Yeah, sure, Donald Trump is awful, but he’s probably not that awful, you know? You know? And even if he is, well, who cares? You’ve got money in your pocket and the sun is shining, isn’t it? Let those Beltway blowhards blow as hard as they please, getting all hot and bothered because Donald Trump browbeat the leader of a foreign country into corrupting his own judicial system in order to announce fraudulent investigations that would likely damage the president’s political opponents in 2020, illegally withholding money appropriated by Congress as leverage, all the while spewing toxic and slanderous language denouncing anyone so shameless as to defy his will. Forget as well the president’s numerous instances of obstruction of justice, his constant lying, his corruption of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the armed services. None that means anything to you personally, does it?
That, in a nutshell, is Ross Douthat’s recent rap “explaining” why this whole impeachment fuss is a little beside the point, because, says Ross, we impeach presidents, not based on what they did, but rather on how the country is doing, citing a Twitter feed from a dude named Jacob T. Levy arguing that Nixon went down while Clinton didn’t because the country was in better shape under Bill than Dick. Well, the state of the economy was better under Clinton, but one could also point out that Nixon won re-election by one of the biggest majorities in history, while Clinton squeaked in via a plurality, and that it beggars the imagination—at least it beggars my imagination—that Republican senators back in 1974 would have removed a president—their president—for the first time in U.S. history just because of a few bumps in the road. A lot of Americans surely thought that things were better in 1974 than they had been in a long time because American participation in the Vietnam War had virtually ended. When Nixon took office in 1969, American combat deaths in Vietnam were well over 100 a week. Combat deaths for the entirety of 1974 totaled 178. Fear of the draft, which had, naturally, been an obsession among young men at the time, had disappeared.
I can recall Ross writing a column several months ago in which he tells us that a Republican friend of his warned him that the Republican Party would not survive Trump’s re-election. Sounds like Ross had learned how to stop worrying and love having Donald Trump’s cock up his ass.
Lots of people on the right are reaching same conclusion as Ross, though often using different arguments. Why? Because he makes the trains run on time, and he keeps the liberals out. It is rare for a major democracy to have as its leader a man utterly devoid of personal probity or scruple. Donald Trump is such a man. And the American right is so benighted, so lacking in confidence, that they will lie down in corruption and be ruled by a man less fastidious than a hog.
