The mesmerising mediocrity of Trump’s opponents

If you believe the headlines, President Donald Trump is in deep trouble. The great impeachment saga is gathering pace. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has been conducting closed-door interviews as part of his investigations into whether the President abused his executive power in his efforts to dig up dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden, the former vice president under Obama. Did Trump threaten to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its government told him what he wanted to hear? More leaked transcripts this week suggest that he did. Gordon Sondland, a US ambassador to the European Union and a Trump ally, has now dropped his Commander–in-Chief in it by suggesting that the Trump administration did insist on a quid-pro-quo deal. Gotcha!

The trouble is, nobody believes the headlines. The transcripts turn out to be far less damning than excited news reports make out, and anyway the leaks are coming from House Democrats who are determined to hurt Trump at any cost. Everybody knows that impeachment will almost certainly not result in Trump leaving the White House: for that, two-thirds of the Republican-majority Senate would have to vote to remove him.

Impeachment is therefore a mere sideshow to the presidential election next year. The Democrats realise that they cannot (and probably should not) oust Trump by non-democratic means. But accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanours is a handy way of distracting from their more fundamental problem: their party’s embarrassing inability to produce a candidate who can beat him at the ballot.

To win an election against Donald Trump should not be a difficult task — at least in theory. His leadership of the free world may not have been the apocalyptic disaster so many expected, but it has hardly been a roaring success. America’s economy has boomed, but the nation’s deficit has ballooned.