Seriousness of Impeachment

Trump Killed the Seriousness of Impeachment

Impeachment proceedings used to be news of unquestionable gravity. The week showed it’s just more fodder for the ideological and culture wars.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

Big font, double-decker headlines, homepage takeovers: It’s been a big week in the news business for visual devices like these.

Editors turn to these once- or twice-a-year headlines to signal to the reader something more than that the news is BIG. Almost by definition in the modern media environment, when the news is big enough to justify big type it’s also news that the reader already knows. Heard about it, probably, within moments after it happened.

What the editors are really trying to say is that the moment is solemn, something of unquestionable gravity and universal relevance.

To which the reaction of many readers these days is: Yeah, sure, whatever ...

It is too early to tell what will come of House Democrats’ decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, but not too early to conclude that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has failed to revive the concept of solemnity in American politics.

That was the obvious intent Tuesday, when she stood in front of a bank of flags, invoking the Founding Fathers and Constitutional Convention of 1787, as she announced the impeachment inquiry.

But the reaction, underway even before she started speaking, made clear that for much of the country, it was just another day in what Rahm Emanuel, when he was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, called the metropolis of “Fucknutsville.” The news may be important, it may be swerving wildly in surprising ways, but never these days is it something that commands reverent attention.

People below a certain age may not have firsthand experience with news events that did indeed command that reaction — and impeachment proceedings against a president unambiguously would have been one of them.

As it happens, I’m above that age. Of four major efforts in U.S. history to impeach presidents, I have vivid, contemporaneous images in mind for three of them.

I was a 10-year-old at summer camp during the last days of Richard Nixon’s presidency. As his situation daily became more dire, I recall receiving a letter from my then-Republican mother, reflecting sadly on the country’s wounds, how disgraceful it was that the president had dishonored his office. For the actual resignation speech, aware that history was unfolding, the camp rolled out black-and-white televisions into the cafeteria, and campers listened raptly to Nixon’s words.

Twenty-three years later, I was a Washington Post reporter in January 1998, working late at the White House as I knew colleagues were on the brink of reporting Bill Clinton’s affair with a former intern named Monica Lewinsky. I was talking with Josh Gerstein, then a young producer for ABC News (and now a less-young journalist for POLITICO), whose organization also knew of the imminent bombshell. The atmosphere was a bit like in a sci-fi movie in which an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. The news seemed beyond belief, the implications grave. We might be hours away from a presidential resignation.

It took a little more than a year from that night until February 1999, when Clinton survived his impeachment by the House with a mostly party-line vote acquittal at a Senate trial. In retrospect, it seems clear what a critical moment of transition the Clinton impeachment — for that matter, the entire Clinton presidency — was in the journey to Nutsville. The solemnity that I was (momentarily ) feeling in the pressroom that night was intermittently observed by most of the major actors during the drama that played out over the next 13 months.

During the Senate trial, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wore robes that he had designed himself for the occasion, with four gold stripes on each sleeve. The getup drew widespread mockery.

That contrast — participants aspiring for dignity while being greeted by the audience with raucous irreverence — pretty much defined the year.

Multiple features of the modern political-media culture that now scarcely draw notice — we live with them in every waking moment — essentially sprouted that year.

There was the notion that establishment news organizations were no longer the gatekeepers of the news or what right-minded people were supposed to think about the news. Internet pioneer Matt Drudge beat The Washington Post and Newsweek to their own scoops, with sources who told him of the debate in those newsrooms about whether the story was ready to publish. These days, with social media, everyone if they wish at any hour of the day can revel in the rubble of the old MSM filter.

This was also the beginning of saturation coverage of Washington, and the commercialization of political news. CNN went round the clock with Lewinksy special programming, as did its newborn rivals, MSNBC and Fox News. The hysteria-and-indignation industry was born.

Above all, the Clinton impeachment was the beginning of political news as Rorschach test — in which one side sees wickedness in a politician’s behavior, and the other side sees wickedness in the disingenuous, hypocritical, malicious response of the opposition party to the behavior. (In a nonpolitical context this phenomenon had begun a few years earlier in the O.J. Simpson case.)

The Clinton case lived easily in this dual reality — partly serious, partly entertainment — because of its subject matter. Oval Office fellatio does not lend itself to solemnity. (No, no, no, said Republicans, this isn’t about sex! It’s about lying under oath and the sacred principle that no one is above the law.)

Trump’s case, however, shows the essential reality — the significance of a piece of news depends mostly on how it can be used as either weapon or shield in the ceaseless ideological and cultural war — applies no matter the underlying subject matter.

The Clinton impeachment was about whether a president was getting head; the Trump impeachment is about whether a president abused his position as head of state. But the essential dynamic — accusers are shocked; defenders shrug — is unchanged.

The incomplete transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was read by Democrats as something close to a smoking gun, with Trump pushing his counterpart — who is hoping for military aid from Washington — to use his influence to revive a closed investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and the activities of his son Hunter Biden, who performed highly compensated work for a well-connected Ukrainian natural gas company.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told POLITICO in a statement it is “laughable to think this is anywhere close to an impeachable offense.” He said Democrats have “already overplayed their hand.”

This taunting dismissal of official proceedings is another sign of the death of solemnity. During the Lewinsky scandal, even many prominent Democrats were surprised and primly disapproving when Clinton pivoted during a televised speech acknowledging the affair into an attack on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. It’s inappropriate, many argued, for a president to attack a legal proceeding.

With the passage of time, however, Clinton’s words seem mild. (“The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation.”)

Trump, by contrast, this week called Democrats “pirates” and the Ukraine investigation “a disgrace to our country” and “another witch hunt.”

Such rhetoric from Trump is now so common that it hardly seems noteworthy. Hyperbole and bombast from partisans in this sense is like a drug that must be used in ever-larger dosages to be effective, or akin to a person who uses so much salt that he no longer remotely tastes the actual food underneath.

The deeper change is that most Americans no longer respect the institutions of Washington, and many believe at some fundamental level they are not on the level. The Gallup polling organization has been measuring this trend for decades. Back in the 1970s, when my mother and most Americans no matter their partisan affiliation were shocked by Nixon’s lawbreaking, the presidency, Congress and the media all commanded majority or near-majority support when people were asked whether they had high “confidence” in the institutions. These days, none of these institutions is even close to majority support, and only 11 percent of people say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress.

This trend may be a solemn development — but don’t expect it to receive a lot of solemnity.