Conservatives and moderates will say that the phone call between Donald Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine is just Donald Trump’s usual bluster and so not to be taken seriously or, if it is, that it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense because it is, after all, just one phone call, and that even if it is an impeachable offense, it is too late in Trump’s term to pursue impeachment because the election about a year from now is available as the preferable device for getting rid of him and so not give the Republicans the excuse of saying that the Democrats are not willing to go to the ballot box to get their way. My view is that the charges are very serious, very impeachable and, most important, it is necessary to pursue these charges because we cannot wait for the next election to correct the problem Trump presents.
What Donald Trump did was an impeachable offense because he asked a foreign power to intrude in our election system by making up charges about his leading domestic opponent. If he thought the charges were real, he could have asked the Department of Justice to look into the matter. Richard Nixon was forced to resign because he too had wanted to subvert our electoral system with his dirty tricks, burglaries and hush money payoffs. Nixon, however, did not try to get a foreign power to do his dirty work, and the transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky makes clear that that is just what he did, the nation not requiring a two year investigation to try to connect the dots. The whole line, the whole narrative, is right there in the phone call, for all to see. Using foreign interests to influence an American election is just what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they gave Congress impeachment powers. It is also why they required the President to be a native born citizen. They did not want Great Britain, in particular, to have any sway in American matters, and that applies to Ukraine as well.
For many, the key question is why not wait for the election of 2020. The answer to that is that we do not know what will happen between now and then. Remember that Barack Obama had pursued the course of not coming down hard in public on reports of Russian meddling in our election in 2016 because he thought that Hillary would pull it off and that then he could retaliate without it seeming like a partisan political move. But Hillary did not win and we don’t know the extent to which Russian sponsored propaganda contributed to that. Well, what if Trump is able to get the South Koreans, let us say, to accuse Elizabeth Warren, should she be the nominee, of some complicated scheme of bribery which no one would be able to unravel but which the media would relentlessly cover because they are always out for a mystery story, the Koreans doing this to keep American military support. Such an October or September surprise might unsettle the Presidential race enough to give Trump a victory, and then where would we be, with a president re-elected through corrupt means and no recourse to that except an impeachment investigation after the horse had gotten out of the barn. Better to step in now, with a clear cut charge.
Trump has done this before, in 2016, where the details are sufficient to make a voter worry about whether he would do it again, even if Mueller did not think the evidence added up to “criminal intent”, and then Trump, in the most recent instance, in 2019, has clearly done it again. He is a serial abuser of the powers of the Presidency. Why wait for a third time to hold him accountable for unconstitutional behavior? The nation is better off suffering the trauma of impeachment over an issue where the President has had his hand observed to be in the cookie jar rather than await another murky matter. The President is surprised that people take that phone call all that seriously and so still hasn’t even figured out an excuse for it, refusing to answer questions about the content of the call, what he was asking Zelensky to do, instead ranting about the press and the whistleblower. I don’t know why Trump has to be scolded rather than held accountable for his actions other than what I suggested in a previous post, which is that he is clearly a clown and so is given the liberties appropriate to a clown. But as all of us should know from Batman comic books and movies, a joker can be a malevolent figure.