 | ![]() | | Supreme Court Justice John Roberts prepares to preside over an impeachment trial. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images | | |
The Most Important Story of the Week: The Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump officially began this week, and Ben Jacobs was in the chamber to observe. “On Day One of the Senate Impeachment Trial, Everyone Was Nervous — and a Little Awkward,” he writes, noting that “it felt at times like watching a grade-school fire drill.” Things will pick up next week when seven Democrats, appointed by Nancy Pelosi to serve as impeachment managers, “argue their case before a global television audience in a courtroom unlike any other, with the highest possible stakes.” For a sense of “What It’s Like to Manage an Impeachment Trial in the U.S. Senate,” Jacobs spoke impeachment managers in the Clinton trial. The former congressmen shed light on what the House Demcorats will soon go through, including the fear that, if they say something stupid, their “grandkids are going to be watching it on the History Channel.” |
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Trap of the Week: Throughout the presidential campaign, Elizabeth Warren “tried very hard to not have the kind of conversation about sexism that can be messy for candidates.” This week “those efforts exploded in her face,” Rebecca Traiser writes in “The Third Rail of Calling ‘Sexism.’” Bernie Sanders denies telling Warren that a woman could not win in 2020, but admits to warning her that “Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist, and a liar.” That’s not at odds with what Warren may well have heard, Traister writes, and it exposes “some of the complicated, painful, difficult dynamics that have kept women from the presidency for the country’s entire history. Among those dynamics is the chilling fact that talking in any kind of honest way about marginalization becomes a trap for the marginalized.” |
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Moneybags of the Week: Despite all of their flaws, billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are currently outpolling many Democratic rivals, and the primary reason why is indisputable: They’ve spent a combined $260 million on campaign ads. What makes Steyer and Bloomberg’s vanity campaigns concerning is their rationality, Eric Levitz writes in “Bloomberg and Steyer Reveal That Billionaires Are Underinvesting In Politics.” The two Democratic billionaires are buying political influence for small sums compared to their vast fortunes. And there are even vaster fortunes out there not spending on politics at all. If Steyer can buy 15 percent support in South Carolina for a few million dollars, what policy outcomes couldn’t Jeff Bezos buy if sufficiently motivated? |
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Burn It All Down of the Week: The Democratic Party’s primary process has been a debacle, Frank Rich writes this week in “What’s Wrong With the Democratic Primary? Everything.” At Tuesday’s debate, U.S. senator Cory Booker was not on the stage after being forced to drop out of the race, but Tom Steyer, “a poseur with zero achievements and no known adherents,” was. “It’s a joke, and the public knows it,” writes Rich, who also takes issue with the enduring focus on the “caucuses in Iowa, a 91 percent white state that, like the white and unrepresentative New Hampshire primary, is another glitch in the system by which the Democrats choose a national ticket.” |
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Disqualification of the Week: As Joe Biden makes his case for the Democratic nomination, he’s leaning on his experience. But when it comes to his relationship to the Iraq War, the former senator is revising history. In “Iraq Still Matters,” Sarah Jones writes that rather than making the case for his presidency, Biden’s track record “should disqualify him instead.” |
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Scoop of the Week: “All is well!” President Trump tweeted in the aftermath of Iran’s missile strike on Iraqi air bases housing U.S. troops. On Thursday, Defense One reported that was not, in fact, the case. Eleven U.S. troops were wounded in the attack and were “medevaced this week to Germany and Kuwait to be treated for traumatic brain injury after experiencing concussion symptoms.” |
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Quote of the Week: “You got a good [President] now — even though they’re trying to impeach the son of a bitch! Can you believe that?” — President Trump to member of the LSU football team at the White House |
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Ben: After a quite long delay, the impeachment trial of President Trump finally gets underway on Tuesday. The outcome is all but preordained: Trump is incredibly likely to be acquitted. But the road to that acquittal could go in several different directions, depending on the course the trial takes. For Democrats, what would a maximally fruitful version of this exercise look like? |
Ed: Probably breaking the GOP conference to get at least John Bolton’s testimony, maybe a couple Republican votes for removing him, and just a generally bad odor for Trump reflected in public opinion. |
Jon: Long trial, lots of damning new testimony, Fifty-plus votes for removal. |
Ed: Yeah, I think we’re contemplating the same scenario. For Trump, no “exoneration,” and some very bad publicity. |
Jon: A distressed Trump storms through the halls of the Senate naked and screaming. |
Ed: It’ll be Tension City for McConnell if Bolton drops a hammer and then Trump demands a long list of witnesses, including the House impeachment manager “Liddle” Adam Schiff. |
Ben: And what does the worst version of impeachment look like for Democrats? |
Jon: One or more Democrats vote to acquit. |
Ed: Yeah, along with a two-week trial with no witnesses, and flagging public interest. Worst of all would be if afterward, Pelosi and other Dem strategists announce they will no longer talk about Trump’s character, but strictly about the minimum wage. Because Midwestern Swing Voters. |
Ben: “You know, actually he’s a nice guy once you get to know him.” |
What are the odds right now that Bolton will testify, in your minds? And the odds we’ll see other witnesses? |
Ed: Maybe 40-60 percent that he testifies, but then he could refuse to answer some questions if Trump asserts executive privilege. The odds of others testifying — particularly those still working in the White House — are lower. But again, nobody knows what he’s going to say if he does testify. |
Jon: I feel like the odds are decent? If he actually wants to testify, and the Senate holds him up, he can just go to the House. |
Ben: So let’s say Bolton does testify, and drop some of the most damning version of events possible. Could that actually sway Susan Collins or Mitt Romney or … is there anyone else who might even possibly vote to convict? |
Jon: Murkowski. Maaaaybe Alexander. |
Ed: I think the bulk of the Republican conference will make a strategic retreat back to the “who cares?” or the “not enough for removal” arguments. |
Jon: I think you’d probably need more for any of them, except perhaps Romney, than damning Bolton testimony. Maybe something to come from the DOJ with Parnas, Giuliani, Hyde … |
Ed: The “not enough for removal” argument would place them more or less where Democrats were with Clinton in 1999. Except, of course, that the crimes and misdemeanors are massively worse this time. |
Jon: Well, Trump really wants a “did nothing wrong, perfect call” defense, and I expect few Republicans to deviate from that. Why risk his wrath just to make a less-dishonest case for the same vote? Might as well go all-in. |
Ed: That’s what the MAGA folk will want. Maybe Alexander won’t care, but the ones remaining in the Senate will. |
Jon: Do we have to call them “folk”? |
Ed: What, you don’t think they’re human, you liberal hack? What would you prefer? Boyos? Mobsters? |
Jon: Can’t we at least pluralize it? The North won the Civil War, we can say “folks.” |
Ed: I am following the usage of the 44th president of the United States, who was not from the South. Accusing me of crackerhood is not fair — I worked on a long screed desecrating the memory of my distant cousin Andrew Johnson. I am a scalawag through and through. |
Ed: Sorry, didn’t mean to deploy a conversation stopper. |
Ben: When assessing the effect any event will have on the public’s opinion of Trump these days, a safe bet is usually “zero.” Still, I’ll throw it out there — could damning testimony that we haven’t heard before move people? Conversely, could Democrats screw themselves in an enduring way if they appear to be grandstanding? Or will we be back at Trump with a 42 percent approval rating when all this is said and done? |
Ed: The latter is most likely, but at least the whole saga will provide a handy rejoinder to those who just want swing voters to stare at the unemployment rate and sign up for another four years. |
Jon: I think it could move opinion a little, sure, and could supply a good framework for the Democrats to impugn his character in the campaign. |
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 | ![]() | | Photo: @Mike2020/Twitter | | |
Mike Bloomberg may not have been at this week’s Democratic debate, but he made sure his campaign would get noticed on Twitter. Above is one of a handful of weird tweets that his campaign described as “trying something fun.” |
In Foreign Policy, political scientist Henry Farrell identifies the intellectual tradition of Elizabeth Warren’s economic worldview: a brand of pro-market leftism informed by public choice theory. Most adherents to the public choice tradition are on the right, and so was Warren, once upon a time. But instead of abandoning public choice as she moved left, Farrell argues that she rewired it to serve progressive purposes. At the Appeal, Adam Johnson argues against the “weird crime” genre of news story, which uses crimes stemming from poverty and/or mental illness as entertainment fodder. These stories have always been a staple of the local news, but the internet has acted like a dispersion agent, making the problem more severe and more urgent. In The National Interest, Nikolas K. Gvosdev takes a first pass at explaining Putin’s latest play: a raft of constitutional reforms which will be put to a nationwide referendum. And finally, the second part of Farm and Dairy’s very informative four-part series on the problems bedeviling the dairy industry was released this week. |
| | — Ezekiel Kweku, politics editor, Intelligencer |
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