Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi have managed to pull off a miracle with their impeachment gambit.
They’ve united Republicans around Donald Trump, a feat once thought impossible, and for which the president owes a great deal to Schiff’s dogged Republican counterpart Devin Nunes.
“There has never been so much unity and spirit in the Republican Party, as there is right now!” trumpeted Trump on twitter Friday.
As support for the president edges up nationally and, notably, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where 94 percent of Republicans oppose impeachment, he has been gifted a remarkable campaign advantage by his opponents.
He ran as an outsider in 2016, and now he gets to run again as an outsider, despite three years in the White House.
The Beltway Brahmin class of bureaucrats and resistance journalists have provided him a new campaign pitch: “New hoax. Same swamp.”
After two weeks of public impeachment hearings, we are no closer to evidence that Trump committed an impeachable offense over Ukraine. Inappropriate, perhaps, but that’s his middle name.
The partisan audience — and media — sitting in the hearings each day, cheering along Schiff’s cunning narrative, has misled the Democrats into thinking it has popular backing.
Like the boy who cried wolf, if you spend long enough shrieking that Trump is the devil incarnate, eventually people switch off.
You only had to hear the laughter at the end of proceedings Thursday, when Schiff let down his guard and mocked Nunes, to recognize the anti-Trump mood infecting the public gallery in Room 1100.
“This is such a threat to democracy … more so than anything I’ve seen in my life,” said retired attorney Michael Lennie, 77, who had come from San Diego to watch the hearings.
When did he realize the gravity of the case? “November 2016.” Boom.
Nor did retiree Melissa Colbert, 71, and Susan Zengerle, 68, of Maryland, hide their antipathy to the president. They were there representing a grassroots political group, Indivisible Montgomery.
“It’s really an anti-Trump group” said Zengerle. Naturally, she found the impeachment witnesses “very credible and nonpartisan” and the Republicans “obstructionist.”
Like the men and women who testified, the audience might be patriotic Americans doing their duty, but they also seem convinced that this elected president is an existential threat to the republic.
Once you’ve convinced yourself of that, it’s a small step to insist he must be removed, by fair means or foul, to save the nation.
But this is a dangerous delusion which, after three years of crying wolf, afflicts only a shrinking minority of Americans.
The Democrats’ all-smoke-no-fire game has turned off independent voters already disillusioned with the failed Russia-collusion probe.
“You’ve seen the polls, I’m going through the roof,” Trump boasted on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning. “In Wisconsin, in the swing states, I’m well up … because the people get it. It’s a witch-hunt.”
He’s not wrong.
As Democrats head home for Thanksgiving to take the temperature of their districts, polls spell impending doom.
Among all-important independent voters, opposition to impeaching Trump leapt from 37 percent to 47 percent over the first week of the public hearings, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll released Tuesday.
An Emerson poll released Wednesday similarly found a rise in opposition to impeachment among independents, from 39 percent last month to 49 percent.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, which Trump won by just 23,000 votes in 2016, a Marquette University poll published Wednesday found 53 percent of all registered voters opposed impeachment, up slightly from last month — and that includes opposition from a whopping 94 percent of Republicans.
The poll also showed Trump flipping the tables to lead every Democratic presidential candidate, including Joe Biden by three points.
Then there’s the Blexit metric. Two polls last week showed Trump’s approval among black voters up around 34 percent.
In the Emerson poll, Trump scored a 34.5 percent job approval rating, echoed in a 34 percent approval in Friday’s Rasmussen poll.
This is the Democrats’ worst nightmare since they need around 85 percent black support to win a presidential race.
Emerson also showed overall approval of Trump jumped to 48 percent from 43 percent last month, before hearings began.
No wonder Democrats in the 31 districts Trump won in 2016 are nervous.
Upstate, Anthony Brindisi, who has a narrow hold on the 22nd District, is trying valiantly to avoid talking about impeachment, as pro-Trump groups prepare to spend millions on TV ads in battleground areas.
“We have to look at what we can start to accomplish over the next few months that will help benefit the American people,” he told WPRI-TV Thursday, “health care, prescription drugs, election security, women’s equality.”
Good luck with that.
In his “Fox & Friends” interview, Trump also described the impeachment process as another “overthrow attempt at the presidency.”
“With no experience I come to Washington. I’ve defeated the Clinton dynasty, the Bush dynasty and the Obama whatever you want to call it … [and] the hatred is incredible.”
It really is. For better or worse, Trump was elected as the great disruptor to change “business as usual” in Washington, to drain the swamp.
The past two weeks we’ve heard from the bureaucratic state just how much they hate Trump’s disruption.
Tough luck, says America.
Parenting is a job in itself
Andrew Yang got it right in Wednesday’s Democratic debate when he said not all parents want to work outside the home.
“We should not be pushing everyone to leave the home and go to the workforce,” he said. “Many parents … say if they leave the home and go to work, they’d be spending all that money on child care anyway. In many cases, it would we better if the parent stayed with the child.”
Amen. But with Rachel Maddow and MSNBC’s all-female team in charge of proceedings, Yang’s unorthodox honesty guaranteed he would be sidelined the rest of the night, continuing a snub so pointed that he is demanding an apology before he will return to the channel.
For some reason, it is an affront to feminism to point out that the upbringing of children is better done by their parents than outsourced to strangers.
The political party that recognizes parents’ true desires will have an electoral advantage.
Legal pot blows up in Boomers’ face
“OK, Boomer,” was Matt Gaetz’s puerile response to Kellyanne Conway’s concerns about marijuana legalization.
The 37-year-old Florida Republican congressman has it the wrong way around.
Boomers are the marijuana boosters who have caused the problems Conway rightly abhors.
The generation that inhaled still thinks weed is the benign, low-potency drug of their youth. Thus, boomer legislators have failed to understand the threat to mental health, especially for teens, of an easily accessible high-potency drug. Nor did they anticipate the expanding black market and associated environmental threat they now are powerless to control.