By traditional civil-disobedience standards, the apparel of the protesters in the Capitol basement last Wednesday fell on the bespoke side. During the civil-rights movement, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee favored overalls, in solidarity with the humble citizens whose rights were being denied. In 2017, women protesting the Inauguration of the nation’s most prominent misogynist were identifiable by the pink “pussy hats” they wore. By contrast, the thirty-some House Republicans—all of them white and all but a few male—who stormed a secure hearing room appeared less “We Shall Overcome” than “We Are Overcompensated.”
The plan was to disrupt the deposition of Laura Cooper, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and an expert on Russia and Ukraine, who was to address a bipartisan group comprising members of the committees handling the inquiry into the impeachment of Donald Trump. The protesters decried what they considered the Soviet-style secrecy of the process. Some carried their cell phones into the room—a breach of security—tweeted about their antics, and ordered pizza. In effect, they were trying to stop a hearing that was in compliance with rules set in 2015 by the House—which at the time had a Republican majority—and which a number of them, as members of the committees involved, were already free to attend. In essence, the stunt was a high-profile display of fealty to Trump, who measures loyalty by a willingness to commit acts of self-abasement on his behalf.
After the recent explosive developments in the impeachment inquiry, such a display was almost to be predicted. (In the Senate, Lindsey Graham simultaneously prepared a resolution, co-sponsored by the Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, to condemn the inquiry as “illegitimate”; forty-six Republicans signed it.) Here, too, Republicans were following the President’s lead.
On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump railed against a “rigged” political system that was conspiring to produce a victory for Hillary Clinton. Observers pointed to the recklessness of his words and to the ways in which delegitimatizing the system might eventually culminate in unrest. He has gone considerably farther down that road. Last week, he called Republicans who do not support him “human scum,” and referred to the impeaching process as a “lynching.” According to the N.A.A.C.P., between 1882 and 1968 nearly five thousand people were lynched in the United States, three-quarters of them African-Americans. None of them had a former U.S. Attorney and mayor of New York City acting as their personal lawyer, or an entire political party defending them.
The current situation has arisen not as a result of Democratic overreach but because the facts increasingly indicate that the President has committed impeachable violations. The G.O.P. protest came after closed-door testimony from William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, who, in a fifteen-page opening statement, described an explicit quid pro quo, in which Trump withheld military aid in the hope of pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election and into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Taylor’s statement is stunning in its allegations of self-interest guiding foreign policy toward a country fighting Russian aggression. Foreign policy is always a matter of balancing competing national interests, but the interests weighed here are not national, or at least not American—they are Russian and Trumpian.
The circumstances are so bizarre as to make the former national-security adviser John Bolton seem like a voice of restraint. Taylor reports that Bolton abruptly ended a meeting with Ukrainian officials at which Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, brought up the investigations, and later referred to the scheme as a “drug deal.” Taylor’s statement is notable not only for the details it provides but because it recounts his reactions to events as they unfolded. He was “embarrassed,” “uncomfortable,” “troubled,” “alarmed,” and “very concerned.” Those same words describe how much of the country has felt for the past three years.
The week’s developments both clarified and upended ideas about the potential impeachment of Trump. There really can no longer be substantial doubt of a quid pro quo. Taylor’s statement and those of other diplomats, along with the whistle-blower’s complaint and the record of Trump’s telephone conversation with Zelensky—not to mention the here-today-gone-later-today admission by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, during a press briefing—have surely resolved the question.
A cornerstone of the comparisons between Watergate and the present national predicament has been the way that congressional hearings drove public opinion toward impeaching Richard Nixon. Support for impeaching Trump surged a few weeks ago, after the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the inquiry. Taylor’s testimony appears to have raised the volume of the conversation about whether Trump’s actions warrant his removal from office. More testimony—in closed and open hearings—and additional facts, the argument presumes, will further move the public to support impeachment.
Such presumptions should not rest so easily. Trumpism is hostile to facts. The consequence may be more reactions like the one we saw last week. The House may deliver articles of impeachment before the end of the year. The findings that result may point to even more damning conclusions than have already been established. Trump, though, has been the lifelong beneficiary of a system in which his race, his wealth, and his lineage have allowed him to operate above the law. Both his personal attorney and Attorney General William Barr are attempting to institutionalize this kind of immunity as a perquisite of the Presidency. (On Thursday, the Times reported that the Justice Department has turned its review of the Russia investigation into a criminal inquiry.)
All of which suggests that Trump is partly correct about the situation resembling a lynching. The history of that act is replete with examples of men who operated outside the law, and believed that their offenses should carry no penalty. In that, the comparison brings to mind not the victims of lynchings but those who committed them. ♦
