The Ron Fournier Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of False Equivalence goes to…
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Below is my column in the Hill on how the second Trump impeachment could become a trial over reckless rhetoric in America. The House managers may be playing into that very danger by selecting some managers who have been criticized in the past for their own over-heated political rhetoric. As managers were replaying the comments of former President Donald Trump from prior years to show how his words fueled divisions, critics were pointing to similar statements from the managers themselves. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the leading impeachment manager, was chided for using “fight like hell” in a 2019 interview with The Atlantic — the very words replayed repeatedly from Trump. He also used that phrase repeatedly in prior years to ramp up his supporters in fighting for Democratic control of Congress.
If you click the link, you’ll note that by “critics” he literally means Donald Trump’s communications staff, of which he is an unpaid and particularly servile member. And this generic statement is what Turley is directly comparing to Donald Trump’s 77 days of asserting that the election was stolen and his supporters should be willing to fight and go to war over it:
It would be possible to see Raskin’s isolated statements that people should “fight” by — asking for a congressional investigation and opposing a Supreme Court nominee — to Trump’s weeks of claims that his followers needed to avenge an election he falsely claimed was stolen, if you have suffered extensive brain damage. I will charitably assume that Turley is merely lying.
Similarly:
If this trial boils down to irresponsible political rhetoric, the public could find it difficult to distinguish between the accused, the “prosecutors” and the “jury.” That is the problem with a strategy that seems focused not on proving incitement of an insurrection but some ill-defined form of political negligence.
This isn’t even sophisticated enough to rise to the level of being “gaslighting.” Leaving aside the fact that the managers have repeatedly provided direct and specific evidence for incitement, treating “incitement” and “negligence” as separate questions in this context is ludicrous. The fact that Trump’s only intervention after the insurrection started was to call Mike Pence a traitor is in itself strong evidence that the insurrection was the result he intended to effect and approved of. But, as so many people have discovered, apologizing for Donald Trump and maintaining any semblance of dignity is impossible.