Remember when House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton because he lied about engaging in consensual oral sex with a willing partner in the White House. That was the only thing that Ken Star and his gang of aggressive special prosecutors could hang on Clinton after investigating the supposedly shady White Water business deal for two years. Never mind that one of the nations most beloved presidents, John F. Kennedy, was known to have had his Secret Service agents smuggle numerous beautiful women into the White House for one night stands and that Franklin D. Roosevelt, considered on of our greatest Presidents, maintained a mistress while President until the day he died.
Was it the Clinton’s personal behavior unworthy of the President of the United States? Yes. Was it an abuse of his power with a lowly subordinate? Quit possibility, regardless of how willing she was. Was it clear grounds for impeachment? Depends on who you ask, but probably not.
Fast forward to 2019. Donald Trump is in the process of being impeached for a blatant abuse of presidential power. It is now quite clear that he withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money authorized by Congress from an ally that was desperately needed those funds in order defend itself in a military conflict against our mutual enemy. He purposely withheld those funds order to force the leader of that ally to do his personal bidding, to advance his political interests and to try to substantiate a conspiracy theory that his buddy Putin was not behind the interference with our 2016 presidential election . In other words he acted against the security interests of the country that he has sworn to protect to advance his own selfish self-interests.
Was that kind of behavior unworthy of the President of the United States? Absolutely! Was it an abuse of a presidential power? Absolutely! Of the worst sort! Was it clear grounds for impeachment? Such an abuse of presidential power to promote his own personal interests to the detriment of the country’s security is exactly the kind of offense the founding fathers had in mind when they inserted the impeachment clause into the US Constitution.
Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and co-author of “Impeachment: An American History”, commented on what acts the framers of the constitution viewed as justifying impeachment in an article in the Washington Post:, “They would say, ‘Well, what if a president works with a foreign power? Well, then of course he should be impeached. What if a president decides to try and make money in office? Well, of course he should be impeached. What if a president lies as part of his campaign? Well, then of course he should be impeached.’”
Trump has done all of these things, and now far worse. He has now literally violated his oath of office.
In late 1998, the Republicans in the House of Representative impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an extra-marital affair, probably as much hide his indiscretions from his wife as from the American people. Now 21 years later their Republican successors in the House are using one failing excuse after another to defend Trump after he committed an infinitely worse offense. Their actions would be somewhat understandable if they believe that he was innocent or if his offenses did not rise to the level of impeachment. On the contrary, after listening to a parade of very creditable witnesses they know he is guilty and as self-ordained “protectors of the Constitution” they know he should be impeached.
Many of them secretly hate Trump because they know that he does not share their values and has effectively wrested control of the Republican base away from them. They defend him now for the same reason that Trump tried to shake down the President of the Ukraine – to support their selfish political self-interests. They know that if they don’t vigorously defend Trump now, he will attack them unmercifully and his supporters back home could well deny them the Republican nomination in their next elections. They have no political integrity. In many ways they are no better than Trump.
History has already begun to put its stamp on the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. Despite having been impeached, when he departed the White House he had an approval rating of 65%, higher than any other departing president since Harry Truman. These many years later he still maintains a favorable rating of over 50%. In polls of presidential historians and political scientists he consistently is ranked among the top 15 American Presidents.
Despite the good probability that the Senate Republicans will ensure that he is not convicted, history will not be kind to Trump. His approval ratings have hovered in the low 40% levels during the vast majority of his presidency and currently stand at a poll average 41.1%, with an average disapproval of 54.1%. His approval ratings have never exceeded the 50% mark. So he is not off to a good start from the historical perspective. Given that only true believers in his base totally approve of his actions, the chances that his approval ratings will rise substantially in the future are slim and none.
The historical view of presidents often changes as the years past, with some presidents gaining more respect for their time in the oval office as the years progress while others come to be viewed less kindly. However, Trump is off to a very inauspicious start. In the past presidents have always given the benefit of the doubt in presidential ranking polls conducted by while they were still in office. They were usually ranked in the middle of the pack.
Trump is off to a very bad start. Earlier this year Siena College Research Institute polled 157 historical and political science scholars for its 6th presidential ranking since 1982. Trump was ranked as the third worst president of all time after Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. In a survey of 200 members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents & Executive Politics Section in early 2018, Trump was ranked last among all American Presidents. Among self-described Republicans surveyed, Trump ranked 40 out of 44 while all of the Democrats and independent ranked him last.
Now keep in mind that these polls were conducted before Trump abused his presidential power by withholding military assistance to the Ukraine for personal gain. They were also taken before he ordered the abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, one of the most despicable acts ever committed by any our presidents. Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy blunders, his alienation of our best allies, his embrace of our enemies and dictators, his disruption of the world order carefully built by both Democratic and Republicans presidents since the end of World War II, his xenophobic domestic policies, and his continual lying and disruptive personal behavior in office had already destined him to be viewed with disdain well into the future by presidential historians, even before recent events.
Prominent psychiatrists have already labeled Donald Trump a dangerously psychotic narcistic and warned the American public that he is a walking powder keg. According to an article in Psycology Today, “70,000 signed a petition warning of Trump’s potential dangerousness, despite longstanding professional injunctions against “diagnosing” public figures whom experts have not personally examined”. I can only imagine what members of their profession will have to say about the man’s mental health once he is removed from office and enough time has passed for the behind the scenes secrets of his administration to trickle out into the into the public domain. Future historians will cite his mental instability as a major reason why he was such a terrible president.
His Congressional enablers will not be viewed kindly by history either. One cannot defend the undefendable without being contaminated by the process. Congressional Republicans have adopted then abandoned one after another a series of talking points in their efforts to defend Trump. One after another those defenses eroded away under an onslaught of facts. Eventually Trump defenders in Congress will have to resort to claiming that what he did was wrong, but not impeachable (pure hogwash) and/or that it is too late to impeach him and that he should instead be tried by the voters in the 2020 election. The abandonment of their pledge to defend the Constitution simply because they were deathly afraid of Trump’s supporters will be viewed as pure political cowardness by those in the future looking back at current events.
Since Republicans will be too cowardly to convict him when he goes on trial in the Senate, I am hopeful that Trump’s enablers and the man they are defending will be viewed in a similar manner by the majority of the voters in the November 2020 elections.
Cajun 11/1/2019