opinion

Opinion: Impeachment fails to snuff Trump

The Democrats were clearly hoping that their partisan impeachment sham would discourage President Trump’s base and weaken his political standing ahead of the 2020 election. The immense crowd that turned out for the president’s Keep America Great rally in Battle Creek — which took place even as the House of Representatives was casting its fateful vote — demonstrated that the politically motivated effort is having exactly the opposite effect.

The rally drew thousands of voters, over 90% of whom were from the crucial battleground state of Michigan. While congressional Democrats were playing to the radical fringe, the voters their party used to represent were braving the elements and the crowds to cheer on President Trump — consistent with our experience at previous Keep America Great rallies, 17% of the voters who turned out in Battle Creek were registered Democrats.

There’s simply no room in today’s Democratic Party for old-school moderates interested in collegiality and compromise, as the impeachment vote made perfectly clear. Democrats who joined the bipartisan vote against their party’s flimsy articles of impeachment — and even Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who merely voted “present” — were excoriated by the left for their heresy. If any of them tries to run for reelection as a Democrat next year, they’ll certainly face a well-funded primary challenger backed by far-left progressive organizations, bringing their political careers to an ignominious end.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a coldly calculating leader, so she probably didn’t have any compunctions about throwing a few backbenchers to the wolves in an effort to damage President Trump. In this case, though, Pelosi’s normally keen political instincts failed her. The sacrificial offering she made at the altar of the “resistance” didn’t merely fail — it backfired spectacularly.

Voters are much smarter than establishment politicians give them credit for, and they haven’t been fooled by the Democrats’ cynical attempt to nullify the outcome of the 2016 election. Pelosi seems to think that getting the House to impeach President Trump was all she needed to put an “asterisk” on the Trump presidency. She’s even floating the possibility of using a procedural gimmick to prevent the Senate from holding a trial — a transparently partisan effort to prevent the upper chamber from acquitting the president and undercutting the supposed significance of the House vote.

It’s not going to work.

Public opinion has swung against the Democrats despite a rigged “inquiry” that bombarded Americans with the left’s talking points for months on end. The polls are moving in the opposite direction, showing that the partisan impeachment sham has given President Trump a major bump in support in several critical swing states. A survey released by USA Today just days before the House impeachment vote was even more revealing, finding that the president has jumped to a sizable nationwide lead over all of his top Democrat rivals.

Like Greek fire, Donald Trump can’t be extinguished. Trying to remove him only makes him stronger, especially among the voters that Democrats most take for granted.

Brad Parscale is the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President Inc.