The first thing to do to keep Donald Trump in power is to make sure impeachment does not happen. The way to trick Democrats into going along with this is to use basic political Kung Fu, using their own weight and movement to bring them down.
Democrats want impeachment. So, trick them into insisting that the House file impeachment proceedings as soon as possible. At this point, the Senate, with its Republican Majority, will not convict Trump because all of those Republicans are loyal. Once the Democrats make hay out of impeaching Trump, and fail, they will look like losers, and the party that looks like the losing party will eventually lose. The Democrats will have spent a huge amount of time, effort, money, and political capital, on an effort that can not succeed.
So, step one to keep our president in power indefinitely would be to trick the Democrats into insisting on impeachment. They will be divided on this. Many will want to not proceed with impeachment in a climate where it can’t possibly work (the obviously correct strategy) and others will want to go through with impeachment no matter what. Getting Democrats to divide over impeachment would have a very similar effect to when they became deeply, emotionally, and irreparably divided over Sanders vs. Clinton. That division helped put our president in power to begin with. This sort of division, but this time over impeachment, will help keep him in power later.
The next thing we need to do to keep the president in power is to make sure he wins in 2020. The aforementioned strategy will help, because it will divide the liberals from the progressives from the whatevers, with in the failing Democratic coalition. But more division will help. This can be done a number of ways.
One would be over Nancy Pelosi. From the Republican point of view, it does not matter who is the Speaker of a Democratic House. Any Speaker the Democrats put up will work hard to defeat the Republicans in the next election, to push through Democratic policies, to support invesigating Trump, etc. There is no universe in which soft on Trump vs a hard on Trump House members are up for consideration for Speaker. Anyone the Democrats elect will be bad for Republicans, Pelosi or not. But by convincing Democrats to fight over this, the Democrats become increasingly divided. The trick is to get some, perhaps many, Democrats to be “Pelosi or bust Democrats” much like there were “Bernie or Bust” Democrats during the 2016 election. “I’m a Pelosi Democrat, and anyone who is not, unfriend me now!” should be the motto of this campaign to divide and conquer Democrats.
Anything that can be done to distract Democrats from Trump’s ongoing efforts to Make America Great Again helps. Anything that can be both a distraction and a point of division for Democrats allows Trump to implement his white supremacist agenda, and at the same time, weakens Democrats so they can neither impeach successfully nor win an election.
What Democrats Should NOT Do If We Want To Keep Trump In Power
It is worth mentioning what Democrats should NOT do to keep Trump in power. There are many things, including staying focused, resisting division, avoiding fatigue by fighting less among themselves and so on. But I want to point out one thing in particular that, if Democrats figure this out, Trump is doomed.
Go after the Senate. In the next election, there will be many Republican senators up for re-election. Some are weak. There are also some weak Democrats, but fewer. Just as 2018 favored Democrat to Republican takeaways in the Senate, 2020 favors the opposite. If the Democrats start now to further weaken sitting Republicans, and develop excellent candidates — and avoid fighting over that process in a self destructive way — they can shift the Senate not only in their favor, put possibly get something close to a super majority. If they can take out all of the vulnerable republicans, like the ones in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas, and keep the vulnerable Democrats, in Alabama, Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, and New Hampshire, they can pick up 9 seats. If they can weaken a few more Republicans, they can potentially reach a super majority, and thus guarantee impeachment of a re-elected President Trump. If the Democrats will have kept their powder dry, and not blow the impeachment that can’t succeed earlier, they could do this. (It is not politically pragmatic for the Democrats to re-try Trump in a second similar impeachment, though that is probably legal.)
Here’s how the Democrats could do that. Using organizations like Indivisible, activists across the country can try to get a pledge from their Senators. The pledge can’t be too specific, and they must accept a range of different possible responses (and thus not divide themselves over the issue). They just need to get their Senators to say something like, “Yes, I think Donald Trump has probably carried out impeachable offenses, and I would welcome the chance of an impeachment trial to determine the truth and act accordingly.” (Not, “guilty no matter what, aaarrrg!!!” … If the Dems grow an internal movement of “Impeach or Bust” they will only hurt themselves further!)
By presenting this demand to all the Senators, they will focus activism on the Republican Senators refusing to admit what is clearly (even to Republicans) true that mirrors what Indivisible did with health care. When it comes times for those Republican Senators to go up for re-election, many will not survive. This strategy got the Democrats power in the House. If Democrats try this, and don’t screw it up with their petty internecine fighting, they can take the Senate in 2020.
Americans who support Trump should be very afraid of such a strategy. But no one should hold their breath. Democrats are more likely to be less divided, not more unified, by the time they need to be, to protect their precious democracy.
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Shouldn’t the first sentence of this post read: “The first thing to do to keep Donald Trump in power is to make sure impeachment happens”?
Stop making sense! 😉
I just want to point out that there are many practical reasons for keeping Nancy Pelosi (she’s a great organizer in the House, she knows how to work the system, she knows what’s possible) there are two reasons that are far more visceral. 1) Keeping Pelosi is a big middle finger to Republicans. They’ve done everything possible to convince Democrats to dump her; let’s not give them the satisfaction. They’ve never listened to us. 2) Trump does have weak spots, psychologically. It will infuriate him to no end to have to answer to a woman. He has no respect for women. He only keeps them around so long as they answer to him. Nancy Pelosi will drive him insane and a 70-year-old man suffering from stress is subject to a lot of medical issues.
In light of the Michael Cohen story today, I want to offer an additional thought on impeachment.
First, the last thing in the world that Democrats want to do is to vote for impeachment, send it to the Senate, and have it voted down. That’s a losing proposition for Democrats in every way. There are plenty of low-information voters who will go into a booth in 2020 and say, “The system put Trump on trial and exonerated him, so he’s not guilty.” I don’t think they’ll see it as the same thing as Clinton’s impeachment, they may sense that Trump was accused of much more serious crimes and it may color how they see him, but it won’t disqualify him. At best, it’s a wash for undecided voters (and trust me, after canvassing last week, I can tell you they will exist right up until election day). Best thing is for Democrats to say, “We need to allow the investigations to continue,” and work on legislative issues where they can (and it appears that it’s more than just Mueller who may be investigating Trump now in the DOJ, yeah!).
That said, there are two strategic cases where Democrats might want to consider impeachment. 1) a Supreme Court vacancy. Impeachment will eat a lot of Senate time up and if you can halt the Senate for months, putting off another appointment until the election, it may be worth rolling the dice on losing impeachment but possibly getting voters to come out and save the Supreme Court. It didn’t work in 2016, but maybe it will this time. 2) Time an impeachment vote so that the Senate can’t hold a trial and a vote before the November 2020 election. Lay the case out in the House, dump all the salacious details, and then say it’s up to the American voters to decide directly, not the Senate.
FYI, next Monday’s show on NPR’s The1A, will be “President Eject?”
https://the1a.org/shows/2018-11-12/president-eject
Billed to discuss different ways to eject a president.
——
One problem: Apparently there are literally millions of people in America who actually prefer an authoritarian oligarchy over democracy.
It saves thinking about things and making decisions.
As Greg and others above have pointed out, and as I’ve observed previously over the last year or so, impeachment will not work because the Republican Senate is corrupted beyond repair. They will vote for the political expediency of their own hides and the benefit of their donors, over the good of the nation.
Think about what this means. A criminal president can wreak havoc in office and the Constitution cannot protect the country. Democracy in the US is fatally flawed – as the evidence before our eyes attests.
There’s a difference though between fatally flawed and fatally broken. An impeached president can still be tried in a criminal court even if his pliant Senate refuses to admit to the articles of impeachment. Impeachment doesn’t carry double jeopardy, and indeed the same articles of impeachment can be brought to the Senate multiple times. So a failed impeachment can still be heard by a court once the criminal is out of the Oval Office.
Matthew Rigdon has already mentioned this but it’s probably worth repeating – there may be benefit in slowly and objectively expose Trump’s crimes over the next 18-20 months or so and then lay the articles of impeachment down just before the next election. Show the electorate what Trump did, but don’t give the Senate the opportunity to refute the case until after the election. This may ensure that Trump and many of his associates are defeated in 2020, and then justice will have its hobbles removed and he can spend the rest of his life in civilian court and then in prison.
The trick will be to keep the Murdoch press and similar rabid-right agencies, and Russia’s cyberwarfare capacity, from contaminating the public discourse. If the truth can be properly aired without misrepresentation there may be salvage from this body blow to the USA’s democracy.
It will still take generations to repair the country though, and to modernise the Constitution and government agencies and to to rout out the corruption of vested interest, but it may bring back the States to a top-level geopolitical force. It’s probably never going to regain its place as preeminent leader though, because Russia and CHina have too much military and economic momentum, and the reality of a ravaging climate in the future is going to profoundly change international power dynamics and influence. The USA has forever lost its moral authority on global warming, and the rest of the planet will never forget this.
I read an interesting idea. The context is American conservatism. Wether it’s applicable in a wider context internationally, or even valid at all, I don’t know.
The idea was this. If conservatives loose power, they won’t reconsider conservatism, but will reconsider democratic process.
Interesting idea methinks.
Well, that’s a good part of how we got here in the first place. We haven’t entirely moved on from Viet Nam… or the Civil War for that matter…