Stop Blaming Impeachment for Trump’s Coronavirus Response
If impeaching the president is a bad idea because it might distract him from a crisis, doing something worthy of impeachment is a bad idea too.
Jonah Goldberg | Apr 3, 2020 | 39 | 163 |

A reporter asked President Trump this week what he thought of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s claim that impeachment distracted Trump from tackling the coronavirus epidemic earlier.
The president gave a rambling answer but ultimately settled on a firm no.
“I don’t think I would have done better had I not been impeached, OK?” Trump said. “And I think that’s a great tribute to something. Maybe it’s a tribute to me. But I don’t think I would’ve acted any differently or I don’t think I would’ve acted any faster.”
Trump’s response threw cold water on what was becoming a common talking point on the right. A week earlier, Henry Olsen, a very Trump-sympathetic columnist for the Washington Post, had written a column headlined, “Let’s be honest. Impeachment hurt Trump’s response to coronavirus.” As China was locking down its cities, Olsen argued, “the White House was focused on addressing this threat to its survival, not on preparing for a threat from China that might never even materialize.”
Other conservatives, including my friends and former National Review colleagues Rich Lowry and Dan McLaughlin, made similar arguments. They emphasized how fortunate we are, in retrospect, that Republicans refused to allow witnesses at the trial, or the distraction might have lasted well into February.
As a matter of analysis, this argument is plausible, perhaps even probable. As Trump repeatedly reminds us, he made a tough and controversial decision to curtail travel from China early on. That was the right thing to do. But it was only a wise decision because it bought us time to marshal resources to fight the inevitable outbreak here in the states. Then, the administration didn’t use that time wisely and failed to adequately prepare.
Consider that both South Korea and the United States recorded their first confirmed case on Jan. 20. South Korea immediately went into overdrive with testing, social distancing and contact tracing. The U.S. did not. The fact that South Korea has the pandemic under relative control and the U.S. doesn’t speaks volumes.
But the White House insists that the president always took the threat seriously.
“I don’t believe the president has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus,” Vice President Mike Pence said this week, despite countless examples of the president belittling the threat of the coronavirus.
Politically, it’s smart for McConnell to blame impeachment. He’s chiefly interested in his own re-election and protecting the Republican majority in the Senate. But Trump’s calculation is different. Both psychologically and politically, he thinks admitting error is a profound mistake. Admitting he took his eye off the ball because of impeachment might not go over well with the non-base voters he needs to get re-elected. Hence the talking point that he’s done everything right from day one.
My problem with the pin-it-on-impeachment argument is twofold. First, it confuses the difference between an explanation and an excuse. If I tell you that I robbed a liquor store because I wanted the money to buy a new car, that’s an explanation, not an excuse. If I did it because kidnappers threatened to harm my family, that’s an excuse.
For people who think there was no merit whatsoever to the impeachment of Trump, and that whatever mistakes he made in his response to the coronavirus were because of it, blaming the Democrats makes some sense.
But that raises my second objection. Whether or not you think the president should have been impeached or removed, Trump is not simply a victim. As Ramesh Ponnuru (also of National Review) notes, this attempt to shift the blame “implicitly treats Democratic behavior as the variable and Republican behavior as the constant.”
Some Democrats have always wanted to impeach Trump simply because they can’t stand him. But others—most importantly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—resisted such efforts by the bomb-throwers. Then, Trump did something—chiefly, he pressured Ukraine to muddy up Joe Biden—and that changed the equation.
If impeaching the president is a bad idea because it might distract him from a crisis like the one we’re now in, behaving in a way that might invite impeachment is a bad idea, too.
In other words, there are no constants here. All the players are dependent variables playing off each other.
So many of the arguments marshaled to defend Trump take it as a given that he can’t change, so everyone else should accommodate him, and if they don’t, they’re to blame for his irrational response. He’s like the cantankerous uncle who comes to Thanksgiving dinner. He won’t change, so there’s no point in getting mad at his behavior. Instead, you get mad at the nephew who sets him off: “You should have known better!”
Maybe that’s true of the nephew, but it’s no less true of the uncle.
Photograph of Donald Trump by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.
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It's all the fault of the Democrats.
If they hadn't persuaded the Trump campaign to hire Paul Manafort and they hadn't produced all of those videos of Trump praising Russia, hired Roger Stone, praised Wikileaks, and fired James Comey, there wouldn't have been a Mueller investigation. If there hadn't been a Mueller investigation, Trump wouldn't have been distracted to the point where much of his time and energy was spent trying to obstruct that investigation and tweeting complaints about it.
If the Democrats hadn't allowed "The Squad" to run for Congress, Trump wouldn't have felt obliged to invite them to return to their countries. Months of tweeting time could have been saved.
If the Democrats hadn't asked difficult questions during confirmation hearings for people like Scott Pruitt and Betsy Devos and they had just let Trump appoint his Doctor to run the VA, it wouldn't be necessary now to have temporary "acting" leaders in place in many major roles.
If the Democrats had just agreed to concede the 2020 election, it wouldn't have been necessary for Giuliani to spend the latter part of 2018 and most of 2019 engrossed in his Most Excellent Ukraine Adventure. He wouldn't have needed to brief Trump on his activities and Trump wouldn't have needed to try to strong-arm the new Ukrainian President into helping out with Rudy's defamation attempts.
If the Democrats hadn't decided to hold hearings into the Ukraine affair, it wouldn't have been necessary for the White House to spend so much time and effort obstructing that process. Nevertheless, they persisted.
If the Democrats hadn't been, well, Democrats, there would have been no need for the FOX network and shows like Fox and Friends and Hannity would not have offered platforms for Trump to watch and call into.
Because of all these thing that the Democrats did, the White House was unable to focus and plan out it's response to the current crisis.
It's time to hold them accountable!
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I consider the January travel ban from China is like the lead batter hitting a tripple in the 1st inning. We are now down 10 to nothing heading into top of 4th. Trump is still bragging about the tripple and demands adoration from the subjects.
JG"s crazy uncle is just a ruined TG dinner. But Trump can kill. Eventually everyone will see the congenital incompetence of Trump. The GOP will regret forever the golden opportunity presented to rid us of this curse in Feb.
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