Editorial | Why Trump’s impeachment is important

Although the evidence against Donald Trump is overwhelming and seemingly unimpeachable, it is nigh impossible that he will be convicted, and removed, by the Senate on the two articles of impeachment that have been made out against him by the US House of Representatives.

President Trump’s Republican Party controls 53 of the 100 seats in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to convict the president. Already, the chamber’s president, Mitch McConnell, has made known his intention to steer the trial along partisan political lines.

“I am not an impartial juror,” Mr McConnell said last week. “This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it.” Which, of course, is contrary to the declaration of the United States Constitution, which requires senators in an impeachment “trial” to “do impartial justice” according to the Constitution and laws.

Mr McConnell’s attitude notwithstanding, the process of impeachment is important, and potentially consequential, not only to the United States, but the rest of the world, especially countries to which America is a revered icon of democracy. Jamaica is among this group of states.

The nearly three years of Mr Trump’s presidency has been marked by selfishness, rudeness, absence of decency, disdain for institutional norms and an obvious antipathy to people of colour, except if they are authoritarian leaders or possessors of wealth. But more invidious for small, weak states like Jamaica is Mr Trump’s contempt for a rules-based, multilateralist global order in which countries like ours can best find insulation. Donald Trump is a reluctant democrat. Or, put differently, democracy for him is an inconvenient route to power and opportunities, he probably hoped, for unrestrained self-dealing.

Impeachment troubles

His impeachment troubles fit into this larger context. It is the result of his attempted shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to cause an investigation into his political rival, former US vice-president, Joe Biden, in exchange for nearly US$400 million in military aid already appropriated by Congress. By delaying the release of the money, crucial to support Ukraine’s fight against separatists in the east of the country, Mr Trump jeopardised America’s geostrategic and security interests for his personal political benefit.

We are persuaded by the constitutional experts who insist that Mr Trump’s behaviour, at its core, amounted to bribery and an unlawful invitation to foreign interference in next year’s presidential election, and that his failure to release documents on the matter, and not allowing staff to testify during an investigation of the issue, was an obstruction of Congress.

Mr Trump’s politics of grievances, which he has manipulated into ownership of Republican votes, allows him to take his party’s legislators hostage, which will guarantee that he won’t be removed as president at the Senate trial, although without real exculpation. The peculiarities of America’s system for electing presidents might even allow him a second term in the job next November. In the event, Mr Trump will claim vindication.

One perspective of this will be to view the impeachment, given its absence of universal support, as an ill-considered political failure. That would be a wrong and narrow take on the issue.

Failing to impeach Mr Trump in the face of such flagrant engagement in what America’s founding fathers called high crimes and misdemeanours would be to surrender to him the institutional arrangements that underpin the country’s democracy. Impeachment serves as a statement that while these institutions may be stressed, they are not broken, and that Donald Trump, even with his enablers in Congress, can’t behave with total impunity.

That’s a message that transcends America’s borders. It will resonate, too, in those countries where the United States is a big idea, a conceptual example of democracy. It says, in part, that Trump is an aberration and that he, too, will pass.