[R]ep. Peter Welch joined the Other Reelect President Trump Campaign last week.
It’s the Other one, not the official Donald J. Trump for President Inc. headquartered at 725 5th Avenue in New York. Welch says he opposes that one, and because Vermont’s only House member is a loyal Democrat who is against almost everything Trump favors there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.
Only to wonder why he supported the Other Trump campaign by saying that he has “concluded that President Donald Trump should be impeached.”
Just what the president and his allies want to hear from more and more Democrats. The Trumpies know what the Democrats may not: that the more Democrats call for impeachment, the better the president’s reelection prospects.
Or maybe some Democrats – including Welch – do know it, but they’re in a political pickle. Because while most voters (upwards of 60%) oppose impeachment, most active Democrats (upwards of 60%) favor it. Politicians often fear to defy their most intense supporter.
But beyond that political pickle, there is something bizarre about the way Democrats (including Welch) have expressed their support for impeachment, something that illustrates how profoundly Donald Trump has transformed the world, or at least American politics.
Transformed it so much that his opponents have sunk to his level of accuracy and integrity.
Explaining his pro-impeachment decision to a gathering in Montpelier, Welch said: “None of us have the right, least of all the highest elected official in the country, to attack people because of who they are. No one has the right to tell a person that they should go back to where they came from.”
As Welch must know (he’s a lawyer), everyone has the right to do both. It’s called free speech, which also protects the right to condemn whoever does either. Maybe Welch really meant to say that no one – especially the president – should tell people to go back where they came from.
As no one should. But Welch is not the only example of the Democratic decline into Trumpian standards of truth. His Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said last week that during testimony before the committee, former special counsel Robert Mueller “told us … that, but for the Department of Justice policy prohibiting [him] from doing so, he would have indicted President Trump.”
Mueller did seem to say that. But a few hours later he made clear that he didn’t mean it, that instead his office “did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.” Nadler had to know this. But in the world Trump has made, factual accuracy is now as irrelevant to Democrats as it to him. Trumpians and liberal Democrats alike live in their own dream-world. For the Democrats, it’s the conviction, based on nothing, that somehow, someday, something will convince most voters that Trump should be impeached.
This is possible, but only because anything is possible. Meanwhile, polls continue to show that most voters, including many who disapprove of Trump, oppose impeachment, and Democrats and liberal commentators continue to ignore this reality at their peril.
But some seem determined. On National Public Radio the other day, Jason Johnson, politics editor at the Root, said that proposing impeachment posed no risk for Democrats because “impeachment is more popular amongst all voters now than it was before the Nixon impeachment.”
On Aug. 1, 1974, eight days before he resigned, Richard Nixon’s approval rating was 24 percent and falling. It had been under 30% almost all year. The Republican senators who went to the White House to tell him to resign did so because support for him had collapsed. Trump’s last Gallup approval was 44% and holding steady. That’s not good. It’s not collapse.
Politicians, as mentioned, fear to defy their base. The fear is logical but not admirable. One job of a leader is to let his or her followers know when they are wrong. They are wrong to clamor for impeachment and Welch was wrong to follow instead of lead them.
Not that there is no credible argument for removing Trump from office. There is. But there is not the faintest likelihood that he will be removed. Besides, in a democracy, the time to reverse the results of the last election is the next election. The next election is not that far off. Since most people do not want the president to be impeached, pursuing impeachment is obviously a way to displease most people. Displeasing most people is not the way to win an election.
Maybe the Democrats who call for impeaching the president worry that they can’t beat him.
The way they’re going, they can’t. Too many of them seem to have stopped talking to anyone but each other. Worse, they seem to have stopped trying to win the support of anyone who voted for Trump in 2016. No one has quite disdained Trump backers as “deplorables” yet. But they’re coming close.
Welch hasn’t said anything that foolish. But from the perspective of Vermonters, if Trump is re-elected, one of those who should be held responsible is their congressman.
