Debate students – young people passionate about the art of argumentation and persuasion – should be quarantined from Donald Trump’s impeachment defense. Either that, or use it as a textbook example of how not to argue a case.
It may take a leap of faith in these dark moments of American political life, but I’d like to think that we will one day return to the kind of normative discourse in which our dialectic is based on evidence and reason. We will get there only by forever banishing from our brains the intellectually-challenged rhetoric churned out by Trump and his Republican sycophants.
Here is just the tip of the bizarre, otherworldly political climate we are forced to endure:
After days of bruising testimony about how Trump bent foreign policy into a cudgel in an attempt to extract Ukraine’s help with his reelection campaign, the world awaited the president’s exculpatory rebuttal. And this is what we got through separate tweets: “The Republican Party, and me, (sic) had a GREAT day yesterday with respect to the phony impeachment Hoax”, and, “NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”
Yes, this is Donald Trump being Donald Trump. From his fictional inaugural crowd to his Sharpie-enhanced hurricane map, facts are foreign to this presidency. Still, when it comes to a subject as somber and serious as impeachment, it would have been nice to see the quality of debate rise above that of a middle school food fight.
Instead, Trump responded to a barrage of damaging testimony about his Ukrainian chicanery by calling in to Fox and Friends. His defense? He called Rep. Adam Schiff, who chaired the impeachment proceedings, a “sick puppy”, and insisted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “as crazy as a bedbug”. As for Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the president finally came up with a cause for firing her. He said – falsely – that the ambassador didn’t post Trump’s picture in the Ukrainian Embassy.
What a difference 20 years makes. The Bill Clinton impeachment in 1999 felt divisive and acrimonious at the time, but the discourse and arguments presented were thoroughly consistent with the adversarial system of dispute resolution. Both sides agreed on the facts: President Clinton had sex with an intern and lied about it. Republicans argued that the president should be impeached, not for the sexual liaison, but for lying about it. Clinton’s defenders, on the other hand, posited that a lie about sex does not rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, the constitutional basis for impeachment.
That all seems so quaint now. The current impeachment controversy can’t, by any stretch of the definition, be called a debate. Instead, we have two parallel universes. In one, House Democrats systematically assembled evidence to show that the president abrogated his sworn duty to execute policy based on the nation’s interests, not on his own partisan political motives.
For the most part, Trump and his defenders have avoided any engagement with the Democrats’ premise. Instead, the president called the process a “hoax” and insisted that he is “winning”. After his handpicked ambassador, Gordon Sondland, flipped on him last week and testified that there was, indeed, a quid-pro-quo and that “everyone was in the loop”, Trump triumphantly tweeted “. . .if this were a prizefight, they’d stop it.”
Meanwhile, two former prosecutors, Preet Bharara and Anne Milgram, issued a special edition of their podcast Thursday night just to rave about how compelling and persuasive last week’s impeachment witnesses were. They echoed the reaction of many of us by concluding that the case against Trump has been solidly proven. Yet, the Donald closed the week by announcing that “. . .we are winning big.” In a way, both the podcasters and the president are right. That’s because they are operating in separate universes, one factual and the other fictional.
The political arena’s rhetorical culture is a modified adaptation of the adversary system that has dominated adjudication of legal disputes for more than 200 years. It rests on the belief that if lawyers for disputing parties advocate fiercely and thoroughly for their clients, through both evidence and argument, a neutral factfinder, such as a judge or jury, will be able to determine the truth of the matter.
Deliberative bodies, from city councils to the U.S. Congress, have used a similar approach when arguing about legislation. The legislators marshal evidence that supports their position, along with arguments designed to persuade, not a judge or jury, but their fellow legislators and the voters who control their fate. Most political debate focuses less on the underlying facts of a controversy and more on the conclusions to be drawn from them.
And then along came a president who eschews facts the way vampires avoid crucifixes. To him, it’s all about the base. His fevered MAGA crowd has but one truth: the primacy of Donald Trump. He is their savior, their last great white hope against an evolving and diversifying culture they disdain. In this universe, there is no burden of proof because facts, evidence and laws don’t matter. His followers will believe anything he tells them. Impeachment is a hoax and a witch hunt. Trump is winning and the Democrats are losing. The news media is the enemy of the people. Joe Biden is corrupt. Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. His phone calls are perfect. It doesn’t matter that all of those assertions are demonstrably false. Facts are irrelevant in this universe.
And because his loyal fanbase worships him without question, congressional Republicans, many of whom see Trump as a malignant goiter on their political trajectory, will vote against impeachment out of fear that this president will tweet them out of office. Barring an unimaginable seismic change in this dynamic, the 45th president of the United States will be impeached in the House and acquitted in the Senate, both on party line votes. Trump will call it the greatest presidential achievement in the country’s history.
That leaves only one exit strategy for this dystopia. Those of us in the other universe, the one where facts and reasoned arguments really do matter, must vote like we’ve never voted before. We don’t yet know the name of our candidate, but truth itself will be on that ballot. It will be the one not named Donald John Trump. Without a hint of hyperbole, this will be the most important vote we ever cast.