Weak persuader

Michael Kinsley, a writer capable of writing amusing columns as recently as the first Bush administration, has an argument against impeaching Trump in the publication ironically entitled “Persuasion” that goes about how you’d expect:

Democrats should forget about impeaching and convicting Donald Trump. It seems vindictive. In fact, it is vindictive. It’s as much about settling scores of the past four years as it is about what Trump said on his way out the door. The man’s reputation is in ruins. He will forever be remembered as a psychotic loser. I know nothing about President Andrew Johnson, except that he is regarded as one of the worst ever, along with Richard Nixon.

Consider how remarkable it is for someone who has been paid an enormous amount of money to write about American politics to make the bolded claim (which amounts to saying you know nothing about Reconstruction, the Civil War amendments, etc.) But if you did know something about Andrew Johnson, you would know that he had more apologists than detractors, even among the liberal intelligencia, for many decades. The first Schlesinger rankings put Johnson 9 spots ahead of Ulysses Grant. One of “profiles in courage” of “John Kennedy’s” Pulitzer Prize-winning book was the Senator who took a bribe to stop Johnson from being convicted. Not a great precedent here.

Trump now joins this exclusive club: presidents that everybody regards as awful, even if they don’t know why. 

More than 74 million people voted for him two months ago!

President Biden has a long list of things he wants to accomplish. He has also spoken eloquently about the need for a return to civility in public life. These are Biden’s two great themes: a renewed activist government and a “kinder, gentler” society (as George Bush the Elder put it, though it was not one of his priorities). [Every Kinsley column contains evidence about when he stopped paying much attention to politics, and here it is. –ed.] Impeachment undermines this. And it won’t shorten Trump’s term by so much as a day, or improve the chances for Biden’s agenda by 0000.01%.

Fixing your transmission won’t inflate your tires either, what is your point here exactly?

The Constitution says that if Trump is impeached and then convicted, he can be banned from running for president again. Trump run again? Democrats should only be so lucky. The media culture does not allow second chances, whatever the Constitution may say. “Trump? we already did that one.” He’s over. He lost the election by 10 million votes. Is there anyone who has become more sympathetic to Trump since Election Day? 

How “the media culture” will prevent Republican primary voters from choosing Trump as their nominee in 2024 is conveniently unexplained. And that hackneyed F. Scott Fitzgerald quote is about as wrong as wrong can be.

Things, alas, are about to get much worse:

There is also a logical problem with impeachment that has no answer I can see. The single article of the impeachment document accuses Trump of fomenting rebellion against the government. His speech on Jan. 6 encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol. Or that is the argument we will hear repeatedly during an impeachment trial, and it is not an unreasonable interpretation of Trump’s words that day.

But meanwhile, federal prosecutors are fanning across the Internet, tracking down and indicting leaders of the mob, which appears to have been far more organized and pre-planned than we thought initially. Every bit of evidence that the rampage was actually a plot undermines the case that Trump’s somewhat ambiguous words shortly before the event are responsible for causing it. You can argue that the rampage was planned or you can argue that Trump caused it. You can’t argue both.

There is…no logical problem here at all? How does the fact that Trump exhorting his followers to attack the Capitol on January 6th was a culmination of weeks of telling his followers that the election was stolen make Trump less responsible?

Starting a GoFundMe to buy Michael Kinsley a subscription to the New York Times pic.twitter.com/iM0NwOALCh— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) February 5, 2021

As we have observed in the past, assertions that if multiple people are responsible for a particular outcome none of them can be held accountable, while transparently illogical, are the first refuge of people who want to defend indefensible behavior. But this is like using Bush v. Gore to give Ralph Nader a pass for deliberately throwing the election to Bush…if Nader was also the median vote on the Supreme Court. I must say that I find this line of reasoning less than persuasive.