Impeachment Is Not a Coup
Jamelle Bouie
1 day ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20191031171048/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/impeachment-is-not-a-coup/ar-AAJzw7g

Each of these three arguments treats the 2016 result as sacrosanct, but the final claim is a bit more subtle: The American people chose Donald Trump and the only way to litigate that choice is in the next election. Anything else is an attack on democracy. The problems with this are endless. To start, impeachment is part of the constitutional structure, specifically created to deal with presidential misbehavior, including corrupt attempts to solicit foreign influence on elections.

Then there’s the secondary but still important fact that there’s no way Trump or his supporters can honestly claim the support of “the people.” Trump is president despite the wishes of the public. Voters did not want him in the White House, but our state-based system for choosing presidents — where the geographic distribution of your supporters is more important than the number you have — gave him a victory. As president, he has yet to earn a majority of the public’s support and in the last national election, his party suffered a decisive defeat, losing the lower chamber of Congress. At this moment, a majority of Americans support the impeachment inquiry. Trump is the legitimate president of the United States, but the idea that he represents “the people” — and that the investigation is an assault on their will — is untenable.

In which case, the claim that the 2016 election is inviolable — and that impeachment is therefore “illegitimate” — makes sense only if you adopt Trump’s right-wing populist logic. In this style of politics, Jan-Werner Müller notes in “What is Populism?,” “other political competitors are just part of the immoral, corrupt elite.” For populists, he writes later, “only some people are really the people.” Trump makes this explicit whenever he denounces entire cities as violent hellscapes or ignores crises and emergencies in states that didn’t vote for him. Trump has not tried to represent the nation as a whole and does not pretend to govern on everyone’s behalf.

Instead, he casts himself as a representative of “the people,” narrowly defined as his supporters, who are themselves — in a sort of circular logic — the essence of the nation. In the Trumpist vision, the 2016 election stands apart from all others. It’s no longer a grant of constitutionally-bounded authority. It becomes a kind of coronation, in which Trump is sanctified as the embodiment of a “real America,” the actual size of which is irrelevant.

Under this logic, the pro-Trump case against impeachment is straightforward. Democrats, hostile Republicans (“human scum”) and dissenting bureaucrats are illegitimized by the fact of their opposition, whenever it started and whatever the reason. That opposition, in turn, is a repudiation of “the people” of Trump’s imagination, which is how the use of a legitimate, constitutional process becomes an attempt to “overturn” their will.

This topsy-turvy logic about the will of the people can end only in an ugly place. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. He heard the phone call between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump and registered his objections to Trump’s behavior.