The Goal Must Be Removal

If you ever observe publicly that congressional Democrats whiffed their oversight and accountability obligations during Donald Trump’s first term, you’ll be quickly swarmed by the party’s army of online defenders (most of them anonymous) who’ll repeat a paint-by-numbers mantra: They impeached him twice!

If they’re really ardent defenders, they’ll even throw the word “literally” in there for emphasis.

This of course says much more about Trump than it does about Democrats. Either Democrats were historically overaggressive, or Trump was egregiously corrupt, or (alternatively) Democrats did juuuust the right amount of oversight. And I know the right answer, because I can name multiple impeachable offenses from term-one that Dems either barely mentioned or ignored altogether.

But I was also there, reporting on it, and can attest that the first impeachment wasn’t supposed to happen. Democratic leadership was upset to learn that Trump had been caught by a whistleblower trying to cheat in his own re-election effort, because they realized it left them little choice: If they treated the Ukraine shakedown as just another distraction from kitchen-table issues, Trump would have bribed and extorted multiple foreign governments into smearing his opponent during the height of the campaign.

So they conducted the narrowest-possible inquiry. One of their earliest findings was that Trump’s acting director of national intelligence at the time, Joseph Maguire, had intervened unsuccessfully to conceal the whistleblower complaint from Congress.

Maguire’s obstructive, somewhat cursory involvement was quickly forgotten. But it turned out to be a harbinger of what would change and what would stay the same over time.

In term two, Trump has committed impeachable offenses of much higher amplitude with with much greater frequency.

His current DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, is reportedly the subject of her own whistleblower complaint and coverup. But she isn’t merely acting as a political failsafe for Trump. She’s also spearheading some kind of harebrained multiagency propaganda-investigation having something to do with ballots cast in Fulton County in 2020. This time around their aim isn’t to give themselves a leg up in the election indirectly, by flooding the information environment with lies; they’re going the more direct route of trying to assert control over ballots: who casts them, and who counts them.

This is a problem.

Today, most Democratic leaders and operatives in Washington believe (and say openly) that the only way to “end this national nightmare” is by winning elections.

As a betting matter, they are probably correct. It is much likelier that the year 2027 begins with Democrats claiming control of at least the U.S. House than that the year 2026 ends with Trump brought low by impeachment or some other kind of meaningful congressional check. But whatever Trump and Gabbard and the DOJ are cooking up together, it underscores the need for Democrats to think a little more granularly, without resorting to cliche.

If they don’t do the kind of accountability work that might engulf Trump in scandal, they’ll be staking everything on an election that Trump intends to steal. Or to try to steal. They must therefore contemplate both winning midterms (something that will be driven more heavily by fundamental forces than by party strategy) and exposing as many abuses as they can, no matter how remote the odds that this nightmare might end early.

Indeed, they have little choice. Self-preservation demands it, just as self-preservation demanded the Ukraine inquiry. The good news is that exposing and fighting Trump is also productive politics. It hits the sweet spot of political issues that would tend to drive Trump’s approval ratings down and drive Democrats’ up.

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I can already hear the reproof: What would really make Democrats more popular is if the midterms became a referendum on health care and “affordability" rather than on Trump.

In some abstract sense, this is probably correct.

But we have an “assume a can-opener” problem here. ...