Beating the Trump Cancer
by Rich Herschlag
Along with apostate conservative David Brooks, a small army of pundits have in the past few weeks laid out their well considered reasons for Democrats to refrain from impeaching the President. Brooks’ argument paraphrased goes something like this: Trump would ultimately win in the Senate and then heading into the 2020 election build on the momentum; impeachment represents elitism of a couple hundred members of Congress over a couple hundred million potential voters; the Democrats would lose momentum on their most viable policy arguments; Americans simply don’t want an impeachment; and finally, there have already been too many false starts. Brooks’ talking points overlap and essentially amount to a single warning—be afraid, Democrats. Be very afraid.
With public support for impeachment growing steadily over the past month, Never Trump (aka “human scum”) conservative-with-a-conscience columnist George F. Will offers a more evolved argument against impeachment. Will concedes preemptively at least three plausible pro-impeachment talking points: forcing Senate Republicans to acknowledge, however grudgingly, additional misdeeds by the President; reestablishing the political primacy of Congress; and through inevitable White House resistance ultimately enhancing the obstruction portion of the impeachment itself. Yet for all the well considered, nuanced yin-yang of his reasoning, Will ends up like all the rest, waving the white flag because of the numbers in the Senate.
In their thoughtful, strategically conservative arguments, Brooks, Will and just about everybody in between manages to miss the central purpose of the impeachment—for one side finally to eschew political calculation in favor of principle. And while it may be that the Democrats’ principle is nothing more than a disguise for political calculation, if so it is the appropriate disguise.
Like America itself, the Democrats have been bullied, mocked, and shoved into their locker for the custodian to hear them banging and whimpering after school. Worse, democracy has been neutered. Saving the big D and the little d in one fell swoop can hardly be called a mistake. Even at the price of the 2020 election. (cont below)
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The wakeup call—a case of extorting a foreign government to get dirt on a domestic political rival—came not a minute too soon. That it is shaping up as more of a Constitutional slam dunk with every 24-hour news cycle is reassuring, but Ukrainegate is more than just a series of connected impeachable offenses. It is the tightly scripted CliffNotes epilogue to the largely unread unwieldy Mueller report. This is not Robert Mueller’s fault. Mueller was asked to cover the entire Civil War with a series of charcoal sketches. In Ukrainegate, Nancy Pelosi gets to be Matthew Brady documenting Appomattox.
On a political level, this was and is perhaps the best and last chance for Democrats to go in for the kill. There is blood in the water but the ocean is vast and time short. On a patriotic level, however, Ukrainegate is something more. It is the chance to beat cancer.
Since John Dean famously warned his boss, Richard Nixon, of a cancer on the presidency in 1973, the “C” word has been bandied about at the whiff of White House scandal. But Ukrainegate is different. The current context is different. Today’s cancer is a pathology of the entire political and cultural life of the United States. Donald J. Trump is stage 4—a large tumor in the thoracic cavity metastasizing to the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. Impeachment proceedings represent immunotherapy. Prior to the impeachment inquiry there were already members of the House attacking the tumor like targeted T cells. As the impeachment inquiry has intensified, these T cells have been cloned in the form of more members of Congress with more potent, specific information allowing them to attack the tumor more effectively.
Over the course of its life the tumor has been allowed to grow mostly unchecked. Some thought it benign, while others considered it just stage 1 or 2. Most people never even bothered to read the biopsy report. The tumor has over the past three years swallowed up healthy tissue in its vicinity, rallied millions of otherwise harmless cells through effective signaling, and thrown off attackers by sowing confusion and distraction. It must be eradicated by any legal means necessary.
Chemotherapy—charging the tumor with a crime—has already proven crude and ineffective. Radiation—constant scrutiny from various left-center media—has caused considerable healthy tissue loss without shrinking the actual tumor. Stem cell therapy—the sweeping approach of introducing an entirely new president through an uncorrupted election—is not available until at least late 2020, and by then the patient may be terminal.
The opportunity to impeach and thereby continue political immunotherapy is far from a panacea. But with stage 4 cancer you don’t fool around. Drs. Brooks and Will are correct that there are likely to be side effects. Loss of the 2020 presidential election might be one of them. The exact medical analogy escapes me. Is that equivalent to the loss of a lung? Nausea? Hair falling out? Unfortunate perhaps, but it doesn’t really matter. When you are in a fight for your life, you can’t worry about the tumor’s feelings or the wrath of metastasized cells throughout the body. You go for the source first and worry about the rest later.
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