The Problem With Impeachment
The Problem With Impeachment
Truthdig
Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has
beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic
institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb
the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations.
It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of
legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and
monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the
reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished
neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would
not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from
their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil
fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the
corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end
our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the
nation's warring tribes-indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds.
Impeachment is about cosmetics. It is about replacing the public face of
empire with a political mandarin such as Joe Biden, himself steeped in
corruption and obsequious service to the rich and corporate power, who will
carry out the same suicidal policies with appropriate regal decorum. The
ruling elites have had enough of Trump's vulgarity, stupidity and staggering
ineptitude. They turned on him not over an egregious impeachable
offense-there have been numerous impeachable offenses including the use of
the presidency for personal enrichment, inciting violence and racism,
passing on classified intelligence to foreign officials, obstruction of
justice and a pathological inability to tell the truth-but because he made
the fatal mistake of trying to take down a fellow member of the ruling
elite.
Yes, Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him dirt
on Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and there probably is some. Yes, it
appears the U.S. president withheld roughly $400 million in military aid to
Ukraine in order to exert leverage over that government. Yes, he attempted
to block the release of the whistleblower report that detailed his conduct.
Yes, this is a violation of the law, one that many Democrats in Congress see
as an impeachable offense.
But this kind of dirty quid pro quo is the staple of politics and
international relations. Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence
official, was hired to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia by Fusion GPS, a
research and intelligence firm under contract to investigate Trump by
Perkins Coie, a law firm working for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic
National Committee. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan's campaign manager,
William Casey, asked the Iranians not to free the American hostages held in
Tehran until after the November presidential election to hurt incumbent
Jimmy Carter, according to Gary Sick, Carter's chief aide on Iran. The
American hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated, in January
1981.
Hillary Clinton, as far as we know, was never on the phone to Steele.
Reagan, as far as we know, was never on the phone to the Iranian president.
Trump's fatal mistake was that he was overt in his request and he made it
himself. This kind of underhanded pressure to damage political opponents
requires skillful hints, secret meetings, carefully calibrated pressure and
total deniability. Trump is too clueless to play the game. Because of this
he looks set to join the exclusive club of presidents who were
impeached-Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
Trump, however, will not go quietly into this good night. He will attempt to
bring the whole rotten edifice down with him. And he may succeed.
"The Democrats thrive on silencing and intimidating his supporters, like
YOU, Friend," reads a fundraising appeal for Trump that was sent out
immediately after the impeachment inquiry was announced this week. "They
want to take YOUR VOTE away. President Trump wants to know who stood with
him when it mattered most."
But fundraising from a looming impeachment proceeding will be benign
compared with what I think will come next. Trump's rhetoric, as the pressure
mounts, will become ever more incendiary. He will, as he has in the past,
openly incite violence against the Democratic leadership and a press he
brands as "the enemy of the people."
There is no shortage of working-class Americans who feel, with
justification, deeply betrayed and manipulated by ruling elites. Their
ability to make a sustainable income has been destroyed. They are trapped in
decaying and dead-end communities. They see no future for themselves or
their children. They view the ruling elites who sold them out with deep
hostility.
Trump, however incompetent, at least expresses this rage. And he does so
with a vulgarity that delights his base. I suspect they are not blind to his
narcissism or even his corruption and incompetence. But he is the middle
finger they flip up at all those oily politicians like the Clintons who lied
to them in far more damaging ways than Trump. Trump was weaponized to stick
it to the man. Polls in the 2016 presidential election showed that 53
percent of Trump supporters were motivated by dislike of Hillary Clinton and
only 44 percent said they were motivated by support for Trump.
"People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by," Matt
Taibbi writes in "Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus."
"They voted against the candidates they hated. At protests and marches, the
ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially
the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side
(i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with
each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country), was
striking."
Impeaching Trump would be seen by his supporters as an effort to take away
this primal, if ineffectual, form of defiance. It is yet another message to
the disenfranchised, especially those in the white working class, that their
lives, their concerns, their hopes and their voices do not matter. This huge
segment of the population, as Trump is aware, is heavily armed. There are
more than 300 million firearms in the hands of U.S. civilians, including 114
million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns. The number of
privately owned military-style assault weapons-including the AR-15
semi-automatic rifles used in the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Fla., and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Conn.-is estimated at 1.5 million. The United States has the highest rate of
gun ownership in the world, an average of 90 firearms per 100 people. Mass
shootings in the U.S. take place at a rate of one or more per day on
average.
Economic, social and political stagnation, coupled with a belief that our
expectations for our lives and the lives of our children have been thwarted,
breeds violence. Trump, fighting for his political life, will use rhetorical
gasoline to set it alight. He will demonize his opponents as the embodiment
of evil. He will seek to widen the divisions and antagonisms, especially
around race. He will brand his political opponents as irredeemable enemies
and traitors. He will demand omnipotence, the power of a dictator. Many of
those for whom he is a cult leader will seek to give it to him. For when the
magical aura of Trump's power is attacked, those in the Trump cult feel
attacked. He is an extension of them. Trump embodies the yearning by
millions of Americans, especially those in the Christian right, for a cult
leader.
The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and
The New York Times, to remove Trump from office, as if our problems are
embodied in him, will backfire. Our social, cultural, economic and political
crisis created a demagogue like Trump. These forces will grow more virulent
if Trump is impeached. The longer we fail to confront and name the corporate
forces responsible for the misery of over half the U.S. population and our
broken democracy, the more the disease of cultism will spread. It was the
seizure of power by corporations that vomited up Trump. And it will be only
by freeing ourselves from corporate rule, by rebuilding our democratic
institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media,
that we can roll back from the abyss.
If we do not succeed in overthrowing corporate power, the explosive devices
mailed to Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James
Clapper and CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc Jr., an ex-stripper and fanatic
Trump supporter who was living out of his van, will become an acceptable
form of political expression. Such assassination attempts will, if left
unchecked, eventually succeed. Anarchic lawlessness and tit-for-tat forms of
political murder will swiftly turn the United States into a failed and
terrifying state.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
