Why the “Impeach Trump” Movement is Misleading and Ineffective
This article is in my “Political Analysis” section.
Introduction
Don’t get it twisted — I’m no fan of President Trump.
However, impeaching Trump over “colluding” with Russia and the idea
that Russia “interfered” with the 2016 election is total nonsense. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the truth is that the whole movement to impeach Trump for “Russia-gate” is a ploy to distract from the substantive issues that matter. And if you dig a little bit into the records of the Democrats who support impeachment, then you can quickly tell that they don’t really care.
The sad thing is that there are legitimate reasons to impeach President Trump, but hardly anyone is talking about them because hardly anyone in Washington (or in the media) is actually principled. So allow me to explain why the movement to impeach Trump is (largely) disingenuous, and how Capitol Hill should go about impeaching Trump if it really wanted to.
Section 1: Why “Russia-Gate” is Stupid
The whole concept of Trump working with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election — often called “Russia-gate” in reference to the “Watergate” scandal — is sort of a fairy tale. Robert Mueller, the former Special Counsel of the United States, found that there was “no collusion” with the Russian government. If you look closely into it, you find some interactions between Trump’s team and some Russian officials, but ultimately nothing came from those interactions.
As far as Russia influencing the election, here’s what happened. They made a “troll farm” — you know what that is? That’s a bunch of people sitting together in cubicles and trolling people and spreading pro-Trump messages via social media. It’s nothing. So stop making a big deal about it.
The only area where there was conceivably something sketchy going on was with the Mueller Report finding evidence of “Obstruction of Justice,” meaning that Trump attempted to block Mueller’s investigation into the matter, even though there was apparently nothing going on. So you could make the argument that Trump should be impeached for blocking a legal investigation. But honestly, the original offense was nonexistent, so — at least in my opinion — it’s kind of a flimsy argument.
Section 2: Actual Reasons to Impeach Trump
Now just because I’m defending Trump on the Russia issue doesn’t mean that he’s off home scot-free. There are things he’s done that violate the Constitution and are much more dangerous than a dumb ass “troll farm.”
The Emoluments Clause
There’s an important section of the Constitution called the “Emoluments Clause.” It goes as follows:
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Basically, government officials can’t take money from foreign governments because then foreign governments could influence US officeholders to do their bidding, because that’s corruption.
Unfortunately, Trump couldn’t help himself. As a real estate tycoon, Trump has tons of hotels in many locations, New York being one of them. He turned ownership of his business ventures over to his kids, but the President has his kids around all the time, so they can update him on what’s going on with his business. That’s a major conflict of interest.
Here’s an example of why those hotels are a problem. In 2018, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia — Mohammed bin Salman — stayed at Trump’s International Hotel in New York, and his stay boosted the hotel’s quarterly revenue up by 13%. Furthermore, from October 2016 to March 2017, a Saudi lobby paid $270,000 to Trump’s International Hotel in D.C.
Well here’s the messed messed-up part: when Saudi Arabia killed Journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Trump received intelligence reports FROM THE CIA that the Saudi government was responsible, Trump denied that the government was responsible for it. Furthermore, Trump recently did an $8.1 billion weapons deal with the Saudis, which they then use to bomb people in Yemen (to learn more about what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen, click below).
The fact that Trump is (albeit indirectly) taking money from the Saudi government poses a MAJOR conflict of interest, and it gives him an incentive to give the Saudis weapons when they commit atrocities and turn a blind eye to their authoritarianism. You could make the case that Trump isn’t doing what he’s doing because of those conflicts of interest (e.g. his advisers are telling him to be nice to Saudi Arabia, he wants to keep getting oil from Saudi Arabia) but the fact that those conflicts of interest exist at all is arguably unconstitutional.
Trump’s Involvement in the Middle East
The fact that no one’s talking about this one really pisses me off.
So the US has been at war with Iraq and Afghanistan for years now, in addition to having military forces in 5 other countries — Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Syria, and Libya. Trump, along with former President Barack Obama, has conducted airstrikes and bombings that have killed thousands of civilians (supposedly to fight terrorists). To be exact, in 2017 the government killed around 850 civilians between those countries, which comes out to thousands of innocent people killed over the last 18 years (the US first entered Afghanistan in 2001).
You know what this? It’s a VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. One of the rules of warfare states that you cannot kill innocent civilians. So Trump has basically committed war crimes.
To be clear, President Obama was also guilty of killing innocent civilians with drone strikes, so yeah, Obama could have been impeached for the same reason. It’s not a problem unique to Trump.
The point here is that there are much more serious and reckless things that Trump is doing that actually warrant a discussion about impeachment, yet people are fixated over “Russia-gate.” Well, let’s take a look at why exactly that is.
Section 3: Why most people pushing for impeachment are full of shit
Many members of the Democratic party are jumping onto the impeachment train, and of course, it’s over the Russia-gate shit. Some have even gone as far as to say that Trump is a puppet to Vladimir Putin. Trump is many things, but he’s not Putin’s voodoo doll . (Idiots like Hillary Clinton and some other Democrats have implied this dynamic).
So if you believe that the Democrats are truly concerned about Putin amassing power via Donald Trump, then this next fact should surprise you. In 2018, a Congress voted to increase military spending to $716 billion. The overwhelming majority of Democrats (67.5% of House Democrats and 85% of Senate Democrats) supported that bill. So, by their logic (not mine, theirs), they just gave Vladimir Putin greater access to the world’s largest military (that’s not actually what’s going on obviously).
See how quickly their logic falls apart? Most of them are not principled people. They pretend to be against Trump’s corrupt administration to hide the fact that they’re giving him more power to commit actual crimes, as we discussed above.
Here’s something else: only two House Democrats (out of 137 who support impeachment) expressed concern over Trump’s violation of the Emoluments Clause. But many others don’t seem to give a shit. That tells you that many of them aren’t principled people who are concerned with real issues. They jump at this cheap opportunity to attack Trump as they play partisan politics.
Yeah, really looking out for American Democracy.
Mainstream media isn’t helping
It doesn’t help that mainstream media lost its shit over Russia-gate but barely discussed legitimate impeachment reasons such as the violation of the emoluments clause. This isn’t surprising as “Trump being a puppet to Putin” is more exciting and sensational than some “conflicts of interests” or anything else Trump does, so of course the media went nuts over the former narrative and ignored the latter. (For more on why television news sucks at covering information, click below to read one of my other articles on this subject).
Section 4: Why impeachment would NOT be useful
Let’s say that impeachment proceedings will actually happen. As the House of Representatives is dominated by Democrats, an impeachment order could very likely pass with a majority in the House. However, once it reaches the Senate, it will die. The Senate is dominated by Republicans, who obviously don’t want to throw out their own party leader. Furthermore, given that Trump has a 79–88% approval rating among Republican voters (depending on which poll you look at), it would be political suicide for the Republican party to turn on its base like that.
So yeah, there’s no chance of Trump getting kicked out given the current circumstances. The only possibility would be if the Democrats win the Senate and keep the House in 2020, and then impeach after the 2020 election. But we have no idea what’s going to happen and there’s no point trying to predict it this early.
My point is that impeaching Trump is a vanity project that won’t go anywhere and distracts from the substantive issues. Democrats would be better served to focus on developing policies to help the country.
Conclusion
I want to make it clear that I’m not defending Donald Trump’s presidency (or the Republicans) as a whole in writing this piece. But I am defending him on his claim that there was “no collusion” with Russia. Because the reality is that some of the Democrats, who don’t actually give a shit to help people and are hypocritical with how they view Trump, are unnecessarily pushing impeachment and distracting from developing policies to actually help people. That’s one of the problems here — politicians often times look for things to attack the “other team” on. They get stuck in their partisan bullshit, and that only means bad things for the American people.
When you watch politicians talk, look for their bullshit- and it’s very important to remember to Stay Cynical.
