A week ago, I published here two pieces proposing the way the Democrats should pitch the wrong-doing of President Donald Trump to the American people to maximize the proportion of the American public that supports the impeachment and removal of this lawless President. One piece proposed that it should be pitched in terms of “patriotism” and Donald Trump’s “betrayal of the nation” at the most fundamental level. The other piece laid out just why Trump’s conduct with Ukraine undermined American national security for his own personal benefit.
I am fortunate to have the opportunity to make that pitch in an area where support for Trump greatly exceeds the support for impeachment: I get a regular op/ed column into newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06). So I decided to boil those two pieces down into a single piece of op/ed length, and here is that piece, which is appearing in this morning’s papers.
**********************************
It’s the Democrats’ task to ask the question, How can the President’s wrong-doing best be presented to increase public support for impeachment?
During the first week of hearings, famed federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann proposed that the emphasis should be on how what Trump was trying to extort from Ukraine attacked the integrity of our election process, that he was “cheating” to win the upcoming presidential election. Americans, he suggested, are not likely to be moved about how Trump’s conduct threatened Ukrainian security.
In my view, he’s mistaken. He’s certainly right that Trump’s effort to corrupt the 2020 election (by illegally enlisting the aid of a foreign country) is profoundly serious.
But the evidence suggests that Trump’s supporters are unlikely to be offended by his corrupting the election process, and thus unlikely to withdraw their support on that account. Recent history has demonstrated that the rank-and-file Republicans of this era are not bothered by their leaders cheating to get power.
(They’ve accepted it when McConnell and his fellow Republican Senators stole a Supreme Court seat, for example; and they’ve accepted it as Republicans in several of the states --NC, WI, MI-- have tried to strip power from statewide offices that they lose.)
But Trump’s undercutting of Ukrainian security – because it has directly damaged America’s own national security – is another matter. The stunning indifference to American national interests that Trump has shown in Ukraine-gate is of a kind that would outrage any American patriot, and there are a lot of people who fly the Stars and Stripes on their houses and yards who do not yet support Trump’s impeachment.
Patriotism has various dimensions, but the core of patriotism is about being on the side of “Us” in a dangerous world where there can be a “Them” that threatens all we hold dear. (That’s why our patriotic holidays have such a pronounced military flavor.) In the battle between Us and Them, the Patriot is solidly behind Us.
And what the hearings are bringing into clear focus is that Trump’s conduct with Ukraine betrayed the nation in precisely those terms: weakening us and making us more vulnerable to our enemies. Precisely the kind of betrayal of the nation that would outrage any American patriot.
If the reality of Trump’s betrayal can be conveyed effectively to patriotic Americans, they might well decide that such a President warrants removal from office.
And, indeed, this is what the hearings are showing clearly about how Trump’s conduct weakened America and strengthened our main adversary:
Ukraine is on the front-line of a battle central to American national security. It’s the battle to contain the newly aggressive Russian regime which – like its Soviet predecessor -- is working systematically to weaken the United States and to undermine the values of democracy.
Because it is a vital American interest to check the rising power of Putin’s corrupt and expansionist Russia, both Republicans and Democrats have long supported a policy in Ukraine that works to block the Russians in two ways: 1) by helping them build a political system based on the rule of law and freed of corruption, and 2) by strengthening their ability to resist militarily the Russian bully that has already seized a part of Ukrainian sovereign territory and continues to attack them.
The hearings are now showing clearly that Trump’s conduct in Ukraine-gate – aside from being crimes committed by the President for his own selfish political benefit – has undermined both dimensions of that agreed American policy.
1) By demanding that the Ukrainians use their legal apparatus to conduct politically-motivated investigations, Trump was pushing the Ukraine back into the very kind of corruption that American policy has been working for decades to root out.
2) With Trump’s (illegal) withholding of the military aid that Congress had passed – and by signaling to both the Ukrainians and their Russian attackers that American support was tenuous – this American President weakened the position of the Ukrainians who are fighting and dying to hold the Russians back.
In both those respects, Trump also fortifies Putin’s regime in its goal to bring the Ukraine back into the Russian orbit, and subvert the rise of democracy.
This is an important national interest, because if the Russians aren’t stopped at Ukraine, Americans might someday have to do it elsewhere ourselves. We Americans spent decades in a dark and dangerous cold war to defeat an aggressive Russian empire. Allowing such a threat to grow again is no small thing.
All of which raises the question of whether Trump simply doesn’t care about what’s good for the United States, or whether – for whatever reason – he’s actively working against the United States on behalf of the corrupt Russian dictatorship that wants to bring America down.
What Trump did with Ukraine would be intolerable for any President of the United States to do with any nation. But doing it with Ukraine reveals an astounding indifference to American national interests.
So if those people whose patriotism is an important political passion can be led to see how Trump has betrayed the nation at this most fundamental level, perhaps they can get shaken loose, and with their allegiance to Trump turned into anger at that betrayal.