Democrats’ dilemma, Republican gambit
Everybody in Washington is talking about impeachment. That’s because, whether they want to believe it or not, by now most people, including Republicans in Congress, know in their gut that Donald Trump has committed multiple impeachable offenses.
The problem is that both Democrats and Republicans don’t want to go there, ironically for a similar reason: a political calculus.
The Republicans will never do it. They are not about to dethrone the man who put them on a fast track toward realizing their decades-long desire: the restoration of white (male, Anglo, straight, native) supremacy and government of, by and for the plutocrats. Before Trump the GOP had already been moving in that direction in fits and starts. Trump offers them a historic opportunity to take a giant leap and establish a society that runs totally by the rules of white supremacy and plutocracy.
Democrats know this and figure that the Republican Senate won’t vote to convict Trump even if the president kills that hypothetical person on Fifth Avenue. If the Democratic House impeaches Trump and the Republicans acquit him in a Senate trial, it would present Donald Trump with some golden opportunities that he would exploit all the way to election day 2020. It will lend some credibility to his narrative that it was all a witch hunt, a Democratic vendetta because he won the election, revenge by sore losers. It will allow him to cry exoneration, crow about his victory and portray the Democrats as losers, the worst thing you can be in the impoverished dog-eat-dog mental universe of Donald Trump and his base.
This presents a dilemma for Democrats. They know their duty under the Constitution is to impeach Trump. It is the principled thing to do. But they don’t want to commit hara-kiri on the altar of the Constitution. With a handful of exceptions, congressional Republicans today (in contrast to the Republicans of the Dwight Eisenhower and Howard Baker eras) don’t care about principles, only profits (for rich people and big companies) and political domination (by straight white males) as far as the eye can see.
The Republicans are trying to goad the Democrats into impeaching Trump and then springing a trap on them. But a great chess player such as an international chess grand master can read the board two or three moves ahead and take on several opponents on different boards simultaneously. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the closest thing to a political master strategist we have had for a long time. She knows a gambit—a move in chess in which a player sacrifices a piece to be in a better position to mount a deadly counterattack—when she sees it. She can decline the sacrifice if accepting it would be falling into a trap leading to checkmate.
Democrats in Congress want impeachment and sectors of their constituency want to “impeach the motherfucker,” as Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib once said passionately. For good reason. Trump has stepped on some people—women, Latinos, Blacks, the disabled, LGBTQ—with golf shoes and an especially sadistic zest. Now they want his head.
But Pelosi wants to win an overwhelming victory in the 2020 election, lest Trump try to challenge the results by spinning another one of his tall tales about phantom illegal voters. She has the respect of all elements in the party, including its rising left-wing. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is the facto leader of that wing, is itching to sock it to Trump but she is too smart to give the Republicans the kind of gift-wrapped thing they want the most, a divided Democratic party, a weakened Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi has told the party regulars they must own the left wing. Now the left is not about to disown the Speaker and leave Pelosi out in the cold to be devoured by a pack of Republican wolves.
Going forward, in the search for a strategy, the Democrats might take a page from a matador facing a dangerous and angry bull. Let the bull keep charging into thin air. Tire him out. Let the men on horseback stick their lances into him and the brave men on foot stick him with the banderillas. Frustrate the bull into letting down his guard. Line up the sword and, at the right time, give the bull one last fair chance to gore him then step aside and deliver an elegant, impeccable, definitive killing thrust.
I would love to see Trump impeached today, convicted, disgraced, humbled and demolished, personally and legally. I think that is called hate and is unchristian, and although people have told me, especially as I get older, that I behave more like a Christian than many Christians, I am an atheist, not a Christian, and I own my hatred of Donald Trump. Yet, I also think, like I suspect Pelosi does, that the right time to strike Trump with a political kill shot is November 2020, after he has been fully exposed and dragged through all the excrement and all the pollution his administration has been producing and making us eat and breathe since the first day.
