Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as
both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report
revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it
did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it
warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to
risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a
Republican-controlled Senate.
Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new
president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a
sovereign state into conducting an investigation-a witch hunt, one might
call it-of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son
Hunter Biden.
As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the
Daily Beast when asked about the president's apparent requests, "Clearly,
Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take
revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison."
Clearly.
If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning.
Trump's grubby commandeering of the presidency's fearsome and nearly
uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of
power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity
of our elections.
The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid
to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held
Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas. It means
nothing to say that no such deal was reached; the important point is that
Trump abused his position in the Oval Office.
In this matter, we need not rely on a newspaper account, nor even on the
complaint, so far unseen, of a whistle-blower. Instead, we have a sweaty,
panicked admission on national television by Trump's bizarre homunculus,
Rudy Giuliani, that he did in fact seek such an investigation on Trump's
behalf. Giuliani later again confirmed Trump's role, tweeting that a
"President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better
investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job."
Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think
about how Americans might react if this happened in any other
administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob
Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico
in 2004 and asked him-indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall
Street Journal-to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was
eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either
man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from
office?
The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their
country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of
Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable "deep-state attack"
nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And
while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he
did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to
shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.
The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself,
however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses
committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know
from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I
won't deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about
Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump's
attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump's own
purposes.
There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can
get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use
his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the
national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored
his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an
American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his
obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the
national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.
In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with
Democrats and press for Trump's impeachment. This won't happen, of course;
even many of Biden's competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their
distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will
engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth
Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment-but without mentioning
Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite
around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden's sake, but to
protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has
made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House.
I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our
Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president
and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United
States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of
the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their
elected leaders to demand Trump's removal, then we no longer have an
accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have
chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional
order in the United States.
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