In 2016 there were two huge disruptions to the political systems of the UK and the US: the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The political elites in both countries responded in remarkably similar ways to these parallel populist shocks – they claimed they were illegitimate, denounced their supporters as thick and deplorable, and did everything in their power to overturn the results.
Amazingly, for three long years since 2016, the establishments of both countries have refused to accept the reality of these democratic votes and have fought to reverse them. Now, with the recent UK General Election, the Remain opposition to Brexit has lost badly, perhaps for good. But the US political establishment, mainly in the form of the Democratic Party, continues its mission to bring down Trump.
This three-year campaign is the backdrop to yesterday’s vote by Democrats in the House of Representatives to impeach Trump. House leader Nancy Pelosi says the Democrats sought impeachment reluctantly, ‘with a heavy heart’. Yet the truth is her party was eager to oust Trump before he even entered the White House, and has been ever since.
Killing the Deep State...
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In December 2016 – a month after Trump’s election, and before his inauguration – Vanity Fair noted that ‘Democrats are paving the way to impeach Donald Trump’. On Trump’s inauguration day in January 2017, liberal activists posted an online petition calling for his impeachment. By April, congresswoman Maxine Waters was exhorting protesters in Washington to ‘Impeach 45’. In June 2017, two Democrat representatives, Al Green and Brad Sherman, initiated formal impeachment efforts.
One year after Trump entered office, Green forced a (losing) vote in congress to impeach on the grounds of ‘Trump’s travel ban, his call to stop transgender people from serving in the military, his statement that some white supremacists in a Charlottesville rally were “very fine people”, and attacks on NFL players who took a knee during the national anthem as a statement against police brutality’. In the Midterm elections in November 2018, a number of Democrats ran on a Remove Trump platform. Newly elected congresswoman Rashida Tlaib vowed, to great acclaim from the party’s base, to ‘impeach the m……f….r’.
Of course, the main endeavours to bring down the president centered on allegations that he colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election. Liberals’ hopes were pinned on the Mueller investigation, to the point of weird adoration of Mueller, including votive candles. Cable TV hosts like Rachel Maddow imagined vast ‘connect the dots’ conspiracies on a nightly basis. But these hopes crashed on the rocks of Mueller’s report, which found no evidence of collusion. Attempts to pin an obstruction charge on Trump fell flat when Mueller failed to back that up as well.
