Now that President Trump has been impeached by the House, it has already been widely observed that Trump has not shown a hint of contrition, as Bill Clinton did, or any sense of obligation to accept a shred of responsibility for what this whole scandal has inflicted on the nation.
But the truth is even worse than this. Trump is declaring the entire proceeding illegitimate, not simply on process grounds, but, crucially, on the grounds that the American majority that elected the House that impeached him simply doesn’t have any claim to legitimate democratic representation of any kind.
The story Trump is now telling about his impeachment has enormously important implications for what comes next — in both procedural and political terms — and he previewed this story at his rally in Michigan on Wednesday night.
“After three years of sinister witch hunts, hoaxes, scams, tonight the House Democrats are trying to nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans,” Trump ranted.
At around that time, the House voted to impeach Trump for using his office to extort a foreign power into helping him rig the next election and obstructing Congress’ efforts to get to the bottom of it.
“With today’s illegal, unconstitutional and partisan impeachment, the do-nothing Democrats are declaring their deep hatred and disdain for the American voter,” Trump continued. “This lawless, partisan impeachment is a political suicide march for the Democrat Party. Have you seen my polls in the last four weeks?”
What Trump is really saying
The claim here isn’t simply the absurd notion that the House’s perfectly legitimate exercise of its constitutional power of impeachment was illegitimate. It’s also that “the American voter” is only constituted by those who voted for Trump in 2016.
After all, “the American voter” means “the American electorate.” Thus, in this telling, the American electorate that elected the House in 2018 by nearly nine points nationally — a genuine American majority — simply doesn’t exist.
Only the minority of Americans who voted for Trump — a minority that was nearly 3 million voters shy of the total that voted for his opponent — constitute the true “American voter.” That is, the true American people.
Republicans tried to use theatrics to breathe life into this story during the impeachment debate:
i’m telling you these displays are an explicit argument that this political minority constitutes “the people” properly understood. https://t.co/JZ6POZTKn0
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) December 18, 2019
But this idea is deeply intertwined with another deception that’s just as foundational to this whole narrative: The notion that Trump’s America has a kind of vast untapped political potential, that his base’s depth and reach are incalculably large — almost mystically so.
Maintaining this mythology is plainly imperative for Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who used Trump’s rally in Michigan to keep it afloat:
Incredible Rally tonight in Battle Creek Michigan!
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) December 19, 2019
✅ 20,202 voters identified (92.2% from MI)
✅ 15% haven’t voted in last four elections, WOW!
✅ 15% have voted in only one of the last four elections
✅ 17% Democrats
Dems play theater while @realDonaldTrump is winning!
In this telling, the impeachment of Trump has caused the only electorate that exists — his own — to swell with rage at the injustice of their own (fictional) disenfranchisement. This is creating enormous hordes of new voters in Trump country.
It’s notable that Trump’s propagandists tend to emphasize this story when he looks particularly weak. After Trump’s endorsement failed to secure a gubernatorial win in deep-red Kentucky, they rolled out the Baghdad Bob spin that Trump’s presence swung the race by a magical 17 points by driving up base turnout, which wasn’t quite enough to compensate for the GOP candidate’s shortcomings.
Now Trump is pushing a similar line, and supporting it by claiming the polls show massive public repudiation of his impeachment. But the polls do not show this.
The plurality of Americans who support impeachment remains larger than the percentages who oppose it. Crucially, the new Post-ABC News poll shows that solid majorities see the House’s impeachment process as fair to Trump, and even larger majorities want the Senate trial to ensure that the fact-finding into Trump’s corrupt conduct continues.
The importance of this cannot be overstated: Large majorities see the impeachment process as in keeping with the rule of law, and believe Democrats are pursuing legitimate questions about Trump’s conduct that still require further scrutiny.
The mythology of Trumpism holds precisely the opposite to be the case. As Trump himself put it at his rally: “It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached.”
It doesn’t feel that way at Trump’s rally, because in Trump country, it cannot legitimately happen.
A darker truth
There is a darker truth underlying this story. In a sense, Trump actually can get through all this without really “feeling” like he was impeached, because the counter-majoritarian structural advantages Trump and his party enjoy could render it so.
Trump will, of course, not get removed. No president ever has. With two-thirds of the Senate required, this is very difficult by design.
But Trump/GOP structural advantages could make this even more painless — and accountability even harder to achieve. The GOP majority in the Senate could end up conducting the trial so that we hear from no new witnesses and see no new evidence. The fact that the Senate disproportionately empowers Trump constituencies and small rural states actually might incentivize this.
Meanwhile, the most likely outcome in 2020 is that Trump will lose the popular vote, possibly by more than last time. The question is whether Trump will pull off another electoral college hat trick, perhaps one even more miraculous than the last one.
Democrats actually agree with the Trump campaign in the sense that they fear Trump’s pools of blue-collar Midwestern white support could be deeper than we think. But what this means is that Democrats fear Trump’s electoral college advantage.
So Trump could end up getting acquitted after a sham trial, and then winning reelection despite getting impeached and losing the popular vote.
Still, Trump’s base is not limitless. Trump is historically unpopular, and majorities see the impeachment process being applied to him as legitimate. The majority that elected the House of Representatives that just impeached Trump actually exists.
There is a real anti-Trump majority in this country. And even if Trump can overcome it via structural advantages, he cannot make it disappear.
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