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There’s been this wistful hope among Trump loyalists that maybe Trump will turn out to be: another Bill Clinton. This hope is ironic on many levels, to be sure. After all, they spent the 1990s trying to hound him out of office using any pretext-Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Lewinsky.
Lewinsky finally gave them the pretext to impeach-with a major assist from Kavanaugh’s perjury trap (as documented in CH Z).
While they themselves did everything to destroy him, now he’s their inspiration as he survived their onslaught. Of course, this is an illusion for a number of reasons-Trump is no Bill Clinton, he’s Richard Nixon. One obvious difference is that Trump is incapable of the discipline necessary to cordon off the Russia investigation from his every day Presidential duties like Clinton did. Trump is always talking and tweeting about ‘the Russia hoax’ and ‘witch hunt’ which gives Mueller further jist for the mill that he’s obstructing justice, and destroys any hope of disassociating himself in the public consciousness from Russia.
UPDATE: While it’s true Trump is no Bill Clinton, the Dem leadership has swallowed this canard hookline and sinker.
But even more crucially a new poll that shows that almost exactly half the country wants Trump impeached demonstrates why he’s not Bill Clinton, he’s Richard Nixon.
FN: To be sure since then a number of polls have come out showing lower support though you suspect the way the questions are framed makes a difference. Since then the MSM has developed a narrative that impeachment ‘plays into the President’s hands’ and that the public will rise up in fury if the most unpopular ‘President’ in history-through the first three years; Trump has never had majority approval-is impeached.
Once the MSM gets a narrative then every piece of evidence is interpreted in a way that confirms their bias-so the MSM narrative that has developed in early 2019 that impeachment isn’t popular is largely the product of motivated reasoning.
The averages seem to show impeachment support in the mid to high 30s which has been treated as being very low-though support for impeaching Nixon was at 19% in the Summer of 1973.
Support in the high 30s-on average-isn’t so bad in face of the MSM anti impeachment narrative-prior to any impeachment inquiry-the inquiry is what is supposed to increase public support.
So between the anti impeachment narrative, the fact that there is no inquiry, added to Pelosi’s own anti impeachment statements the high 30s is not so bad. Now that the Dems are-kinda sorta maybe-doing an inquiry we’ll see if support rises. The key is public hearings-we can’t say they won’t increase support before we have them.
Regarding the MSM’s clear anti impeachment bias, Eric Boehlert recently pointed out how different the MSM attitude to Trump’s collusion compared with Clinton’s lying about sex.
I pose a simple question; https://t.co/2LnIkb7Wzg
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 12, 2019
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 12, 2019
This is because for the MSM facts don’t matter only narrative matter-they liked the narrative of Clinton resigning, but like the narrative of Trump resigning much less. Your ‘liberal media’ in action.
FWIW I haven’t seen many recent polls of impeachment post the Mueller hearing and the surging of Dem House support for it-currently we now have over half the Dem caucus in favor with Nadler and Friends now explicitly stating they’re doing an inquiry.
“The public is more supportive of impeaching Mr. Trump than it ever was of impeaching Mr. Clinton and more than it was of beginning impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon until near the end of the Watergate scandal. In August, 49 percent of Americans surveyed by The Washington Post and ABC News favored impeaching Mr. Trump, while 46 percent opposed it.”
I certainly would like to see Trump impeached-if that’s where the facts lead. But I don’t know that we’re ready for that today-seems to me that 49% is a start but it needs to be higher for impeachment. But having said that the support for Clinton’s impeachment was much less than 49% and the GOP did it anyway.
UPDATE: I wrote these words back in October, 2018. I thought that 49% wasn’t high enough-but note it wasn’t until the Summer of 1974 that more than this supported Nixon’s impeachment. It is a fact though that the WaPo poll was on the high side of support we’ve seen
One thing that’s not appreciated is that some of the Democrats wanted to impeach Clinton and remove him from office but then they discovered this was not what they’re voters want. The support for Clinton’s impeachment was very high-among not just the GOP but many allegedly liberal newspapers called for him to step down on their editorial pages and a good number of Democrats in Congress initially were warm to it too but then the voters weighed in. This was so clear that even Rush Limbaugh-who back then even a liberal news junkie like me had to listen to as there was very little else besides the short nightly network news-noticed. He acknowledged that the worse the headlines got for Clinton and the closer it got to actual impeachment the higher his approval ratings rose. The week the GOP Senate attempted-and failed-to ram though removal from office, Clinton was up to 81% according to Gallup-which was still close to the only game in town back then.
How telling is it that more Democrats supported impeaching Clinton than Trump at least in the early going?
It’s pretty obvious Trump is Nixon and not Clinton. The similarities between Trump and Nixon are so numerous you’re not going to be able to list them all in one sitting. Both Watergate and Watergate 2.0 center around a break in to the DNC-of course #2 was much more effective as it was cyber rather than ‘kinetic.’
Like Nixon Trump tried to fire his way out of the investigation-Nixon fired Archibald Cox, Trump fired Comey. Both had Roger Stone, both had a parallel narrative that the real scandal was that the previous-Democratic-President spied on them during the campaign-aka Spygate(as we note in more detail in Chapter X); Nixon’s PU was LBJ spied on him selling out his country to rig an election.
Both Nixon and Trump also colluded with a foreign power to win the election-though for Nixon that wasn’t the Watergate election but the previous one of 1968 (as we saw in chp X).
Having said that there are a few similarities between Trump and Clinton: both are philanderers though Trump clearly has a resentful misogyny that Bill showed no sign of. Still it’s notable as noted in (chp Y) that the media has been much more tolerant of Trump’s philandering than Bill’s-to say nothing of Trump’s allegations of sexual assault.
Another similarity is if you look at the everyday tempo of the Trump Russia House it is perhaps more similar to the everyday experience of Bill Clinton’s Administration. Just like with Clinton, there is a scandal every day for Trump. Nixon’s scandals only really got out in the 2nd term. It’s also true that this was still an era where the press was less aggressive-Clinton’s Administration also coincided with the beginning of a 24 hour news cycle.
As Marcy Wheeler points out when Kavanaugh fumes over revenge on behalf of the Clintons he is tacitly admitting that there are wrongs to seek revenge for
The guy who insisted that–
I am strongly opposed to giving the President any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship — unless before questioning on Monday, he either (i) resigns or (ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to [sexual assault cover-up expert Ken Starr].
“That guy thinks the scrutiny of his own sexual past is just “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” plural. Not just Hillary for — as he explicitly mentions — “President Trump and the 2016 election.” But also Bill Clinton, the man whom Kavanaugh demanded describe details of his use of sex toys and enjoyment of blowjobs under oath, and perhaps even Chelsea, the young girl who had to watch her parents be humiliated before the entire nation.”
“In spite of Kavanaugh’s suggestion that this imagined campaign would have consequences for decades, his admission that it might be revenge means it must be revenge for something. For something done to the Clintons. Hillary. And Bill.”
“For a guy who is unashamed about using stolen emails, the notion that he considers this revenge for Hillary is troubling enough. If this is revenge, it is revenge for Hillary being wronged during the 2016 election, and a big part of that wrong was using stolen emails. And Kavanaugh is no more embarrassed about using stolen emails than the guy who appointed him.”
But, again, if this is revenge, it suggests what happened to Clinton — the insistence that Bill confess under oath to Kavanaugh about cumming into Monica’s mouth — was itself wrong.”
And I do think that you can argue that in many ways Trump’s everyday experience-as being hunted by the media, ‘harassed’ he and Mitch McConnell whine, where no matter how he tries to change the subject, no matter how he tries to get the media to look at the bouncing ball over there, it always comes back to Russia, Mueller, obstruction, collusion, etc-resembles Clinton’s everyday experience as President during the 1990s.
Bill was literally harassed by the media every day. Every day some Clinton scandal real or imagined-usually imagined-dominated the news cycle. Even when Clinton went abroad he got asked about Whitewater, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, perjury. No matter how he tried to elevate the discourse, the media always pinned the scandals back on his forehead. And this is also Trump’s experience with his Administration.
Indeed, I would agree that it’s probably been even worse for Trump-as the scandals are so serious. Most of the Clinton scandals were astonishingly banal-to use Hannah Arednt’s word in a different context.
And on some level this is revenge on behalf of the Clintons from us Democrats-for what was done to Clinton and what was done to Obama. But Obama never had many scandals. The Trump years clearly are similar to the Clinton years as far as the media always being on the hunt for more scandals on steroids.
So in that sense you can understand why the Trump loyalists in the Russia House and GOP hope that Trump will be able to weather it the way Clinton was able to. But there’s the difference: most Americans thought Nixon should have been impeached, close to a majority already believe that of Trump. The overwhelming majority never thought that about Clinton. They saw it as basically overreach by a hyperpartisan GOP.
Trump is no Bill Clinton, not on his best day. He is Nixon and will meet with Nixon’s fate-by 2020.
UPDATE: Still since Barr’s fake exoneration letter the MSM has largely ignored the fact that Trump ‘won’ his Office with the help of a hostile foreign power-and rogue FBI agents hostile to Hillary Clinton. This has become a detail to trivial for their narrative-but what about Biden’s gaffes!