Amanda Marcotte makes a great point today.
Just to remind everyone, Donald Trump was impeached last year. It did not go that well.
First, the Senate failed to remove this monstrously corrupt and incompetent man from office. Then in rapid succession, Trump nearly started a shooting war in the Middle East, he presided over the most spectacular public health debacle in 100 years (210,000 Americans dead and counting), and then Trump deliberately took a match to the powder keg of American racism by doubling down on his open embrace of white supremacists and paranoid lunatics like himself. In response, instead of impeaching him again (more than called for), Congress failed to act.
Impeachment was sheer hell. The Republicans behaved shamefully, sliming anyone and everyone who brought Trump’s crimes to light. A lot of people, including close friends of mine who are professional journalists at the top of their profession, thought impeachment wasn’t worth it and would backfire or, at the very least, do nothing.
But Marcotte is right. It didn’t do as much as it should have — there is still a walking, tweeting existential threat in the White House, his tiny hands clutching the nuclear trigger — but it did do something important:
Trump got outed for his involvement in [the Russian disinformation campaign to slime Joe Biden] by a whistleblower who was, rightfully, concerned when he heard Trump blackmailing the Ukranian president into getting involved in the plot, and the impeachment trial followed. Impeachment derailed the scheme by refocusing press attention away from the smears against Biden and towards the real story, which is Trump’s corruption. It was a clarifying moment, one that showed the extent of Trump’s malicious intentions and exposed the workings of the machinery that exists to inject specious right wing narratives into the mainstream press.
Now every journalist knows that trying to make hay out of this latest stunt only makes you look like a stooge of Trump and Russian intelligence, and so they’re staying away. The only outlet that would touch it was the New York Post. Even social media corporations, which have a terrible track record of letting Russian disinformation ops run rampant on their platforms, have gone to great lengths to push back against its spread.
There’s a moral here for Democrats: It’s worth it to fight back hard, even if there’s no immediate payoff.
A lot of folks wonder if impeachment was worth the time and energy because, in the end, the corrupt Republicans who controlled the Senate refused to remove Trump, despite his obvious guilt. But the long-term effects of impeachment have been largely positive for Democrats. Impeachment made it toxic for even the most shameless mainstream journalists to pretend there is any legitimacy to Trump’s lies. It made it so that, in these final weeks before the election, the focus is where it belongs: On Trump’s corruption and failures, not on some made-up nonsense about his opponent.
There are a lot of difficult fights ahead for Democrats, starting with the fight to keep Amy Coney Barrett off the Supreme Court, but also future ones like the fight to save the economy if Biden is elected and the fight to rebalance the courts after years of Republican court-packing. Some of those fights will be hard, if not impossible, to win. But, as impeachment shows, it’s worth having the fight anyway, because it often pays off in the long run. Just look at the current headlines at the New York Times.