Everything you’re hearing about Donald Trump’s impeachment is wrong
This morning the House introduced two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. Within a week the House Judiciary Committee, and then the full House, will vote on the articles. Once that happens, Trump will have been officially impeached. Even as this historic process plays out, we’re all left looking at the political ramifications of it – and the mainstream media is almost uniformly framing it wrong.
Most media pundits are framing impeachment in this manner: it’s entirely on the House Democrats to convince an unspecified number of Americans that Donald Trump deserves to be impeached, or else the Democrats will fall into a lava pit and Trump will magically win in every way, shape and form. Because the Democrats are the ones who took the risk of impeaching Trump, this narrative makes sense… but only if you put zero thought into it whatsoever.
Here’s the real situation. Before impeachment was on the table, Donald Trump’s 2020 poll numbers were so terrible, he was 100% on track to get blown out – unless something major and unexpected happened to fundamentally turn things around for him. The risk the Democrats took by impeaching Trump was that if it blew up in their faces and drove new supporters into Trump’s arms, it could make him popular enough to have a shot in 2020 that he wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Since impeachment has begun, we’ve seen pro-impeachment poll numbers go up significantly at first, and then level off. We’ve seen Donald Trump’s approval rating numbers go down very slightly. We’ve seen his 2020 poll numbers stay about the same. Trump and the media love to pull isolated outlier polls out of context to try to make it look like impeachment has somehow helped him, but if you look at the polling averages, this simply isn’t happening.
So the reality is that – thus far at least – impeachment has left Donald Trump in pretty much the same terrible place he was in before it began. As things now stand on the day the articles of impeachment are being introduced against him, Trump still has virtually no chance in 2020 unless he pulls off some major turnaround that brings him new supporters.
Trump was hoping that the Department of Justice Inspector General report would spark a turnaround for him by painting the entire U.S. government as having criminally plotted against him in 2016, but that report merely confirmed that his 2016 campaign was a criminal enterprise. Trump is hoping his Senate impeachment trial will turn things around for him, but even if he’s acquitted by the Republicans, there’s no reason to expect that an acquittal would gain him a single 2020 voter. In fact none of the antics carried out by him and his allies have gained him any ground in the polls, which is why his 2020 odds are historically bad.
The Democrats are a football team with a two touchdown lead in the fourth quarter, and they simply have to maintain that lead as the clock runs down. If they want to run a complex play like impeachment, they don’t need to widen their lead with it; they just have to make sure it doesn’t backfire and cost them their existing lead.
Donald Trump is the one who’s down by two touchdowns late in the game, and he’s the one who needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat before time expires. He’ll certainly keep trying. But if Plan A was to secretly conspire with Ukraine to mislead voters, it obviously backfired. If Plan B was the DOJ IG report, that just blew up in his face. If Plan C was to use his resulting impeachment to somehow magically gain new voters, that’s failing thus far as well. Plan D and Plan E will be even dumber, because these are the ideas he initially rejected when he went with Plan A and Plan B. But we’ll have to stay vigilant, because as we learned the hard way in 2016, even an idiot can get lucky if he throws enough bad ideas at the wall and they all happen to line up in extraordinarily improbable fashion.
In the meantime, as you stay vigilant heading into 2020, keep in mind that the Democrats are the team in the lead who simply must avoid blowing that lead, while Donald Trump is the team that’s way behind and is desperately trying to come up with a trick play that might open up a chance to get back into the game. When the media instead decides to run with a narrative about the Democrats needing a desperation heave to somehow stop Trump from magically winning, because a false narrative like that is better for ratings, that’s just plain dangerous.
