Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump on the campus of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday
Based on every public indication, and barring some attack of conscience on the part of a handful of Republican senators, on Friday evening, the Senate will vote to acquit Donald Trump on the two counts of his impeachment. This will occur after two weeks of late-into-the-night legal argumentation and the presentation of zero witnesses. And it will bring to a close one of the more vexing episodes of political theater in the country’s history, not least because it was seen by so few people and at such low consequence.
The flailing and patently self-refuting two-pronged case of Trump’s legal attachés—first, that Trump didn’t do it, and second, that he did do it, but there’s nothing wrong with that—never conspired to produce a moment of Republican reckoning. If there’s any lesson to be learned from the impeachment trial, it’s best articulated by Alan Dershowitz, who, in the closest thing approaching a viral clip, claimed, “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."
Dershowitz’s contention may seem gallingly limitless in its understanding of executive power—a president need only believe something will help him for him to be in the clear. Indeed, the man himself was so stung by the reaction to his argument that he tried to walk it back. But sadly, that statement, which boils down to the assertion that there essentially is no impeachable behavior, turns out to be spot-on. So long as it requires 67 senators in agreement for something to broach the threshold of impeachability, there is no impeachable offense.
And while liberal hand-wringers would allege that this makes a mockery of constitutional intent and that the Founding Fathers would never have anticipated it, history actually backs it up. Of the three presidential impeachment cases brought before the Senate, none have resulted in convictions. Trump was right when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. The specter of impeachment as an enforceable limitation on presidential lawlessness is just that.
In fact, the progression of the impeachment trial, from obvious, flagrant transgression to predictable acquittal has been as tidy an encapsulation of the Trump Doctrine as we’ve seen throughout three-plus years of his presidency. And while the tactical value of pursuing impeachment given this inexorable outcome (which some would say will serve only to embolden Trump ahead of the election cycle) remains up for debate, the impeachment process serves as a validation of the principle Trump invoked most consistently on the campaign trail: that the rules are all made up, and they need not apply.
To the extent that there’s been a through line in the wildly inchoate Trump presidency, which has swung from anti-interventionism to warmongering, from pro-worker tariffs to dropping the tax bills of some of the largest multinational corporations to zilch, it’s this. And while Trump is less aberration than dyed-in-the-wool Republican with some colorful eccentricities, his stand-alone contribution has been to implement this theory with full force, with the full backing of the human-shield Republicans in Congress.
In foreign policy, Trump’s egregious violation of international law with the strike on top Iranian official Qassem Soleimani did absolutely nothing to advance an agenda or provide a tactical advantage, but served merely to prove that the rules of international law were all made up, and there would be no cost for violating them. In trade, Trump tore up NAFTA mostly to prove that NAFTA was in fact violable and that he could generate a “new” deal that was largely exactly the same, with little blowback. In basic procedural transparency, Trump continues to violate the Emoluments Clause freely and openly, with foreign governments and stateside lobbyists and executives streaming through his hotels for tribute, constitutional restrictions be damned. It’s not clear these decisions have helped the public or him personally (which according to Dershowitz is the same thing)—that estimation seems in fact secondary to his motivation of proving that the rules are everywhere unenforceable and entirely make-believe.
It’s the same story elsewhere. The Trump administration has torn up the country’s environmental standards and emissions regulations, just to prove they were tearable (though the oil and gas industry thanks him for his service). When it came to the border wall, which the Congress told him he was not allowed to fund as he’d intended, he went right ahead and did it anyway, circumventing their rules by siphoning money from the military budget. When you’re a star, they let you do it.
Of course, the rules have long been imaginary for a certain class of people in the United States—the Wall Street bankers, for example, who broke the law repeatedly and induced a global financial crisis, or the Bush-era torturers, who openly flouted all international rules of engagement and human rights conventions. In other words, the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected, forever granted a free pass in our two-tiered system of justice.
But Trump’s appeal on the campaign trail was that he would put this principle in service of downwardly mobile Americans, particularly in the Rust Belt states he swept with exceedingly little effort. Those free-trade deals facilitated that outsourced millions of jobs in the region? He’d shred them readily. If Ford or GM wanted to move a plant to Mexico, he’d hit their cars with a mercilessly high import tariff. Compare that with two decades of messaging from the Democratic establishment: they’d really like to just give defrauded homeowners money, or forgive student debt, or intervene in the face of policy-induced job losses, they really would …but there are rules. There are constraints. Certain things—free trade, market forces—are sacrosanct. If there was a resounding message of the Obama years, it’s that he would have done great, transformative things if not for those invisible limitations that we all know are there but can do nothing about.
Trump, of course, didn’t put his abiding disregard for the rules to work in service of the downwardly mobile blue-collar worker. He just did it for himself. He turned a tidy profit off his candidacy. He refused to disclose his tax returns. He declined to enter his business holdings into a blind trust, and his hotels booked up with foreign leaders on their way to international summits.
Will an acquittal make him even more brazen? I doubt it. The impeachment trial wasn’t needed to validate this approach; it’s on display daily. Trump has proven that many of the rules we thought might fence in a president are actually just wishful projections, “norms” that can be disregarded. But impeachment isn’t a new addition to the list. We’ve known since Andrew Johnson that it wasn’t a meaningful check on the president’s power. And especially in an age of partisan polarization, expecting broad bipartisan cooperation in removing a chief executive is a fool’s errand.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the Trump doctrine sets a precedent that could empower a Democratic president as well. There are plenty of legal means by which a Democratic president can go their own way on policy and implement a robust agenda without new authority or permission from the other branches. Though it’s unlikely the next Democratic president will be backed by such an openly subservient Congress, Trump’s been slowed little even with the House under Democratic control. It’s clearer now than ever that the limitations and constraints that the liberal establishment leaned upon to excuse their inactivity are entirely self-enforced. For all the damage done, Trump has proven that nothing is off the table. And if a Democrat triumphs in November, and has the courage to put that to good use, we all might be better for it.
