An Impeached Trump is a More Powerful Trump
This piece was originally written and performed by the author for BUGHOUSE #16 on January 7, 2019 at Haymarket Pub & Brewery. You can listen to the show here.
In a recent New York Times piece titled “The People vs. Donald J. Trump,” opinion columnist David Leonhardt writes “The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?”
Leonhardt goes on to make the case that impeachment of our 45th president is a must if the nation, and potentially the world, are to survive. But Leonhardt, thinks the big picture is smaller than it actually is.
Donald Trump is a problem. He’s a stain on American diplomacy and the office of the president. The guy has always been a wanker, a creep, a con man, a dumb daddy’s boy and a racist crook. Nothing in the last decade changed that. Nothing. And he should not be President of the United States. But impeachment will be a divisive waste of time.
Certainly, the House of Representatives could impeach him. But to get him out of office it’s going to require the Senate to pull the proverbial trigger. And that’s not going to happen. The Senate is still held my a majority of Republicans. Chances are that they’ll squash the impeachment idea immediately. And that’d be the end of that.
Now, they could recognize their mistake in allowing Trump to take over their party and admit he’s a dangerous fool and initiate impeachment proceedings, but even that won’t remove the guy from power — it will only draw things out over the next two years. It will be a distraction, and we don’t need any more distractions during this presidency. We, and by we, I mean the Legislative Branch and the few remaining humans in the Executive Branch, we need to get to work.
Let’s look at what the Trump Presidency will look like if impeachment proceedings commence.
Barron and Tiffany’s dad — remember Barron and Tiffany? — will be pissed. Like really pissed. We’ve seen Trump pissed, and a pissed off Trump makes a lot more trouble for everyone. He goes from stupid and spazzy to super stupid and spazzy. The tweets get more insulting and accusatory; the lies get more outrageous; the vengeance on his enemies gets more intense. Everything becomes even more careless than it is on his best days, which is pretty bad. He’ll alienate those few remaining humans keeping the Presidency and a big chunk of American democracy afloat. Essentially, if the House impeaches Donald Trump, it’ll be handing him a huge cannon which he’ll use to blow a hole in the ship while trying to fire at Pelosi and Schummer and maybe even you and me.
In this time, he’ll either align himself closer with Putin and Kim Jong Un or piss them off so bad that North Korea starts dropping the bombs and Russia invades everything from our government to our underwear drawers. It will be total chaos. This kind of chaos may prevent Trump from incarcerating more immigrant kids, but it could also mean their certain death via nuclear war.
No matter what happens from now until the day Donald Trump dies, he will blame others for his failures and pick fights that don’t need to be picked. If he’s facing removal from office, instead of just differences of opinion over border security and budgets, he’ll erupt like a toddler who’s candy was yanked from his hand and a flaming steak knife was plunged into his rectum. That’s the kind of fit we’ll see. If you’ve ever seen a toddler lose their shit when they don’t have a flaming steak knife plunged into their rectum, you know how bad that could get.
Really, really bad.
Furthermore, we’re not just facing Trump’s wrath or the democratic trouble it will incite. We have to be mindful of the die-hard Trump supporters. They, like our Commander in Chief, are petulant rubes who will follow Trump’s antagonistic, ill-informed, distraction bravado and behavior, which ignites equal amounts of clapping back from the Strident Left. This muddies the waters and is, well, exactly the kind of distraction Trump and his ilk need in order to maintain their teeny grasp on power. Or at least their grasp on the keys to the Oval Office. They’ll blame all of Trump’s failures on the “attack” on the President.
Impeachment proceedings will give Trump and Co. the scapegoat they need to fail without feeling like failures. Trump will become a martyr. That will only embolden the MAGA Masses. And that’s a terrible thing for the future of the country. Presidents come and go but The People are long lasting. What we’re experiencing today by the far right conservative Republican Party was put in motion in 1964 with Barry Goldwater’s campaign, kicked into gear during Reagan’s Eighties and dolloped with whipped cream and a cherry thanks to W’s administration.
When you get dick cancer, you need to kill the cancer itself, not haphazardly slice your dong off. Impeaching Trump would just be cutting off our diseased dick. And I guarantee you that the cancer would come for our balls, bones, and brains.
Now, let’s look at what can happen if the House chooses to run the clock out.
Trump will continue being an ineffective bonehead, stirring up shit, making a mess of things, but a mess we can clean up. With the House and the Senate charged with governing and keeping Trump in line in a diplomatic way, all accusations of an attack will be without the right amount of fuel to set any real fires. They’ll sounds just as ridiculous as when anyone talks about Hillary’s emails today.
More importantly, with the Democrats focused on actually governing and legislating, they’ll have more time to adapt to the changes occurring in the party. Differences can be reconciled or at least understood. This allows the party to become united. A united party is the only way Trump and the Far Right can be beat fair and square in 2020.
A statement needs to be made for history to recognize down the line: Donald Trump and the Far Right were defeated by American democracy at its best. Without impeachment proceedings and with Trump still showing his ass at every opportunity, the GOP remaining in Congress will be able to quietly distance themselves from Trump and move more toward the center. So, too, will the Strident Left. The parties will recognize that working together can save the country and their individual political careers. Everyone wins.
The Founding Fathers wrote Article 1, sections 2 and 3, and clauses 5 and 6 of the U.S. Constitution for a reason. They foresaw that some people would make it to the highest office who would ultimately be unfit for that office. Nixon was one. Trump certainly is unfit. But the difference is that Nixon was a measured criminal. Trump is a lunatic. He cannot be dealt with in the same way as Nixon. Trump’s weaponry is not power from within, like Nixon. Trump’s power comes from the feedback he gets by throwing vitriol at his enemies. We can’t allow him to do that.
Impeaching Donald Trump is exactly the thing that will make him more dangerous. Do not impeach Trump —vote him out.
