As the impeachment trial in the US Senate heads towards a partisan anticlimax, the intellectual debasements of the Trump era have plumbed new depths. Faced with solid evidence of wrongdoing, the president’s defence did its best to cloud the issues, until Harvard professor and former OJ Simpson attorney Alan Dershowitz betrayed the real game plan. Aware that even in a trial with no witnesses, or further evidence, the facts were too embarrassing for his client, Dershowitz argued that: “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.” In plainer English: even if Trump subordinated the nation’s interests to his own, tried to cheat in an election, broke the law and then tried to cover his tracks, he shouldn’t be impeached.
For good measure, Dershowitz then added: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest” – a line that Jonathan Swift would have appreciated in one of his political satires. Yet the Senate maintained its decorum and listened as though Dershowitz was making a perfectly reasonable claim. Clearly it is one of the many specious defences that Republican senators intend to use when justifying their complicity with Mitch McConnell’s shameful cover-up of the president’s chicanery.
While such sophistry played out in the Senate, former National Security Advisor John Bolton was savouring pre-publication publicity that few authors can dream of. His forthcoming book “The Room Where It Happened; A White House Memoir.” reportedly confirms most of the facts that the president’s lawyers have been denying. Since he is a fully paid-up Conservative hawk, whose claim is supported by a former White House chief of staff, Bolton’s disclosures forced Trump’s lawyers into further madcap arguments for ignoring him, or his manuscript. Depending on the lawyer it was because the claims were hearsay, would weaken executive privilege, or harm national security interests.
As the Senate trial decays into a political circus, it has marked the battle lines for the rest of this year quite clearly. The Republicans have chosen to defend Trump even though his guilt has been established far beyond any reasonable doubt. They have not done so on principle, but simply because they have enough votes to prevail. Essentially, Mitch McConnell is reusing the playbook that blocked the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland. Writing about McConnell’s use of hyperpolarized politics to “make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralysed as he possibly could” the historian Christopher Browning predicted that: If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” The sham trial being rushed through the Senate underscores that verdict and indicates that he, even more than Trump, is the real threat to the integrity of the political system.
Even with a successful acquittal, Republican Senators will look like opportunists who have too readily put party ahead of country to defend a president who has encouraged foreign interference in US elections at least twice. If current polling is any indication, that may not play well in the forthcoming elections. Furthermore, even without a guilty verdict in the Senate, Trump remains impeached and some of the litigation started in the lower house may end up strengthening Congress’s powers in subsequent impeachment proceedings. Most importantly, Trump stands exposed as the schemer he has always been, up to his eyes in old-fashioned political corruption, nearly all of it impeachable.
