“We’re gonna go in there,” newly elected Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib said yesterday, “we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.” It was, evidently, a very upsetting thing for a member of Congress to say. People wanted it known they found it upsetting.
“This is a gift to Trump,” tweeted New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, in his lifelong vigilance against any disturbance from the Democratic Party’s left flank.
Tlaib’s “behavior was boorish, embarrassing, unbefitting, and an incredible gift to the republicans on multiple levels,” the “#Resistance digital strategist” John Aravosis wrote.
“Come on! I get the anger, but is this helpful?” the Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted. (“No it’s not,” he tweeted in a new tweet in response to his own question.)
Who else was upset? Donald Trump was upset.
How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2019
It was the idea of impeachment that bothered him at first. Later, he complained to the press about Tlaib’s coarse language, too. Had Tlaib given him a gift, or had the people complaining about Tlaib given him a gift? Or—is the motherfucker out here talking about his own impeachment, because somebody finally started talking about impeaching the motherfucker?
That couldn’t possibly be, because Donald Trump is a messaging genius, who has demonstrated over and over again that he knows how to seize the news cycle away from whatever it is that responsible, established Democrats want to talk about. Surely breaking his hold on the narrative can’t be as simple as just saying he’s a motherfucker and needs to be impeached.
On what level was Tlaib wrong? Not by using crude language, and letting Trump claim he’s the victim. Three and a half years into Donald Trump’s career as a candidate or president, it should be obvious that he will yell about being a victim no matter how politely or judiciously any criticism of him gets framed. If no one is actively mistreating him, he’ll just invent some mistreatment and yell about that.
That leaves the complaint that it’s premature or too aggressive to say Trump should be impeached. By pushing for impeachment, Tlaib would—would what, exactly? Make the Democrats look partisan or vindictive? People like Jonathan Chait have spent their careers fixated on making sure that no one in the Democratic Party may ever express any position that might scare a centrist or make a Republican angry; that is, that no one should say what they believe, let alone suggest acting on it.
Republicans, of course, are fine with letting the far fringe of their party spout off. Their whole program of directing hostility and sabotage at the Obama administration, which left the party with unified control of the entire federal government and most statehouses, was led by Tea Partiers staking out absurd positions against the basic functioning of government. Eventually the Senate majority leader was blandly refusing to allow consideration of a Supreme Court nominee. The more they ranted, the more they got.
But that’s just tactics and theater. What about the substance of impeachment? David Axelrod and Jonathan Chait know perfectly well that Donald Trump is corrupt and incompetent. Trump’s hotel shenanigans alone—openly selling access, self-dealing at inflated prices, and soliciting funds from foreign powers—would disqualify a person as president, under the terms everyone used to pretend were the normal terms of government. Less than two hours after tweeting his disapproval of Tlaib, Chait published a column accusing Trump of “transparent business fraud,” saying he appears to have relied for cash on “Russian money laundering,” and summing him up as “a criminal who happened to be elected president.”
There is a legal remedy, written into the Constitution, for when the country finds the presidency occupied by a criminal. It’s to impeach the motherfucker. Chait isn’t waiting for facts to establish whether Trump should be impeached. He knows he should be. He’s waiting for some set of conditions to arise in the discourse that might allow a person to say it.
The practical objection might be that Trump can’t be removed through impeachment, because even if the Democratic majority in the House were to impeach him, it would still require a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate—in which Republicans hold the majority—to vote to remove him. And the fundamental fact about the Republicans is that they are bound to stay with Trump and protect him, because he is their president and they are fully committed to cynical partisanship, and because they are already too guilty to stop.
But the fundamental fact about Trump is that he is entirely a crook, a liar and a criminal to his core. Behind every known bad thing he’s done are even worse things that are only partly known, and in front of every one of those bad things is a crumbling scrim of lies and fraud and cover-ups.
The word “motherfucker” doesn’t change that. The defenders of respectability and norms insist that there’s a right way to go about impeachment, which requires patience, discretion, and methodical progress toward the goal. All of that sounds scrupulous and honorable. It depends, however, on a bizarre dishonesty—the dishonesty of pretending that the case against Trump began with a blank sheet on January 3, when the new Democratic House majority was sworn in.
The shutdown of his fraudulent foundation, the criminal convictions of his close advisors and associates, the ordering of troops to the border for a political stunt, the two children dead so far in the administration’s network of prison camps—God forbid, or procedure forbid, that anyone recognize that these things have already happened, or say whose responsibility they are. It would be unfair. It would be a constitutional crisis if someone were to notice the constitutional crisis is well underway.
What Tlaib was saying was that the case for impeaching Trump is already strong enough. That doesn’t mean it won’t keep on getting stronger, with every new day and new Congressional hearing and new presidential meltdown. It just means her position will keep getting more and more correct.
