By the time Kenneth Starr started speaking at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump on Monday afternoon, it was hard not to wonder whether the whole thing was meant as a monumental distraction. Certainly, it was a bizarre spectacle: the man who brought us the last impeachment of a President lecturing the Senate on the dangerous evils of impeachment.
I’m old enough to remember when, in 1998, Starr produced the most X-rated document ever to be printed under congressional seal, in service of lobbying for an impeachment. The document, which will forever be known as the Starr report, detailed Bill Clinton’s Oval Office trysts in painfully graphic detail. (Google “Starr report” and “cigar” if you don’t remember.) Now, in 2020, the author of that report is acting as the sanctimonious guardian of congressional dignity, lecturing us all on the floor of the Senate about the unfair, improper charges against Donald Trump? Within seconds of opening his mouth on the Senate floor, Starr had his liberal critics—and lots of non-liberals, too—sputtering with outrage.
In his remarks as a member of Trump’s legal team, Starr inveighed against what he called the “Age of Impeachment,” saying that it is happening “too frequently” and is “inherently destabilizing” and “acrimonious.” He reserved particularly scathing words for the “runaway House” and its conduct during Trump’s impeachment, which he called “dripping with fundamental process violations.” Starr seemed especially upset about the partisan nature of the Trump proceedings by the Democratic-controlled House. “Like war, impeachment is hell,” he said. Remember, this is the man who advocated for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, by a Republican-controlled House, for lying under oath about an extramarital affair. Irony is dead. Very, very dead.
But in the end Starr’s comments, trolling as they were, seemed inconsequential and destined to be quickly forgotten, even by the senators required to sit quietly at their desks and listen to them “on pain of imprisonment,” as the Senate sergeant at arms solemnly reminds them at the start of the trial each afternoon. On this day, the only words that mattered were two that never crossed Starr’s lips: John Bolton.
Sometimes, it’s what happens outside the courtroom that throws a trial into turmoil—even in a Senate impeachment proceeding whose outcome we all think we know. This was the case with what even Fox News called the “Bolton bombshell,” the news, reported late Sunday by the Times, that Bolton, in his book manuscript, confirms that Trump conditioned nearly four hundred million dollars in military aid to Ukraine on politically motivated investigations. Bolton, who served as Trump’s national-security adviser until September, claims that the President told him this directly, and has said that he is prepared to testify under oath about the Ukraine matter. But Senate Republicans—aside from a handful of undecided ones, such as Mitt Romney and Susan Collins—have so far balked at calling Bolton and other Trump Administration witnesses who abided by the President’s order not to testify when they were called to do so in the House.
The attack on Bolton was swift and predictable. Bolton was a disgruntled former employee, a neocon, a money-grubber with a two-million-dollar book to sell. The President himself led the mob, beginning to tweet and retweet anti-Bolton statements around midnight. By 9 a.m., he had sent out about a dozen critiques of the man he employed to oversee America’s national security for a year and a half, including the false statement that the House had never called Bolton to testify in its impeachment inquiry. On the Fox Web site, a headline trumpeted that Trump & Company “strikes back” against Bolton for the “manuscript leak,” without saying what the leak actually said. By midday, the Republican National Committee was sending out official talking points attacking Bolton.
The assault on Bolton, though, may not have its intended effect. It only takes four Republican votes to buck Party leaders and call for witnesses. By Monday morning, it was clear that a vote for witnesses had become much more likely, and that the fight was now over the terms. Trump’s ally Lindsey Graham laid it out starkly, threatening to call witnesses such as former Vice-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, whose work in Ukraine Trump wanted investigated, as a way of embarrassing the potential 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee. Graham tweeted, “If there is a desire and decision by the Senate to call Democratic witnesses, then at a minimum the Senate should allow President @realDonaldTrump to call all relevant witnesses he has requested.” In other words, let the floodgates open. But will they? The four Republican senators who have been most interested in hearing witnesses may or may not want to join in that exercise. Romney told reporters he had always wanted to hear from Bolton, and that it was “increasingly likely” that enough Republicans would now join him. Collins said that the Bolton revelations “strengthen the case” for witnesses. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, another key vote, said that she had always been “curious” about Bolton’s testimony.
What their fellow-Republicans had to say was even more revelatory. Within hours, Trump’s most fervent defenders in the Senate said they didn’t care that the former national-security adviser was accusing Trump of doing exactly what the first article of impeachment charges him with doing. “We learned nothing new. We learned nothing new. This is no different than what we’ve heard from several of the seventeen witnesses that the House has brought forward,” John Barrasso, of Wyoming, told reporters on Monday morning.
Soon, the rhetoric in Trump’s defense grew more heated, notwithstanding the Louisiana senator John Kennedy’s suggestion to his colleagues that they “pop a Zoloft.” Kelly Loeffler, the newly appointed Republican senator from Georgia, did not take his advice. She tweeted a statement torching Romney and anyone who would dare consider calling witnesses: “After 2 weeks, it’s clear that Democrats have no case for impeachment. Sadly, my colleague @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame. The circus is over. It’s time to move on!” Loeffler’s tweet said, in a more confrontational tone, essentially the same thing that most Republican senators said on Monday.
At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses. And not just a few, but almost all of them. But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial, crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers, and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress. Just last week, Trump’s legal team told senators that “not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the President suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance.”
In fact, the President and his aides knew that Bolton had done more than suggest it. He had put it in writing, sent his account to the White House on December 30th, and was prepared to raise his right hand and swear to it under oath. But we have had so many smoking-gun moments in the last few years. This is the post–“Access Hollywood” tape G.O.P., which elected as President of the United States a man who bragged of grabbing women by their genitals on tape, just a few weeks after the recording came to light. In the Ukraine scandal, we have seen this process repeat itself. Facts emerge that show the President’s actions to be inappropriate, outrageous, and clearly, straightforwardly wrong. At first, even Republicans on the Hill seem to waver. But again and again and again they find a way to accommodate themselves to the unpleasant new information, to rationalize and to justify.
On Monday, after watching all this play out, Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who has been forced to forego Presidential campaigning in Iowa in order to attend the Senate trial, said that listening to the Trump defense was like a visit to an “alternative universe.” But Monday proved once again that this alternative universe has become the new normal in Trump’s G.O.P. It is not the exception but the rule. The post-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party will be largely the same as the pre-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party.
