This Week in Impeachment: Trump Lets Democrats Off the Hook, Puts the Squeeze on GOP Instead

The impeachment of President Trump was already a likely event by the end of last week. It became even more likely this week.

Three sets of developments each acted to push the probability of impeachment higher over the past few days. First, the Trump White House made it clear that it was adopting a maximally combative approach, refusing cooperation with Congress and even imposing a last-minute veto on Tuesday's scheduled deposition of Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU who was directly involved in policy toward Ukraine. This response seemed certain to strike Democrats of all ideological persuasions as unacceptably dismissive of the constitutional legitimacy of congressional oversight.

Second, a series of news stories filling in additional details and opening up more angles on the Ukraine affair kept momentum alive and suggested that future investigations, whether by Congress or the media, would potentially uncover even more impeachment fodder over time. New facts are still emerging on a daily basis, and it seems likely that the true scope of the story is not yet understood.

Third, a series of public opinion surveys confirmed that most Americans support the impeachment inquiry—and a Fox News poll released on Wednesday even found a slim majority already favoring Trump's removal from office. A Washington community that is ordinarily fond of cautioning Democrats that they are risking "overreach" by engaging in any politically assertive behavior temporarily ceased its usual litany of warnings, as the previously sizable bloc of citizens in the "dislike Trump but oppose impeachment" camp turned out to be easily convinced to jump aboard once Democratic leaders made the case for it.

Some pundits have interpreted the White House's flouting of Congress, including the sudden yanking of Sondland's congressional appearance on Tuesday, as the strategic playing of a weak hand. Why else would the president take steps that virtually ensure his impeachment, if not to desperately head off testimony and other evidence that would be at least equally damaging?

But it's likely that the stonewalling, at least in this case, was driven by presidential psychology more than any kind of justifiable calculation. Sondlund doesn't really fit the profile of a devastating witness against Trump—whom he continues to serve as ambassador—and it would have been easy enough for him to alternate rhetorical defenses of the president with claims of ignorance or lapsed memory when it came to any inconvenient details. Blocking his deposition with blanket assertions of executive supremacy alienated Democrats while signaling "coverup in progress" to the media and other attentive political elites. Even congressional Republicans seemed to believe that Sondlund would be more likely to help than hurt the president's case, apparently convincing the White House by Thursday night to permit him to testify after all next week.

Trump's risk-taking approach is not limited to the procedural warfare that seems ultimately destined to provoke additional counts of impeachment against him. He also continues to insist that he has done "nothing wrong" and therefore deserves no criticism from any direction. This behavior, too, has the effect of boxing in other Republicans while taking pressure off the more cautious members of the Democratic opposition.

When White House scandals arise, fellow partisans often perceive the safest political ground for themselves to be a middle position between conviction and exoneration: the president did something he shouldn't have, but the offense isn't serious enough to justify removal from office. This was the approach many Democrats adopted when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998. Though aspects of Clinton's behavior were indefensible, they argued, his transgressions did not meet the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. Once Clinton (eventually) acknowledged the impropriety of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, expressing criticism of his actions did not require other Democrats to break with the White House's own party line.

Trump will have none of that. The events of the week signaled that no contrition will be expressed—not even a sentiment in the vein of "I'm sorry that foreign governments apparently misinterpreted my innocent remarks"—and no disloyalty will be tolerated. Blocking off this escape route puts congressional Republicans in an uncomfortable position. Any criticism of Trump from within the GOP, however gentle, will attract national media attention and potentially provoke a presidential counterattack on Twitter. But openly defending Trump's behavior has its own risks: according to this week's Fox News poll, 66 percent of Americans think that it was wrong for the president to ask foreign leaders to investigate his political rivals, and only 17 percent agree that Trump's comments on the call with Ukrainian president Zelensky were appropriate.

So far, a common Republican response to this dilemma is to publicly oppose impeachment as an unjustified partisan exercise led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, but to also avoid directly answering the question of whether the president acted properly or whether soliciting foreign assistance in an electoral campaign (potentially a federal crime) is permissible behavior. This strategem may turn out to be a successful solution to Republicans' conundrum, but it carries an inevitable awkwardness that may not be sustainable as the story continues to progress over subsequent weeks and months.

Trump is wagering that he can hold Republicans in line by the mere threat of intra-partisan reprisal. He may well be right about this; if most Republicans aren't even willing to criticize Trump in public, they're certainly a long way from voting to impeach him or remove him from office. But for now, the president is likely to find fewer vocal defenders than he would have if he were willing to give an inch of ground by acknowledging the possibility that he might have made a mistake or two. So far, Trump's insistence that his communication with Ukraine was "perfect" has succeeded at creating more discomfort within the ranks of his own party than among his political opponents.

This Week in Impeachment: Does Trump Need a Good Strategy?

Over the two weeks or so since the impeachment of Donald Trump became likely, a series of news articles has chronicled Trump's strategic and tactical response to his new predicament. Anyone wondering whether Trump would adopt Bill Clinton's playbook from 1998—acknowledge impeachment as little as possible in public; portray yourself as more concerned with Americans' policy priorities than your own personal conflicts; build an adept political "war room" in the White House to respond to news developments and distribute talking points to partisan allies—has by now received an answer. As David Frum of The Atlantic observed earlier this week, Trump has taken the opposite approach from Clinton in many respects: he talks about impeachment obsessively, he shows no contrition for any aspect of the case, and he invests little in trying to persuade anyone who isn't already a Trump supporter that his impeachment is unwarranted.

It was clear enough even before these recent developments that Trump is much more a creature of emotion than a political calculator in the Clinton mold. The inadvisable admissions and uncontrolled outbursts of the past few days are hardly out of line with past behavior, though their growing intensity suggests that the prospect of impeachment is placing a decided strain on the presidential temperament. Put simply, this doesn't have the feel of a master strategy being coolly moved into place.

But does it really matter?

Clinton's response made sense because congressional Democrats' willingness to stand by him was dependent, as he perceived it, on the belief that they would not pay an electoral price for doing so. It was critically important, from this point of view, for Clinton to remain popular with swing voters and for other Democrats to hold their own in trial heat polls against Republican opponents; if the public turned against Clinton, so would key members of his own party, thus jeopardizing his presidency. The impeachment strategy, then, was merely a specific application of the Clinton-era Democrats' broader political approach: make tactical concessions here and there in order to gain and hold the political middle ground against the Republican opposition.

Trump is not only a very different kind of politician than Clinton, but he also leads a very different kind of party. Many congressional Republicans worry more—for good reason—about internal primary challenges from the right than Democrats do about a backlash on the left, which keeps them publicly loyal to a president who remains very popular among the Republican grassroots. Trump's belief that general elections are won more by keeping the party base stoked and mobilized than by reassuring swing voters of his moderation and pragmatism is shared widely among Republican politicians and activists. Trump can also rely on the conservative media infrastructure to supply a stream of arguments in his defense for other Republicans to echo, making the creation of a central command post staffed by political communication and research professionals a less necessary step for him than it was for Clinton.

So even if Frum is right that Clinton and Trump have chosen diametrically opposed counterimpeachment strategies, it's very possible that they will both wind up facing the same outcome: a more-or-less party-line vote to impeach in the House of Representatives, followed by a more-or-less party-line vote to acquit in the Senate. It's fair to wonder whether Trump would actually benefit after all from following his predecessor's more deliberate approach. Perhaps the answer is no. But there are a few reasons why a better strategy might actually help Trump:

1. It might exacerbate Democratic divisions. One key difference between 1998 and 2019 is that Clinton's impeachment was driven by a committed Republican congressional leadership (especially then-majority whip Tom DeLay), while Nancy Pelosi and other top House Democratic officials have been visibly unenthusiastic about impeaching Trump due to the perceived risk that it poses to the party's most electorally vulnerable members. A savvier White House would be in position to exploit this internal tension by turning down the rhetorical heat and allowing moderate Democrats to have second thoughts, but instead it is providing more impeachment fodder seemingly every time that the president speaks in public. Trump is already acting as if his impeachment is inevitable, thereby making it—at the least—more probable.

2. Even a few Republican defections matter. The strength of partisan ties and the power of the conservative media guarantee that most Republicans will stick with their president, thereby ensuring that he will continue in office unless the Ukraine scandal metastasizes dramatically from its current state. But if a handful of congressional Republicans break with Trump, it bolsters the legitimacy of the impeachment effort and undercuts the counterargument that the whole thing is a Democratic power grab. Even if the public doesn't notice too much or remember too long, attentive elites are much more likely to treat the Ukraine scandal as a serious violation if there is an element of bipartisanship to the impeachment proceedings.

Some Republican allies will be content to defend Trump regardless of circumstance, but others will be worried about getting caught out on a limb that gets sawed off when the president's story changes or new facts surface that disprove previous claims. The release of the "smoking gun tape" sealed Richard Nixon's fate in 1974 in part because Republicans in Congress discovered that Nixon had been lying not just to the press but to them, and allowing them to repeat those lies to their constituents. Several key Republicans have already grown very quiet rather than commit themselves to any particular position or version of events, and there doesn't seem to be much about the president's handling of the crisis that is privately reassuring to members of Congress.

3. Trump still has another election to win. Clinton, of course, was in the midst of his second term in 1998, but Trump is facing an election next year burdened by a subpar approval rating and a highly energized opposition party. Even if the current crisis doesn't further damage his popularity, it still makes it harder for him to win over a few skeptical voters and thus strengthen his position prior to the 2020 race. Impeachment may not itself have major electoral ramifications, but it could still exact an opportunity cost on a presidency that could really use a few quiet months. Clinton believed that getting drawn into daily rhetorical combat would erode his ability to claim the high ground. But Trump is a fighter by nature, and can't resist the partisan fray regardless of the political benefits that might come from adopting the veneer of statesmanship.

Impeachment Is Important—But Don't Expect It to Matter Much in 2020

Once Democratic control of the House of Representatives made the impeachment of Donald Trump hypothetically possible, discussion of the topic has been accompanied by a widespread assumption (held inside as well as outside the party) that pursuing impeachment is a high-risk political strategy with a very good chance of seriously backfiring regardless of its substantive justification. This conventional wisdom reflects the Washington community's collective memory of the events of 1998, which goes something like this: zealous Republicans insisted on impeaching Bill Clinton despite strong opposition from American voters, who exacted their revenge by raining electoral blows upon the GOP in the congressional midterms as Clinton snickered with delight.

But that's not really what happened. It's true that impeachment was unpopular, but the actual results of the 1998 election were hardly calamitous for Republicans. The party suffered a very minor loss of 5 seats in the House, while there was no net partisan change in the Senate. Republicans held a majority in both congressional chambers prior to the election, and they retained this majority afterwards with little change in their margin of control. The 1998 midterms were the epitome of a status quo election, with no measurable wind or wave in either direction.

There are two main reasons why the Clinton impeachment is misleadingly remembered as such a disaster for the Republican Party. The first is that most journalists and commentators assumed that Republicans would reap major political benefits from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal from the moment it first emerged in January 1998. Even when polls began to roll in showing that most Americans weren't outraged by the revelations—and certainly didn't believe they warranted removal from office—pundits repeatedly waved them off, insisting that the electorate would be properly scandalized once it learned more of the facts. For example, Sam Donaldson of ABC News was predicting as late as mid-October that the public was about to turn against Clinton for good, forcing his resignation from the presidency.

The written report of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, engineered by congressional Republicans to be released to the public in the midst of the campaign season in mid-September, contained a number of salacious details that consumed the news media for weeks. When combined with the "iron law" that the president's party "always" loses House seats in the midterm election (which had held true for every midterm since 1938 at that point), this well-timed additional exposé was supposedly poised to hand the GOP a major political advantage. So while the election itself hardly produced a Democratic landslide, the outcome was interpreted against a backdrop of contrary expectations as a decisive victory for Clinton at the expense of his partisan opponents.

The second reason why the Clinton impeachment went down in history as a political fiasco is the messy leadership succession that occurred after the election. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was immediately forced out by his own party, though the disappointing election returns represented the final blow to an already weakened Gingrich (who had faced an internal Republican coup attempt the year before) rather than the central factor precipitating his exit from the speakership. It was easy enough for media reports to frame Gingrich's downfall as representing Clinton's ultimate triumph over an arch-nemesis, but the abrupt withdrawal of the next prospective speaker, Bob Livingston, from consideration for the job several weeks later—Livingston had carried on an extramarital affair, which became disqualifying under the circumstances on grounds of perceived partisan hypocrisy—merely cemented perceptions that the whole production had turned into an utter wipeout for Republicans even before the Senate trial of Clinton ended in an anti-climactic acquittal early the following year.

But there is no clear evidence that Republican candidates as a group performed any worse, either in 1998 or thereafter, than they would have absent the impeachment push. Clinton was an unusually popular president due primarily to an unusually robust national economy, and many of the most promising congressional seat targets for the GOP had already been picked off in the 1994 or 1996 elections. Congressional elections expert Gary Jacobson of UC San Diego concluded at the time that "the results of the 1998 elections are in no way extraordinary. . . . [they] are about what we would expect if no one had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky."

If Clinton's impeachment didn't really matter much in the 1998 elections (Washington lore aside), there's little reason to believe that a potential impeachment of Donald Trump will be decisive in 2020. Trump is much less popular than Clinton was; public attitudes have become more consistently partisan and less malleable over the 21 succeeding years; fewer members of Congress are cross-pressured by representing a constituency that normally leans toward the opposite party; and even an impeachment process that stretches on for a few months will conclude well before next November. The currently developing scandal is important for a number of reasons, but it's very possible that its influence on future elections never extends beyond potentially pushing this or that odd congressional seat in one partisan direction or the other.

An impeachment proceeding is such a momentous, historic event that it's only natural to expect it to have a transformative effect on the attitudes of the American public. This was certainly a common assumption in 1998—how can such a big political story not produce a correspondingly big electoral impact?—and some analysts continue even today to treat impeachment as a perilous political proposition for one side or the other. But the Trump presidency has already generated more than the usual number of big political stories, and the effects of all of them on mass opinion have been modest at best. Americans have already made up their minds about this president, and it will take a truly dramatic set of future developments for most of them to re-evaluate his performance in office. That doesn't mean this isn't an important story—it surely is, just as Clinton's impeachment was. But not everything that's important in politics leaves a major imprint on the voting returns.

As "Mayor Pete" Shows, Some Democrats Just Keep Looking For JFK

An extremely long presidential nomination process, when combined with a large number of aspirants, is fertile ground for a series of boomlets in which successive candidates attract a burst of positive attention and upward motion in public opinion polls. The first such boomlet of the 2020 Democratic contest seems to have arrived right on schedule, though its specific beneficiary is more of a surprise. In a field crowded with members of Congress, it's Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana (population: 102,000), who has managed to capture the most early momentum.

Several recent polls have found Buttigieg running in third place behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (the only two Democratic candidates who have previously run for president), both nationally and in the early nomination states. Buttigieg also raised more than $7 million in individual donations during the first quarter of 2019, more than all but three of the other Democratic contenders (Biden, of course, was not yet a declared candidate).

It seems strange that a measurable segment of the party would already be throwing its support behind a midsize-city mayor rather than any of the many federal or statewide officeholders in the race. But Buttigieg projects a Kennedyesque persona, and a Kennedyesque persona is a valuable asset in a Democratic primary contest.

Kennedyesque politicians are youthful, personable, and confident. They compensate for their relative inexperience with well-hyped intellectual credentials: Ivy League diplomas, pet policy passions, authorship of "serious" books, public displays of erudition. Their bouts of earnestness are balanced by expressions of humor and self-awareness. They are masters of the rhetoric of idealistic generalities, leading audiences to find them charismatic or even inspirational, but they don't insist on doctrinal purity when it comes to the details. Indeed, the hope they offer—and "hope" is often what they explicitly promise—is that electing them will allow the nation to shed its messy ideological and partisan conflicts, progressing unencumbered into a new, brighter era of reason, civility, and mutual understanding. (One of the reasons why the Kennedy style doesn't have the same appeal within the Republican Party is that in the Republican version of utopia, political enemies are simply defeated, not converted.)

For decades, Democratic politicians with the capacity to do so have adapted themselves to the Kennedy model. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both found considerable success in Democratic presidential primaries by emulating Kennedy's approach, and even losing candidates like Gary Hart (1984) and John Edwards (2004) rode elements of the Kennedy persona to advance further in the nomination process than their other political virtues would likely have carried them. The fact that Clinton and Obama are the only post-JFK Democrats to be elected twice to the presidency reinforces the perception among electability-minded partisans that the Kennedy style can offer a strategic advantage that persists even after the primaries are over.

There are other recurrent archetypes in Democratic politics: the scrappy pugilist (Harry Truman, Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders); the just-the-facts technocrat (Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas); the political veteran who can work the levers of power (Lyndon Johnson, Walter Mondale, Hillary Clinton). But it's hard to imagine any of these other profiles being sufficient to launch a midwestern mayor into presidential contention against a raft of better-situated opponents. Buttigieg's electoral chances will depend on his ability to keep this precious persona intact as he weathers the added scrutiny that will inevitably follow his recent bump in the polls.

The interest that Buttigieg's campaign has already received is a testament to the warp speed at which today's political world operates. Except for Biden and Sanders, the other, more conventionally qualified Democratic candidates in the 2020 race are new faces on the national scene by traditional standards—yet much of the journalistic and social media realms are currently treating them like yesterday's news. It really wasn't all that long ago, in fact, that there was this other youngish candidate who suddenly emerged from obscurity to inspire Democratic activists across the country by seeming to personify a new, more hopeful kind of politics.

Had kind of a Kennedy look about him, too.

Beto something?

Whatever happened to that guy?