If Trump Goes Down, He’s Taking Everyone With Him
The impeachment inquiry is laying him bare. It’s not a pretty sight.
I
was based in Washington and reported from Capitol Hill during Bill
Clinton’s impeachment, which was the last time the country entered
waters like these. It was ugly, and Democrats and Republicans traded
vicious words.
But Clinton never
publicly accused his detractors of treason or floated the idea that one
of them be arrested on those grounds, as Donald Trump just did with Adam Schiff.
Clinton
and his defenders raised the specter of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,”
to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase, thus asserting that he was
being persecuted for his politics, not punished for his misdeeds.
But
they didn’t insist, as Trump and his defenders routinely do, that a
vital part of the federal government was an evil cabal intent on
undermining our democratic processes, which is Trump’s self-serving
characterization of the intelligence community. Their central strategy
wasn’t to ignite a full-blown crisis of confidence in the institutions
of government. They weren’t serving dire notice, as Trump essentially
is, that if the president goes down, he’s taking everyone and everything
else with him.
The
Clintons possessed and projected a moral arrogance that was laughably
oxymoronic under the circumstances. And they and other prominent
Democrats junked the party’s supposed concern for women’s empowerment to
savage Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and others who came forward with
claims about the president’s extramarital sexual activity, including serious accusations of sexual violence.
But
they didn’t equate the potential fall of the president with the fall of
the Republic. They didn’t go full apocalypse. Bill Clinton didn’t
prophesy that his impeachment would lead to a kind of “civil war” from
which the country would “never heal,” as Trump did by tweeting an evangelical pastor’s comments on Fox News along those lines.
I wrote last week
that the prospect of Trump’s impeachment terrified me, and one of the
main reasons I cited was what we’re seeing now: his histrionic response,
which is untethered from any sense of honor, civic concern or real
patriotism.
[Get a more personal take on politics, newsmakers and more with Frank Bruni’s exclusive commentary every week. Sign up for his newsletter.]
He’s
not like most of his predecessors in the White House, who had some
limits, at least a few scruples and the capacity to feel shame. Their
self-pity wasn’t this unfathomably deep, their delusions of martyrdom
this insanely grand. “There has been no President in the history of our
Country who has been treated so badly as I have,” he tweeted last week,
and the violins have wailed only louder and weepier since.
