A plague on both Trump’s sordid White House and the self-righteous Democrats
Shakespeare, as ever, said it best.
As the eloquent Mercutio lays dying at the hands of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, his last thoughts are of the unreasoning duel between the two aristocratic families of Verona, the Montagues and the Capulets.
Aptly summing up the poisonous atmosphere which directly led to his death, Mercutio damns both with the piercing phrase: “a plague on both your houses”.
This is precisely how I feel about both the feckless, self-righteous Democrats and the nasty, self-destructive Republicans as they head down the rabbit hole of impeachment.
For the problem with the impeachment crisis is that absolutely everyone is right about absolutely everything – both parties are practically and morally awful.
The Democrats, burned over these past two years trying to depose Donald Trump through the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, now think that they have a better chance with the present Ukrainian whistle-blower crisis.
A senior anonymous CIA officer allegedly heard from numerous second-hand sources (he admits that he wasn’t there to authenticate this) that Trump was bullying the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on one of his Democratic rivals in 2020, former vice president Joe Biden.
And, indeed, the transcript notes released of their telephone conversation do not make for pretty reading. While the President is correct in that there is no explicit quid pro quo mentioned during the call, there hardly needs to be. Just prior to it, $400m in military aid for Kiev had been held up, and would only be released with the President’s blessing.
As the Democratic speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sensibly points out, it is not one act but the sequence of acts that is the problem here. Neither Trump nor his acolytes have to mention that aid is suspended, as the fledgling Ukrainian government is surely capable of putting two and two together, knowing that a failure to please the mercurial President will be a disaster for them.
There is absolutely no doubt from reading the transcript that Trump was leveraging Ukraine’s dependent position over the aid to do as he wanted for partisan political gain.
The founders of the American Republic clearly set out impeachment in the Constitution as a political, rather than legal, remedy. In behaving this abominably, Trump has left himself wide open to the impeachment standard.
A last word to Trump defenders about the breath-taking stupidity of their man.
Having just been (largely) exonerated by the Mueller report, and with his Democratic rivals moving ever leftwards in a country that remains resolutely centre-right, this should have been the moment for the President to sit back and let the electoral forces work in his favour.
Of course, he could not manage that. Trump got right back down into the muck and the mire, like a spoiled child who cannot help picking a scab, no matter how many times his parents plead with them not to. He thoroughly deserves the impeachment ordeal that is about to be visited upon him.
But let’s pause a moment and look at the equally risible Democrats.
Quite like supposedly high-minded Remainers in the UK who talk of parliamentary sovereignty while dreaming of thwarting the will of the people, the Democrats’ motives for impeachment are highly suspect.
Using anonymous sources, armed with second-hand information, it seems that congressional Democrats are prepared to hound Trump by whatever means possible – still attempting to overturn a 2016 election result that horrifies them. They have increasingly become appalling carbon copies of their great adversary.
And that’s without delving into genuine Democratic quid pro quo corruption, which Trump is right to point out. Biden’s troubled son Hunter made a fortune serving on the board of a dodgy Ukrainian gas company (he has also done ridiculously well in China), despite having absolutely no business acumen or energy-related experience.
The obvious conclusion is that he was paid for access to his father by those wishing to influence the vice president.
Worse, and in true Trump-like fashion, Biden senior has bragged about holding $1bn in aid hostage, dependent on an earlier Ukrainian government removing a prosecutor who had looked into the gas company’s dealings. Again, legal – and again, shameful.
The end result of this will be nothing but the further coarsening of the American body politic.
The Democrats have the votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Trump, but are 20 senators short in the upper chamber of the two thirds majority needed for conviction. Unless many Republicans miraculously decide to switch sides, this means that the President will remain in office, bloodied but surviving.
And for next few years America will be consumed by this suicidal drama. In other words, the political risk for the US is the US.
Main image credit: Getty