When The Fascist Rump Is All That's Left

Hakeem Jeffries recently visited Fox News to assure its hostile audience that Democrats don’t intend to waste time using impeachment as a tool to investigate or otherwise check Donald Trump.

“Of course not,” Jeffries said. “I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living.”

It’d be easy to shrug off this kind of tiresome boilerplate if Jeffries were lying, full stop. Lying is bad, but weakening the rally-around-Trump effect by presenting a gentle face to a MAGA audience might be useful at the margin come election time.

The problem is, Jeffries was almost certainly just telling the truth. What he said isn’t meaningless. If Jeffries truly intends for Democrats to engage in robust oversight, he’d have demurred in a different way. What he said (and what I believe he means) is that when people follow politics after the midterm elections, the foreground will be filled with symbolic Democratic efforts to “drive down the high cost of living.” He won’t let investigative efforts crowd out the more important work of test votes and hearings about health insurance premiums.

This is a problem for all the usual reasons. But here’s a new one: From the Republican Party’s perspective, logic and simplicity will point not to comity, bipartisanship, change of strategy. It’ll point to making things even more miserable for politically engaged Americans than they already are: You elected Democrats and things got more unpleasant. Let that be a lesson.

On a superficial level, this is a relatively weak argument for the party that controls the presidency to make. But it makes perfect sense given the GOP’s mental models of how power flows, and persuasion works. The worst thing that could happen, in their eyes, would be for Democrats to parlay victory into victory, exciting the pro-democracy movement for elections to come while MAGA gasses out. Better to demoralize Democratic voters, to make them conclude resistance is futile.

If that is how they see things, they will dial the dysfunction up. Trump himself will be narcissistically vengeful—at the country, for rejecting him—and thus inclined to hurt it more than he already has. He and his loyalists will intensify their authoritarian harassment and national sabotage. They’ll fill the vacuum created by Democratic conflict avoidance with daily provocation, forcing Democrats to respond rather than set their own agenda. This is just the kind of dynamic that really could sap enthusiasm from the pro-democracy movement.

Democrats thus need to prepare to make a different kind of argument than the one their quants want them to make. Not that Democrats are obsessively focused on prices, but that all the country’s problems—its economic ones, yes, but the whole pall that’s been cast over it for the better part of a decade now—they’re all Trump’s fault. The bad feelings, and the political violence, and the rejection of truth and reality—it’s all because of him. And we will have to live with it until he’s gone, whether by term limit, or nature, or impeachment and removal. So let’s hang together.

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Think of all the times Republicans could and should have disenthralled themselves from Trump, but didn’t. Early in the 2016 primary. After the Access Hollywood tape came to light. His first impeachment. His second impeachment. I could go on.

What happened instead is the party became more and more Trumpist at each turn. Why is that? ...