“I’m a student of Watergate,” Brinkley says. “I was alive and doing cable TV and journalism during Clinton’s impeachment. What I see happening with Trump seems to me far worse.”
Not taking impeachment great. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images Presidential scholar Douglas Brinkley was one of more than 750 historians, including Ken Burns, Sean Wilentz, Ron Chernow, and Robert Caro, who signed an open letter this week declaring that President Trump’s actions “urgently and justly require his impeachment.
This is all going to fade – America produces spectacles monthly. I think by the time of the conventions, impeachment will be a distant echo, something that happened many months ago. I don’t feel many people in the fall of 2020 are going to be voting solely on impeachment. It is a kind of dent in Trump’s armor that points to a corrupt administration.
I would encourage you and any American to listen to Bill Clinton’s December 1998 apology to the nation. He took personal blame for the Lewinsky affair, asked for forgiveness, framed it as a mea culpa. He helped unite the country. He said, “I deserve some punishment. I did some things that were wrong.” Donald Trump is performing a kind of temper tantrum of defiance, which does not look good in history. It’s like George Wallace saying, “Segregation now and forever.
All of that is hogwash. The founders did a beautiful job of setting up impeachment principles. After all, for Congress, you’ve got to have a 50 percent bar. It is true that from time to time there may be a majority in the House who gets drunk on impeachment. But in the next phase, you need two thirds of the Senate to vote for removal. That’s a high bar to meet. Donald Trump is not going to be removed.
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