Trump's Anti-Impeachment Strategy: A Short-Term Winner & Long-Term Disaster

ANNA MONEYMAKER / THE NEW YORK TIMES

It is an insult to Bob Dylan, the magisterial poet, to use his name in the same sentence as Donald Trump, the maniacal president, but here goes: Like Dylan’s rolling stone, Trump is on his own, no direction home. 

In the 11 days since House Democrats kicked off a series of hearings that will precede a vote on articles of impeachment, there has yet to emerge an impeachment strategy, let alone a team to coordinate a strategy, only the sight of a spittle-flecked president raving on the lawn of the White House as he, to use the term of the moment, self impeaches.   

As hard to believe even in these mind-boggling times, for Trump that is a strategy.  There is no war room, no communications staff, no nothing beyond the pathologically narcissistic Chosen One himself.  

Although the concerted efforts of he and his surrogates to pressure Ukraine -- and now China -- to investigate his leading Democratic challenger are a clear violation of the constitutional ban on accepting "something of value" from foreign entities in a U.S. election and are the smoking gun driving impeachment, Trump is claiming that these overtly extortionate schemes are neither unconstitutional nor out of the ordinary.   

Trump will continue to push that claim relentlessly while fabricate even greater falsehoods about Joe and Hunter Biden. 

The most recent is that as vice president, Joe Biden threatened to hold up $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it sacked its abjectly corrupt prosecutor general.  That much is true, but what Trump never mentions is that Biden had Republican support, as well as the support of the International Monetary Fund, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the many rank-and-file Ukrainians who are desperate for their homeland to embrace Western values and are sick and tired of the endemic government corruption that is a holdover of the Soviet era and when a pro-Moscow president ran their country. 

As shabby as Trump's so-called strategy may be, it will work in the short term.  His base isn't going anywhere, Senate Republicans are dutifully supporting him, and no one in the West Wing is going to convince him that he needs to do much more than bloviate if he's going to fight off impeachment.  

This is because, as a long-term strategy, it is a disaster.   

As it is, impeachment-worthy revelations are outpacing Trump's ability to push back against them.  (I added an extraordinary 14 major developments to my Russia-Ukraine scandals timeline over the past week).  He declared that there was no quid pro quo between he and Ukrainian President Zelensky and hours later text messages between two key State Department aides revealed that there was just that.  And so on and so forth. 

Indeed, Trump is failing to control a crisis that engulfs his presidency a little more with each news cycle.

And if you listen closely, few Senate Republicans beyond Lindsey Graham are pushing Trump's flimsy anti-impeachment meme that using foreign policy to advance his political interests is okay.  Their silence, instead of their usual unified message, is instructive because many privately loath Trump and what he has done to their party, let alone the country, and they know that even the most muted criticism will provoke outrage from him.  

"It's very difficult to message on quicksand," is how one Republican operative puts it.

Listen a little more and you find that while the 30-something percent of the electorate that Trump's base represents will dutifully vote for him in 2020 come hell or high water, his prospects in the swing states he barely took in 2016 in winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, and even some of the states he won handily, are so dreadful that it becomes a safer bet by the day that he will lose very badly if the election is fairly contested. 

Senate Majority Leader "Moscow Mitch" McConnell now says that under Senate rules he would have "no choice" but to bring articles of impeachment articles voted out of the House to the Senate floor, which would occur just as the election campaign is heating up, but that may be thinly-disguised trickery.  McConnell, for example, could take is Old Kentucky Home time doing that.  

At least 20 Republican defections would be needed to convict Trump in the Senate, but Senate Republicans up for re-election in swing states also are listening and will soon be arriving at a very big fork in the road.  They can't please both Trump loyalists and swing voters.  So do they continue to support the president and face possible defeat or do they get behind impeachment?   And in the meantime, do they dare speak up as Mitt Romney did on Friday in calling the president's extralegal excursions "wrong and appalling." 

Trump has not acted entirely on his own. 

Dutifully passive Vice President Pence, acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr have been jumping on his command, but Rudy Giuliani occupies a special place in this historic melodrama. 

Trump's lawyer-fixer has managed the feat of doing what James Comey and Robert Mueller could not -- putting the president on the ropes by amplifying his crap, corruption and criminality.  That (sorry, Bob) is a significant reason why Trump is on his own, no direction home.