Is impeachment good for Trump? Not unless the media helps him.
by digby
This piece by Josh Marshall is important to keep in mind as you watch the impeachment of Donald Trump unfold over the next few weeks. He takes on the idea that the impeachment is bound to help Trump, o make no difference, by assuming, correctly I think, that a lot of this is driven by media assumptions that haven’t held up in the past and wont hold up this time either:
Going back to the 1990s, the elite national press, especially in Washington, DC, was highly, highly invested in the idea that a major scandal would and should bring Bill Clinton down. It is also true that a majority of those same people likely voted for Clinton, at least in 1992. It’s complicated. Many books could be written on the increasingly strained, melodramatic and esoteric theories these people peddled trying to reconcile the fact that the public didn’t seem to see the matter in the same way.
When it comes to the question of impeachment, there was a similar pattern. Public opinion was very, very consistent over the course of 1998. The public did not want Clinton driven from office. The poll data is striking. Support for impeaching Clinton never got as high as 30%. For much of the year it was around 20%. Consistently throughout 1998, an overwhelming majority of the population opposed impeachment. As you can see from this chart, support for impeaching Clinton never got as high (though it got pretty close) as it did to impeaching Bush and Obama.
Clinton’s spiking popularity was clearly tied to a public rejection of the year long quest to drive him from office. Earlier this month we saw press reports that Clinton’s onetime advisor, the inveterate doofus Mark Penn was advising Trump to pursue the Clinton strategy of focusing on the public business rather than impeachment as a way to drive his popularity in the face of impeachment. Of course, this strategy is completely beyond Trump’s abilities. But even if it were not this strategy only worked if you understand the underlying reality that Clinton was leaning into an overwhelming public rejection of impeachment.
So after a year in which the public consistently, by a 2 to 1 margin, said they did not want the President impeached or removed from office, Republicans proceeded to impeach the President. It is quite clear that the real lesson here isn’t about impeachment. It is that if you do something that is overwhelmingly unpopular and which the public is closely focused on, you’re probably going to face some public backlash. Obvious…
He points out that despite the fact that the polls all pointed to Republicans losing seats, the press was shocked, as were the Republicans. They had believed their own hype, always a mistake.
The national elite media’s relationship with Bill Clinton was a weird and highly distorting mirror. It had a profound effect at the time and continues to do so. Republicans faced a backlash because impeachment was completely uncalled for and a grossly irresponsible decision. That is of course my subjective judgment. But it is certainly mirrored by public polling data which shows very clearly that it was always an overwhelmingly unpopular decision. Ignore the public will on the big issue of the day and you’re likely to trigger a backlash. That’s obvious. Everyone knows that.
Today support for impeachment is dramatically higher. Most polls show it has a very small plurality support. Some polls have shown support for it just over 50%. Clearly the public is highly and intensely divided. But there is no reason to believe the reaction will be anything like it was in 1998/99 for the very simple reason that the public’s take on it is radically different and support is dramatically higher. This is truly obvious.
I would just add that the press and the political establishment’s relationship with Clinton was highly influenced by the ascendant right wing media apparatus’s working of the refs. This was the media’s first test against the Gingrich right’s new nihilistic win-by-any-means-necessary ethos and they failed badly. In those days the public, however, wasn’t as highly polarized, largely because while the process had already begun with the civil rights movement and the backlash against the cultural changes of the 60s, the right wing media hadn’t fully established itself as a world unto its own and the country hadn’t bifurcated completely as a result of the election of the first black president.
The media did not cope well and, while they are doing better today, they are still not up to the task. As journalist Jonathan Allen confessed back in 2015, that dynamic was still at work 20 years later and it contributed greatly to the election of Donald Trump.
They remain a problem today. This talk of “partisan brawling” is trivializing what’s happening which is the first step. Here is a case in point:
Trump and the GOP had an explicit strategy to persuade the public that impeachment is just a partisan mess, which was a challenge since the President’s own staff offered the most incriminating testimony.New York Times to the rescue: https://t.co/je8E87cgz5
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) December 14, 2019
Once acquitted, if we see a spate of “Teflon Don” analysis, it will be even worse. The truth of this matter isn’t that Trump is teflon, it’s that every Republican official is an accomplice in his crimes and a destroyer of democracy as we’ve known it. If the press fails to be honest about that, he will have a much easier time of it in 2020 than he deserves if only because it could dampen voter enthusiasm.
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