Why Impeachment Failed

Many Democrats and their allies in the press were calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump long before the infamous call with the president of Ukraine had even happened. Countless mainstream newspapers and magazines developed elaborate rationales for why the president should be impeached. Most of these, however, did not argue that Trump had committed impeachable offenses. Rather, they assumed as established fact that he had done so, with assertions that were usually supported by nothing other than the adverb “clearly,” as in, “the president has clearly crossed the threshold for impeachment.”

At that time, let’s assume that half the country agreed that Trump had “clearly” committed impeachable offenses. That judgment rested only on their original character judgment of Trump, and a bunch of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of preposterousness, which they were trying on for size randomly, as if shopping for cowboy boots in a vintage store.

Meanwhile, the other half the country did not share the Democrats’ character judgment. Indeed, they were rapidly becoming convinced of the opposite. Many Republicans who were Trump skeptics at first, and more than a few Never Trumpers, were concluding that the president, for all his objectionable traits and habits, was turning out to be a better president than many of them expected, and was perhaps more well-meaning than he liked to let on. As one accusation after another turned out to be false, former Trump skeptics became increasingly skeptical of Trump’s opponents. On top of that, the Left’s accusations often swept all conservatives in with the president; they were accusing conservatives’ neighbors and family members of racism and other such nonsense simply because they had voted Trump.

Read the full article at National Review.