House Democrats are winning big right now over Donald Trump – if you understand how strategy works
The House Judiciary Committee announced this morning that it will vote on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress. After that, the full House will hold another vote to make it official. Then the House will begin dishing out whatever consequences it has in mind against Barr. It all sounds like a slow and fruitless exercise – unless you look at the strategy involved.
The two things most people are overlooking right now is that there are no magic wands on either side, and that this isn’t a race. Yes, Donald Trump is doing more damage to democracy by the day. But when people start demanding that House Democrats “do something,” they never seem to be able to come up with a (real world-based) explanation of what it is they want House Democrats to do. They can’t simply snap their fingers and make Donald Trump disappear – not even by impeaching him. Nothing works that way.
Trump doesn’t have a magic wand either. The difference is that he likes to throw out imaginary threats that even he knows he can’t carry out, because he’s hoping it’ll strike fear into his detractors, and thus demotivate them. For instance, Trump has no way to stop Robert Mueller from testifying. It’s not that Trump would be breaking the law by stopping Mueller from testifying; it’s that Trump has literally no way of stopping it, other than perhaps sending Sarah Sanders to tie Mueller’s shoelaces together.
Donald Trump knows this, just like he knows that he can’t magically remain in office for another two years after he loses the 2020 election. The courts would authorize law enforcement to drag him out on his ass, and that would be that. But Trump makes these empty threats because he’s hoping it’ll cause you to cower. The reality is that in the fight between Trump and the House Democrats, he doesn’t have magic powers any more than they do.
Even more importantly, this isn’t some kind of race. If you think House Democrats need to “do something” in the next five minutes if they’re going to have any hope of defeating Trump, then you’ve lost sight of how things actually work. It’s not as if the Democrats are trying to get to some finish line in their oversight process where Trump falls through a trap door. The ENTIRE POINT of this process is to expose and thus destroy Trump, piece by piece, in the eyes of the public. And you do that one step at a time if you want it to be effective.
There are a lot of people demanding that impeachment happen right this second, to the point that they’re beating up on Democratic House leaders for not having impeached Trump yet. But these people don’t seem to understand what impeachment is. It’s a long series of impeachment hearings in the House, followed by a House vote, followed by a long impeachment trial in the Senate. The key word here is “long.” If impeachment were initiated right now, it would still be going on six months or a year from now.
It’s understandable that some folks are so frustrated, they just want SOMETHING TO HAPPEN RIGHT NOW. But that’s not how anything works, on either side. That doesn’t change because someone on social media comes up with a clever (yet completely nonsensical and literally impossible) idea for how House Democrats can magically get rid of Trump before dinnertime. Nor does that change because Trump tweeted yet another fantasy about something he knows he can’t actually do.
That said, if you limit your focus to things that are real, and if you pay attention to what’s going on, you’ll see that House Democrats are winning big right now. Those out there who don’t understand strategy are insisting that the William Barr hearings were a waste of time, because Barr lied on day one and failed to show up on day two. But that was the entire point. Barr made himself look terrible, and thus made Trump look guilty. As a result, the number of Americans in favor of impeachment has gone up noticeably over the past week. The more people who want impeachment, the more impact it’ll have once it begins.
And again, the entire point of impeachment is to use the process to gradually expose and destroy Donald Trump in the eyes of the public. If the process works really well, Trump will become so toxically unpopular, Senate Republicans will have to consider the possibility that their own odds of reelection might be better if they agree to dump him. While that scenario may be unlikely, what’s far more likely is that the impeachment process will grind Trump into the ground and leave him heading into the 2020 general election with both hands tied behind his back.
There’s also the scenario in which Donald Trump eventually realizes he’s been so thoroughly exposed, and that so much more of his crimes and fraud are going to be exposed, he decides to negotiate a resignation plea deal. The people who don’t understand strategy are already yelling “Trump is too _____ to ever resign” (fill in the blank with whatever pops into their head). But why do you think Trump keeps tweeting threats that even he knows are literally not possible? It’s about strategy, positioning, scaring people into thinking he’s going to win no matter what. He’s deranged, but he still understands strategy.
The bottom line is that House Democrats have spent the past week winning, and winning huge. Not in the Avengers sense of “snap your fingers and magically win,” because that doesn’t exist outside the movies. But the Democrats have taken Trump’s most effective henchman Barr off the table by forcing him to play defense for the rest of his tenure, and they’ve managed to increase the number of people who want impeachment, even before they put Robert Mueller in front of the cameras. In the real world, this is what winning looks like. You win enough big battles like this in a row, and the other side collapses. It’s not what some folks want to hear, but it’s how things work. Anything else is just fantasy.
