Dan Pfeiffer - Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again

Could this be it? I thought to myself at the beginning of the scandal that sparked the fourth impeachment proceedings in American history.

If it was trueas the Washington Post and others were reportingthat during a call with the newly elected Ukrainian president, Trump used the specter of military aid to extort the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, then Trump would be guilty of a crime more serious than anything Nixon was accused of during Watergate.

To date, Trumps presidency had been far from successful. His poll numbers had vacillated between mediocre and historically terrible. He had few legislative accomplishments, and most of his executive orders were caught up in the courts because they were poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. But Trump had escaped true political accountability despite saying and doing things on a near-daily basis that would have ended most presidencies.

As I have done every day since the 2016 election, I tempered my optimism. There was no upside to getting my hopes up. After the much-anticipated Mueller report landed with a thud, Ilike most Democratshad conditioned myself to expect disappointment in the scandal department. The problem with the Mueller report wasnt that it didnt include ample evidence of wrongdoing by the president; the report was a none-too-subtle road map for impeachment. But it went nowhere. The press treated it as old news, the Democrats seemed ready to move on before the ink was dry, and Republicans just lied about it. I feared the same thing would happen again. Dont get me wrong, I had little doubt Trump was guilty of wrongdoingit was just a question how explicit his crime was and how definitive the evidence. Trumps efforts to collude with Russia and obstruct the Mueller probe had been so ham-handed that the lines between his criminality and his incompetence were blurred.

My preemptive sense of disappointment deepened the next morning when Trump announced that he would be releasing the transcript of the call. To say Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer is an insult to butter knives, but even he is not dumb enough to release a transcript of a call that would implicate him in global criminal conspiracy to interfere in an American election.

Right?

Wrong.

In the transcript, Trump sounded like a crooked capo trying to pressure a local businessman. Trump called his conversation with the Ukraine Presidentthe perfect call, but it was an imperfect crime.

In the following days, we would learn that the efforts to cover up this obviously impeachable offense involved the White House, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, and the Department of Justice. As an example, Attorney General Bill Barr who helped cover up the Mueller report played a similar role in this affair. Barr didnt recuse himself from the investigation even though Trump names him in the call with Ukraine as a participant in the criminal conspiracy.

Additionally, the witnesses to the crimes were not partisan actors but decorated veterans, career diplomats and national security professionals, as well as Trumps own staff. Its easy to miss the historical significance of what Trump did. Our national attention span is so short and the pace of events so frenetic that its nearly impossible to step back and take stock of the moment.

Trump handled the beginning of an impeachment inquiry with his usual aplomb. In a period of about 96 hours, Trump

• called for the execution of the whistleblower and the administration officials that corroborated their account;
• referred to six members of Congress as savagesthe six members Trump chose were two Jews and four women of color which wasnt a coincidence.
• suggested a second civil war would be an appropriate response to impeachment;
• posted eighteen tweets
• said that the Democratic chair of the Intelligence Committee should be arrested for treason, which happens to be a crime punishable by death; and
• reportedly committed another crime by agreeing to back off legislation to mandate background checks for gun sales in exchange for the National Rifle Association contributing to his legal and political defense.

In the early days of the impeachment inquiry, public opinion moved decidedly in the Democrats direction. Majorities backed the inquiry, and even some Republican voters were troubled by Trumps actions. There was a drumbeat of credible firsthand witnesses. Before long, there could be no doubt about what happened. The call and the extensive effort to cover it up were a crime higher than any of the crimes committed during Watergate.

Yet, Donald Trump is still president. In the end, none of it mattered very much. A few Republicans expressed private concerns. Some even sent a few sad tweets. But no one actually did anything. Large swaths of voters believed he had committed a crime, but few expected him to face any accountability.

As a nation, we were uncomfortably numb to crimes being committed in the Oval Office.

The whole thing was deeply depressing, but it was also final confirmation of something that had been eating at me for years.

The American political system is fundamentally brokena fact the Republican Party has ruthlessly exploited to rig politics in their favor.

This notion was not a new one to me. The fact that the Republican Party was out of control has been obvious for a long time. They were radical, rabid, and often racist the entire time I worked for Barack Obama. Their approach to government was nihilist on the best day. They were people who just wanted to see the world burn.

At the time, I thought this was a temporary affliction on the body politic. One that would be cured by the passage of time and the 2016 election.