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Process draws Trump ire

Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — As the House of Representatives voted to impeach him Wednesday night, President Donald Trump held forth at a campaign rally in Michigan attacking his principal tormentor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was understandable, considering all the grief she has caused him in recent days.

More startling, however, was his blunt and obscene pivot to the memory of the state’s departed House icon, the late Rep. John Dingell, and his widow, Debbie, who now occupies his old House seat. Trump, after sarcastically calling her “a great beauty,” which she actually is, he struck her with a supremely low verbal blow.

He told the Michigan audience that he’d given the late Dingell the “A-plus” treatment, by having flags flown at half mast in his honor, and how Debbie Dingell had called him to say how her late husband would have “been thrilled” looking down from heaven. To which the president commented to the home-state crowd: “Maybe he’s looking up” — the implication being from Hell.

Reporters noted audible moans from attending Michiganders, and that reaction is likely to be replicated in the state in the year ahead. Trump is expected to campaign heavily in the pivotal state in hopes of repeating his narrow victory there in 2016, which secured his Electoral College success despite losing the national poplar vote by 3 million ballots.

So much for Trump’s supposed political genius for thrilling his base with outrageous conduct. Such behavior causes other, less hypnotized Trump defenders to scratch their heads at his appalling personal demeanor.

This detour from common decency, which has become the norm for this, the most indisputably crass American president in history, encapsulates politics as usual in the era of Donald Trump.

It signals what can be expected in the days ahead as the Republican- and Trump-dominated Senate awaits the two House impeachment articles charging abuse of presidential power and obstruction of the congressional oversight sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution.

At this writing, Speaker Pelosi was contemplating whether to hold back from sending the articles to the Senate until the upper chamber agreed on a fair process for trying the charges.

But such a delay could backfire on the Democrats as petulant, only delaying the Senate’s likely acquittal of Trump.

Also, it seems wishful thinking that such a temporary stalemate between House and Senate leaders might persuade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow testimony from the likes of White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

If the judgment already widely in vogue stands, nothing substantial is likely to alter the outcome of the sorry but imperative impeachment — freeing Trump to survive in the Oval Office to seek a second term next year.

Nevertheless, the Democrats’ motivation and rationale that the Constitution commands them to challenge the destructive behavior of Donald Trump through the process of impeachment is a worthy exercise in defense of the core values of this cherished democracy.

In a sense, the emergence and exploitation of an unscrupulous leader unhindered by the nation’s norms of decency and morality has been a potential threat through many of the more than 200 years of the republic.

It has shown its face occasionally in our lifetimes in the likes of Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Richard Nixon and others.

The impeachment of Donald Trump, while so far only halfway into the Constitutional process of cleansing our politics of provable bad apples who ruthlessly exploit it, validates the sometimes painful exercise of defending our democracy.

In this case, the exercise is amply demonstrating the erosive nature of the forces of hatred and racial and cultural division, even in a self-confident modern democratic state. Trump has been a bitter and flamboyant warning rocket, and one whose destructive blow can still be addressed by voters next year.

Editor’s note: Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.

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