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Photograph Source: United States House of Representatives – Public Domain

With the gravitas of a wardrobe malfunction at a Super Bowl halftime show, Donald Trump was impeached. This, by the same Democratic Party functionaries who went on to pass his $734 billion military budget and his reworked not-NAFTA trade agreement. To the perpetual ‘if,’ if Mr. Trump isn’t to be trusted with the affairs of state, the alleged reason he was impeached, why enhance his power over the affairs of state through increasing the military budget? The same is true with re-upping the Patriot Act. And backing his coup in Bolivia. And his attempted coup in Venezuela.

Clearer evidence of the political theater character of impeachment would be hard to find. Left apparently unconsidered in the halls of power is how socially divisive this theater is becoming. If there was a lesson in Labour’s electoral loss in Britain, it is that Clintonite ‘triangulation’ works until it doesn’t. As the facts have it, both Democrats and Republicans have spent four decades working for capital and against labor. But it is Democrats alone who now stand in front of the catastrophe they helped create to claim credit for it. Labour did this when they equivocated on the consequence of their own neoliberal disaster, Brexit.

It is difficult to tell what impeachment was expected to accomplish. A sense of ‘getting Trump’ seems to have been the primary motivation. If so, Mr. Trump has quite spectacularly not been gotten. He won’t be convicted by the Senate, meaning that he won’t be removed from office. Coming much earlier in his (now) likely tenure than Bill Clinton’s impeachment, no constraints have been placed on Mr. Trump’s future actions. Impeachment along party lines looks like the Democrats sanctioned Mr. Trump— not official sanction as has been claimed. And hopes of politically shaming Donald Trump imagine it possible to shame him.

With the current impasse over moving the charges against Mr. Trump forward in the Senate, what has been demonstrated is that Democrats are incapable of governing in the most basic of senses. The question of the end game, which one would assume had been considered before starting the process, appears never to have occurred to them. With new charges against Donald Trump now being rumored, the Democrat’s apparent strategy is to double down. As politically attractive as incompetence mixed with desperation is, there are real problems in need of being solved.

The final story of impeachment isn’t yet written— the machinations between the House and Senate might yield some as-of-yet unconsidered outcome. But the story to date— its beginning, middle and end, were reasonably well understood on the day that Mr. Trump took office. Conversely, if establishment Democrats really believe any of what they have been saying about Mr. Trump to be true— that he is an authoritarian, demagogic, etc., why do they continue to enhance his power legislatively? Wouldn’t prudence dictate that his power be clipped wherever and whenever possible?

The aggregated evidence suggests that the logic and reasons given by top Democrats for opposing Mr. Trump are fictions. If the predictable death of impeachment in the Senate weren’t enough, who among the establishment Democratic candidates being brought forth to dislodge Mr. Trump in 2020 opposes his political program in material terms? They may oppose Donald Trump the person, but as long as he over-funds the military and cuts taxes for the rich, how does this differ from their own programs? Phrased differently, who amongst the establishment candidates publicly proclaimed Mr. Trump’s military budget to be the moral and political abomination that it is?

Handing Mr. Trump a political victory on his signature issue— trade, seems suicidal. The problem for Democrats is that their fealty to neoliberalism means that they only understand trade from Mr. Trump’s right. In Britain, Labour tried to use triangulation to hold antithetical class interests together. This included professional class liberals and the working class they had spent several decades displacing as functionaries for capital. The Democrat’s ‘centrism’ is an effort to de-politicize similar antithetical class interests. Note: it didn’t work for Labour.

Three centuries of political musical chairs around slight variations on oligarchic control now leaves Team D battling Team R to perpetuate the game. From the evidence, it’s certain that the well-crafted hatred of the opposing team’s key players is sincerely felt. Donald Trump is racist, sexist and Nancy Pelosi is a big government liberal. But this loathing isn’t the politics in play. The politics that affect outcomes like war and peace, shared prosperity and the material health of the environment aren’t within the purview of team sports.

While much of the criticism of Donald Trump has basis in fact, placing it in a partisan frame grants absolution to Democrats who put forward much the same program. For vitriolic anti-immigrant rants, Bill Clinton was the master. For engineering viciously racist social, political and economic outcomes, Bill Clinton was the master. Barack Obama was the Deporter-in-Chief. It is more than a bit ironic that so many of the videos of children in cages attributed to Donald Trump were from Mr. Obama’s tenure in the White House. The political problem for Democrats: everyone who isn’t a Democrat knows this.

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