The False Comfort of Impeachment

Why George Conway's Absurd Impeachment Fantasy Captivates NY-12 Voters

Richard Nixon departing the White House after his resignation in 1974, a high that Democrats are still chasing more than fifty years later.

This week, Jack Schlossberg took a shot at Micah Lasher on Twitter: “Micah Lasher doesn’t think we should impeach Trump — says it’s a waste of time and we can’t afford it. I disagree — we can’t afford not to.”

Lasher clapped back with a clarification; he supported impeachment, but believed it to be largely symbolic, because it would be impossible to get the votes for removal in the Senate. Schlossberg fired back, then Lasher, then Schlossberg again. It was a rare spat between two candidates on their main accounts (usually this kind of work is left to the mudslinging comms consultants), and it centered one of this race’s rare issues on which candidates actually disagree.

To understand the potency of Schlossberg’s position, why it is so captivating to a certain kind of NY-12 voter, so captivating that it is the single animating issue of a different prominent candidate’s campaign, you have to understand the particular way that impeachment looms in the political memory of the Democratic Party.

I.

“People have got to know whether their President is a crook,” President Richard Nixon told the Associated Press’s Managing Editors Association meeting at DisneyWorld in Miami in November of 1973. “Well, I’m not a crook.” Things are different today. Our President is a crook, brazenly and unapologetically. But at the time, such allegations carried real weight, and Democrats eventually used them to take down a reactionary populist who had utterly dominated them for half a decade.

Under Nixon, Republicans had pulled off a historic realignment, by wresting the Southern “Dixiecrats” of the New Deal era away from the Democratic Party with reactionary “law-and-order” racial politics, and by identifying a “silent majority” of disaffected voters who snobby elites in both parties had neglected for too long. This formidable coalition left Democrats in a hopeless tailspin, and Nixon won a staggering 49 of 50 states in his 1972 reelection bid. In the summer of 1973, the Democrats finally busted out of their funk with the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, which painstakingly and diligently excavated the complex web of Nixon’s conspiracy to spy on his political opponents and then cover it up. These hearings produced hundreds of hours of gripping daytime television, with charismatic Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker grilling senior members of the Nixon administration under oath, leading to evasive squirming, and eventually, dramatic revelations. According to Gallup, over 70% of Americans watched the proceedings live at some point, and as many as 20% reported watching at least ten hours. (Ten hours of unedited footage of a bunch of lawyers asking dry procedural questions, ruffling through documents, and then taking long breaks! Live on TV! In the summer! What was wrong with you people?!)

In July of 1973, the Watergate Committee struck gold in their interview with White House aide Alexander Butterfield, who revealed, live on television, that virtually every conversation between President Nixon and his top administrative officials had been recorded for posterity. This set off a yearlong legal battle to get these tapes into the public record, which the White House fought at every turn, first by firing the Justice Department’s Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (and firing the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General when they both refused to fire Cox), then by agreeing to release the tapes but redacting an 18-and-a-half minute section of tape of a conversation on June 20, 1972 (and then lying about the redaction and claiming that it was a mechanical error), and finally by claiming executive privilege in court. The latter issue wound its way to the Supreme Court in July of 1974, in the landmark case United States v. Nixon, which pitted Cox’s replacement, Special Prosecutor Howard Jaworski representing the Justice Department, and legendary Boston trial lawyer James D. St. Clair acting as Special Counsel for the President. Jaworski absolutely obliterated St. Clair, and on July 24th, only three weeks after oral arguments, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege, ruling that the missing tape had to be released at once.

On August 5th, Nixon released the tape, which became known as the “Smoking Gun” tape. It was astonishing: clear audio of President Nixon and his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussing in frank terms how they planned to have the CIA convince FBI investigators to stop prying into Watergate by making vague (and false) claims about national security. Nixon’s remaining support in Congress evaporated overnight, and three days later, he became the first U.S. President to resign from office.

II.

If you’ve followed the New York Times and MSNBC’s coverage of Donald Trump over the past ten years, you may have noticed an obsession with finding Trump’s Smoking Gun tape. For over a decade, Democrats of a certain generation have been convinced that they are one mp3 file away from exposing Donald Trump for what he truly is, and from taking him out of politics for good. They thought they had it on October 7th, 2016, when the Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording of Trump bragging about his success with women to television personality Billy Bush, and telling him that “when you’re a star, they let you do it… grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Democrats thought they had it in 2019, when, in response to a whistleblower complaint, Trump released a transcript of his phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “I would like you to do us a favor.” Trump told Zelensky, heavily implying that future military aid might be dependent on this favor. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution [of his son Hunter] so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.” And they thought they had a Smoking Gun in 2021, when the Washington Post published the recording of Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he falsely claimed that the election had been stolen and urged Raffensperger to do his best to “find us 11,780 votes.”

Trump has survived every one of these Smoking Gun moments, and in retrospect, it’s obvious why: you cannot uncover something that everyone already knows. While the details of each individual tape were scandalous and worthy of the outcry that they generated, none of them fundamentally altered the electorate’s perception of Donald Trump. It was not shocking in 2016 that the guy who ran Miss Universe, frequently called into Howard Stern to brag about sleeping with models, and generally made colorfully degrading comments about women constantly, might make offensive jokes about sexual assault. It was not shocking in 2019 that the same man, who had operated with flagrant self-interest, and frequently disregarded rules and norms around sensitive foreign policy issues, might be interested in exchanging State Department foreign aid for a personal political advantage. And it certainly was not shocking in January of 2021 that Donald Trump believed the election was stolen, and that Republicans in all levels of government should seize the levers of power to make sure that he didn’t have to leave office. He’d been screaming that on television and on social media every day for six weeks by that point. Trump has always enjoyed the advantage of being completely uninhibited in his public communications, which is that he has nothing left to hide.

Nevertheless, the obsession with Smoking Gun moments persists, because Democrats who came of age in the 1970s cannot stop chasing the high of Watergate. It was what worked the last time the party had lost its mojo to a reactionary anti-elite populist, and a recurring theme of this blog is that generals like to fight the last war. So ten years, and two failed impeachments, after Trump was first elected, these Democrats are eager for a procedural solution to Trumpism. What we need, they tell us, is an excellent lawyer, who can go to Washington, and hold some damn hearings. We need that lawyer to uncover secret truths about the Trump Administration, to catch them in a lie on national television in spectacular fashion. We need him to “Build The Case”, to diligently assemble all the evidence and then tie it all together with an ornate, elegant, easily digestible legal narrative. And above all, we need him to uncover new, shocking truths about Trump’s misdeeds, truths that are so horrifying and disqualifying and illegal, that the relevant authorities will have no choice but to remove Trump from office.

Nowhere in the country does this fantasy capture the imagination of the liberal Democrats in their 60s and 70s more than in New York’s Twelfth Congressional District.

III.

“Let’s start with you, Mr. Conway,” said moderator Errol Louis, about an hour into last April’s NY-12 candidate forum at the 92nd Street Y, before teeing a question up about pursuing a Trump impeachment trial. The question was largely academic at this point, because George Conway had for the past hour pursued a fascinating and novel debate strategy. Any time he was asked a question, whether about affordability, foreign policy, transit, or healthcare, he answered the same way. First, he would vaguely echo one of his opponents, (“I couldn’t agree more”, about Alex Bores’s supply-side housing plan, or “I keep hearing everything I agree with,” about Lasher’s vision for a new cross-harbor rail freight tunnel), then pause dramatically, and then pivot to the same topic: “But how are we going to get that done with this guy in the White House?” The only way to execute any progressive policy, Conway argued (though he was never specific on what that policy might be, or why he cared about it), was to immediately pursue removing Trump from power. “I sound like the broken record on this but He. Has. To. Go. The criminality has to stop, and it’s the power of Congress to take that step first.”

Louis tried in vain to get Conway to say anything else of substance, but after an hour, he relented, and asked about impeachment directly. Conway had at this point used all his best lines on the subject, and didn’t have much to add, so he restated his case as forcefully and simply as he could. “Impeach and remove. Full stop. There are so many impeachable offenses that this man is committing each and every day.”

Micah Lasher went next, and seemed genuinely confused that Conway had missed the obvious flaw in his grand plan. “I believe we can and we should impeach Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, and I believe he should be removed. But I don’t think there is any world in which that will happen. And that seems fairly self-evident to me. Maybe I’m missing something.”

Lasher is not missing something. As he pointed out a few minutes later, Senate Republicans were unwilling to impeach Trump after January 6th, at a moment when doing so would have had no effect on their legislative agenda (he was about to leave office), and crucially, after he had just sicced a violent mob on them personally. Most of the few Republicans that did vote to impeach were immediately primaried and kicked out of the party in disgrace. The idea that enough of them would do so to reach a two-thirds majority, in the middle of his term, with a presidential election looming, for corruption and malfeasance that had been in the public record for years, is absurd. The idea that if you could pull it off, President JD Vance might be more amenable to Lasher and Bores’s progressive policy agenda, is equally absurd, though perhaps compelling to a lifelong Republican like George Conway who not-so-secretly yearns for the “sensible, responsible, grown-up” Republican of the Reagan and Bush era.

But nostalgia is a powerful force, and it can make voters embrace absurdity. Up next, Jack Schlossberg objected to Lasher’s pragmatism, and leaned heavily into his particular brand of nostalgia to do it.. “My lesson from President Kennedy was to do things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard,” he said. “I think this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It’s our country’s 250th birthday. What is going to happen next? What is the next chapter here? Are we not all completely and utterly disgusted by what we see?” Schlossberg didn’t have a substantive answer to Lasher’s concerns about the viability of impeachment, but he had something equally compelling instead: wild, out-of-control haymakers. “Maybe if you have a super PAC funded by a billionaire, you don’t understand how people feel around this district about President Trump.”

To Schlossberg, this is just one of a long list of middle-school-class-president-level ideas that are meant to generate attention with a (mostly out-of-district) online audience, and to force the experienced career politicians to sound boring and lame if they oppose them. You should be able to deduct your rent from your taxes! Trump himself should pay for Trump Tower’s NYPD security detail, and then also personally pay into a special fund to subsidize the city budget! And we should impeach him while we’re at it! The unabashed vapidity is kind of the point, whether Schlossberg realizes it or not. When you set it against the backdrop of the Kennedy name, pedigree, and considerable political resources, you get a contrast that is genuinely eye-catching. Schlossberg may not ultimately be able to convert those eyeballs into votes at a high-enough clip, but that’s a problem most of the candidates in this race would love to have.

To Conway, however, impeachment is not just an attention generator. It’s his entire identity as a candidate. “I strongly disagree that removal is impossible,” Conway responded. “And it’s not just about holding hearings and uncovering the criminality — it’s hard-nosed lawyering. We need that. We can make the case.” We need to beat Trump in court and in Congress’s court-like functions, this argument goes, so we need someone who has the specialized skillset of a courtroom lawyer.

The lawyer-to-elected-official pipeline is well established, and there are many ways in which the skillsets overlap. Both jobs require extensive public speaking, familiarity with law and the public policy concerns that shape them, and a deep network of rich and powerful people who are eager to give you money. But the rules of the game differ dramatically. Politics is about convincing a majority of people to join your side. The legal system is about slowly, methodically uncovering something approximating objective truth. It doesn’t matter what people think outside the courtroom, you just need to convince a tiny, captive audience, who have been trained to speak your specific elite language, and reward you for your knowledge and proficiency of the intricate rules and customs of the court. You can spend thousands of hours pouring over millions of pages of documents, transcripts, and recordings, and then painstakingly walk the judge, the jury, or your negotiating partner through them, adding your brilliant, subtle, lawyerly narrative twist to each relevant detail. Underlying the existence of an independent judiciary is the assumption that there are some matters that are beyond the scope of democracy, that are too important to leave to a vote. We don’t settle murder trials with a vote, for example, even high-profile ones. There are some matters for which we have to take the time, spend the resources, and most importantly, hire the elite technical experts, to get right.

In the dark, ugly heart of Democrats’ Watergate nostalgia, sits the uncomfortable belief that electing our President may be one of these matters, that it too may be too important to leave up to a vote. After all, didn’t we elite Democrats know that Nixon (and Trump) was unfit to lead? That he was breaking rules and norms at too fast a clip? That he was dangerous and corrupt and fundamentally unworthy of the power that he held? And given that, shouldn’t there be a way for us to remove him from power without having to ask all these annoying (and “deplorable”) commoners for permission? The Watergate fantasy allows liberals to indulge in their worst, most elitist belief, which is that they know better, and should be awarded special power because of it. In the Constitution, our framers did not entrust the elite with this power. Instead, they insisted that a President could only be removed from office with a broad small-d democratic mandate, a two-thirds majority of elected Senators.

In a healthier democracy, Trump’s staggering offenses would easily compel a bipartisan mandate for removal. He would be replaced, as Nixon was, with someone who would pursue the same ideological agenda, but with a higher commitment to the rule of law as well. But we do not live in that democracy, and it does no one any good to pretend that we do. In our world, the only way to get rid of Trump is to convince people that his policy agenda stinks, that Democrats have a better one, and that it will materially improve their lives if they vote for us instead of them.

Trump’s net approval rating is twenty points underwater at the time of writing. This is a winnable fight. Candidates like George Conway, with no policy agenda whatsoever, or Jack Schlossberg, with a bad one, appeal to NY-12 voters’ sense of nostalgia. But they’d be absolutely no help in the fight, and we need all the help we can get.