Editorial | Trump should be impeached

THE EASY way is to allow Donald Trump to serve out his remaining fortnight as president of the United States, then see the back of him. We are not for the easy way.

Mr Trump should be impeached, which would be the political penalty for his latest and egregious high crime and misdemeanour in the office of president, to wit: a blatant attempt to steal the US presidential election. After he leaves office and no longer has the shield of the presidency, Mr Trump should face criminal prosecution for the same offence.

We appreciate that even if the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives could draft and vote on articles of impeachment in the time they have left, there would not be time for a trial in the Republican Senate, where there would be no appetite for it; and that even if there was, Mr Trump would be acquitted anyway. But it would be an important act of symbolism if the impeachment happened. It would be a signal that despite the best efforts of Mr Trump and his Republican enablers over the past four years, the United States of America has not totally surrendered its moral authority or its penchant for lecturing others about the tenets and merits of democracy.

By all matrices, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, won last November’s presidential election. He received 81,283,485 votes,, compared to Mr Trump’s 74,223,744. That translates to 51.4 per cent of the popular vote for Mr Biden and 46.9 per cent for Mr Trump. Mr Biden got over seven million more votes than Mr Trump. But in America’s arcane presidential system, what matters most is not the popular vote, but who wins more votes in the Electoral College, which depends on who wins the election in each of the 50 US states. Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes; Mr Trump 232.

Despite these statistics and the validation of results by independent election monitors and bipartisan electoral officials across America, Mr Trump and large swathes of the Republican Party have refused to accept the electoral defeat. They have, however, lost dozens of cases in courts across the country, including two that reached the Supreme Court, America’s final court.

These facts notwithstanding, Mr Trump has not conceded the election and continues his attempts to find ways to overturn the results. Last Saturday, he telephoned Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state of the state of Georgia, attempting to overturn Mr Biden’s majority of 11,779 votes.

Said Mr Trump: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780, which is one more than we have.” He just wanted a single vote more than Mr Biden received. At another point in the conversation, Mr Trump said: “There is nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.” He also said: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

Although Mr Trump, in the conversation, claimed that he won the state, Mr Trump’s telephone call was, prima facie, more than an attempt to have another recount of Georgia’s vote, of which there have been several. It sounded like a shakedown. There is a sense of deja vu between the president’s call to Mr Raffensperger and the one Mr Trump had with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, pressuring Kyiv to investigate Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, in exchange for political support and military aid. Congress impeached Mr Trump for that behaviour, but he was not convicted by the Senate.

Under US federal election law, a person who “knowingly and wilfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by …. (B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the state in which the election is held”, is guilty of an offence for which he can be fined and sent to jail for up to five years.

This seems a case of Mr Trump seeking to compromise the tabulations of ballots, knowing that the election outcome he proposes would be materially false. In going to the test of Mr Trump’s state of mind, there may be a presumption, among some people, that the president has deluded himself into believing that he actually won Georgia. It appears to this newspaper more a case of wilful blindness.

The bottom line, however, is that if America wants the world to keep faith in its leadership, it has to keep faith with its Constitution and its laws. Mr Trump should be impeached, and he should also face criminal liability.