Liberal Impeachment Fantasies Have to Stop – The Daily Beast – Daily Beast

In times of unexpected strife, the aggrieved seek comfort anywhere they can find it, like trees trying to grow on the side of cliffs. Since Donald Trumps election, dejected liberals have sought catharsis in tears, in marches, in late-night comedy, in essays about reasons that marches occurred. But none of those things have changed the fact that Trump is the president.

Were now entering a new phase in liberal self-soothing: the calming Nixon-expert-with-a-crystal-ball phase.

This weeks New York magazine cover story, written by Frank Rich, lays hard into the Trump-Nixon tie, offering history as balm. The resistance neednt worry just yet. Just wait, Rich urges. Watergate auto-da-f wasnt built in a day.

Rich isnt alone in his Trump-Watergate fantasy. Its hard to avoid drawing some parallels between Tricky Dick and Teflon Don.

Like Trump, Richard Nixons Congress was stocked with allies. Nixon taped people (Trump, thus far, only lies about it). Nixon had Deep Throat, an aggrieved FBI guy, and Trump has James Comey, an aggrieved FBI guy. Nixon, like Trump, hated the press and loved his daughters and had a strange relationship with his wife.

The next part of the story, the fantasy goes, ends happily for the opposition. In Nixons case, journalists grabbed a thread and kept pulling. And within two years of his election, a president who had logged a record popular vote was quite literally peacing out of the White House.

Rich argues that Trumps TBD-gate is unfolding at a comparable rate to Watergate. You will find reason to hope that the 45th presidents path through scandal may wind up at the same destination as the 37thsa premature exit from the White House in disgraceon a comparable timeline.

Is it possible that Trumps presidency will end in Nixonian disgrace? Sure. But theres a much greater likelihood that it wont, that Richs prediction will age about as well as Van Jones March 1 proclamation that Donald Trump became president last night, or Fareed Zakarias proclamation on April 7 that Donald Trump became president last night. If Trump somehow lurches through four or eight years, history will view the lefts starry-eyed Watergate dreams as in the same genre of smug as Clinton acolytes cockiness going into the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign. Litanies of Trump-Nixon comparisons amount to little more than fantasy, wastes of precious time that could have been better used on reality.

Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon, and 1973 is not 2017.

During Nixons time, Americans could only get their news from a few outlets; if they wanted anything less mainstream than the NBC Nightly News, they had to seek out the Whole Earth catalog or their local Ron Paul-esque kook and his facsimiled newsletter. The internet has democratized information, but it has also muddied the waters. In 2017, we are all denizens of a customizable media reality that has never felt more subjective. Pre-web, a person at odds with the mainstream opinion about what the truth is would be pushed to the margins. Now, the president himself has endorsed a fringe news outlet that denies that the murder of dozens of children in Sandy Hook ever happened. We no longer agree what the definition of is is. The margins have gone mainstream.

Watergate fantasy porn neglects to realistically establish that Watergate was a series of freakish lightning strikes. Its hard to imagine how they could replicate themselves in 2017. Even if the public trusted the press as they did in the early 1970s (they dont), or if Trump is actually guilty of prosecutable wrongdoing as recognized by those in a position to prosecute (we dont know, but are acting as though we do), or if Congress, given Trumps theoretical wrongdoing, would move to impeach (also unknown), theres the not-small problem of Trumps supporters. Theyre not going anywhere, and the reasons they were drawn to Trump arent going anywhere.

In the 2016 election, Polk County, Wisconsin, went about 2-1 for Donald Trump. The 956 square-mile grid of field and forest hugging the states western border is home to only 43,400 residents. I was born in the now-shuttered hospital in one of its towns, a village with a population that barely cracks four digits, and lived there until I was 18 years old.

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Alan Walker has been the head of Polk Countys Republican Party for over a decade. To hear him tell it, nothing has happened since the inauguration to make him second guess his vote.

The same goes for most of the people Alan Walker knows who are active in local politics. They arent ready to abandon President Trump. In Walkers view, Trump is following through on what he promised hed do. Investigations into Trump are nothing more than media agitating designed to derail a true conservative agenda.

Many here in Polk County think the liberal elite were looking down on them, Walker wrote in a post-election op-ed in a local newspaper. The people in Polk County are good, honest, down-to-earth people, good citizens. People here are not racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic people, but are labeled that way by the liberals. If people had been talking to the people of Polk County, the notion of a Trump victory wouldnt have seemed farfetched in October before the election.

In April, Trump supporters in the area held two Trump-less Trump rallies in the area, one in Turtle Lake, and one a short drive south in Hudson. Walker estimates that a few dozen gathered in Turtle Lake; about 120 in Hudson. Local politicians and activists spoke. At one gathering, Walker led a prayer.

I dont know if youre old enough to remember Reagan, Walker tells me, via phone. When Reagan was president, it was constantly people against him. Its much worse with Trump than it was with President Bush or Bush Jr.

People who want Donald Trump to be president for as little time as possible are in the market for good news right now, but theres not much good news to be had. Trump already has installed one Supreme Court justice and will probably get to nominate another, a feat that hasnt gone unnoticed by his supporters like Alan Walker. Trump has already pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, another victory for his base. Hes got part of his travel ban enacted, for the time being. His party has the House and the Senate, and most statehouses. Sure, hes faced setbacks due to his seeming lack of knowledge of how to navigate the Washington jungle gym, but the longer hes in charge, the more accidental wins hes likely to stumble into. The people who already liked Trump are always going to like him; the people who never liked him never will.

Hoping for the best is sustaining. But the other half of that adage is prepare for the worst. For too long, liberals have clung to the former and ignored the latter. In order to survive the Trump era intact, they must resist the urge to look for the future in the 1970s. They must stop wasting their time reading fan fiction and deal with the reality that we are probably stuck with Trump. And then what?

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Liberal Impeachment Fantasies Have to Stop - The Daily Beast - Daily Beast