Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why try to impeach Donald Trump?

The Democrats have got swept up in their own reality TV show

Democrats have long criticized Donald Trump for his addiction to Twitter, his rolling-news attention span, the backlit narcissism of his reality-TV presidency. But the most media-addled people in public life are, in fact, Trump’s critics. Nobody is quicker to reach the most hysterical conclusions. The anti-Trump show must go on, just like the president’s Twitter feed, never mind the details.

Take Nancy Pelosi’s announcement this week that the Democrats are forming a committee to look into whether Trump should be impeached because of his dodgy negotiations with Ukraine. This is Big Trump News: impeachments always are. It’s also a foregone conclusion. There can only be one verdict. The Democrats now have to press ahead with the Trump-Ukraine conspiracy — or look deeply stupid.

Remember, folks, it’s Ukraine, not Russia. The Trump-Russia conspiracy fell flat — after three years of Democrats and most of the media insisting Trump’s ties to Moscow should and would lead to his impeachment, Robert Mueller’s exhaustive inquiry found no damning evidence of collusion. It was the biggest media cock-up in modern history.

For breathless anti-Trumpists, the Trump-Ukraine story is connected to Russia, because everything is. But it is different, they insist. In 2016, Trump was just a candidate. In 2019, he is the president. If he really did, as reports suggest, threaten to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden, his leading challenger in next year’s presidential election, that is a high crime.

What’s the evidence, though? So far, we have little beyond a suspicious timeline. On July 25, Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and — as Trump himself has readily admitted — discussed former Vice President Biden, whose son Hunter did business in Ukraine while his father was in office. In early August, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s wonderfully indiscreet personal lawyer, met a representative of Zelensky’s government in Spain and reportedly urged an investigation into the Bidens.

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