Frank Rich: The Case for a Fast, Focused Trump Impeachment
the national circus 2:50 P.M.
The Case for a Fast, Focused Trump Impeachment
By Frank Rich
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No one needs to hear from me that Pelosi knows what she’s doing. She surely recognizes that one of the problems with a multi-strand impeachment inquiry is that there are so many potential charges against Trump and the grifters in his White House circle (family included) that it could take a decade to get to the bottom of them. She also has to reckon with the reality that there isn’t a ton of talent in her caucus that’s up to so demanding a job. For every capable and focused inquisitor like Adam Schiff, there are many more who, as we saw in Thursday’s hearing with the acting National Intelligence director Joseph Maguire, are prone to showboating, losing the forest for the trees, repeating each other, and, in general, hiding rather than advancing the prosecutorial ball.
There’s no time for this. Speed is of the essence for several reasons. In a nation attuned to binge watching, we like our stories to play out without interruption. What’s more, speed is the organic pace of a modern impeachment. Less than eleven weeks separated the opening of the House Judiciary Committee’s formal impeachment hearings on Richard Nixon in 1974 and the committee’s first vote on an article of impeachment. That same process took just under ten weeks in the Bill Clinton impeachment of 1998. Both efforts were narrowly focused even though in both cases the sitting presidents’ adversaries had other charges they were panting to adjudicate.
In both cases as well, the calcifying of public opinion sped up in tandem with the narrative, leading to a clear majority verdict and forcing cautious party loyalists to fall in line. The slow burn of the Nixon impeachment narrative may foreshadow Trump’s. It took until three months before Nixon’s resignation for three Republican senators to muster the nerve to call for his exit — three senators, not so incidentally, who were up for reelection that year. In Clinton’s case, his approval rating started skyrocketing in direct proportion to Newt Gingrich’s impeachment putsch, leading to the failure to convict in the Senate and a GOP political debacle. In the instance of Trump, we are already seeing the start of a shift in the polls, with major surveys this week showing for the first time that the country is evenly divided on impeachment rather than opposed.
Another argument for speed is that it’s a smart play to strike when the White House is on the mat. It’s an indicator of the overall disarray that Trump released the incriminating phone readout without even recognizing how incriminating it is. The ranks of the presidential bubble/bunker have dwindled down to heel-clicking sycophants who didn’t even think to put an impeachment war room in place. The fact that Corey Lewandowski’s name is being floated as its potential general indicates the bargain-basement caliber of talent available for such an assignment. It’s indicative of the shortfall that Trump and his GOP defenders have been reduced to recycling nearly half-century-old lines from Watergate. The Nixon White House spokesman Ken Clawson — to take one representative example — decried that investigation as a “witch hunt” ginned up by “people who were completely rejected at the polls” and were “trying to bring down this presidency.”
This week we’ve also seen the White House accidentally send its pathetic talking points to the Democratic congressional leadership and then, even more haplessly, attempt to “recall” the errant email once the blunder was revealed. The president who has declared war on leakers can’t even stop his own staff from leaking in broad daylight via a mass email blast. And let’s not forget the farcical White House effort at the start of the week to throw Rudy under the bus: Instead of making Giuliani the fall guy, Trump and his lackeys have instead spurred him on to grab any and every media opportunity to compound the charges and underline Trump’s guilt.
As the wheels are falling off at the White House, so they are spinning out of control in Trump’s already addled brain. It’s hard to see how his threatening whistle-blowers with death or calling Adam Schiff “sick” accomplishes anything beyond making the case that he is incapacitated and should be removed by the 25th Amendment — a solution also considered by some Republican senators as an impeachment alternative for Nixon. A Washington Post article this week quoted a former presidential aide as worrying that Trump’s fury “may lead to less structured output from the White House.” Given that there’s already no structure in the White House “output,” it beggars the imagination to wonder what’s in store.
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