In our final newsletter, a look at impeachment's impact on American politics.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. We’re signing off for good with a look at how the country responded to President Trump’s impeachment and his acquittal. |
This newsletter spent a lot of time thinking about the politicians and officials responsible for conducting, participating in and judging the impeachment inquiry and trial. One of those officials, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — a member of the National Security Council — was escorted from the White House today, most likely as an act of retribution for his testimony. |
Yet for all of the drama we covered, the plodding path to an acquittal took us right back to where we started, with both sides seeming to hold the same intensity of anger or despair. |
For our last edition of the Impeachment Briefing, I wanted to think more about how those outside of the political class experienced the story. I talked to three people — an independent voter and two Times columnists with often contrasting views — who tried to help me understand why the country remains divided along familiar lines. |
How an independent responded |
Jerry Iannacci is 52. He lives in Newtown Square, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and has taught art classes at a public middle school for 22 years. He grew up in a historically Republican pocket of the state but became a Democrat, voting enthusiastically for Barack Obama. |
Before the 2016 election, disillusioned with the tensions in American politics, he changed his voter registration to independent. And for the first time in his life, he chose not to vote in the presidential race. |
“I’m one of those people who maybe swung it Trump’s way,” he told me. “It’s a regret, but it felt like a matter of principle.” |
But when he watched the impeachment proceedings, Mr. Iannacci — who, as a swing voter in a swing state, represents perhaps the most coveted constituency in American politics — was reminded of the equal-opportunity disgust he has felt. |
The investigation and trial of President Trump, he said, would be remembered in historical writing but not in what he referred to as our “regular social-political climate,” leaving an otherwise momentous event deprived of immediate meaning. |
“Impeachment should have been a chance for us to look objectively at what our values are,” he said. Instead, he only grew “more disconnected and disillusioned with the belief that we are exceptional and different.” |
The almost perfectly split votes to impeach, block new witnesses and acquit the president reflected what felt so broken to Mr. Iannacci. |
“If it’s your camp, it’s O.K. If it’s the other camp, it’s not O.K.,” he said. “If you’re saying it only matters if the other guy did it, that’s a scary situation for us as a country.” |
Mr. Iannacci sees a way out: finding a way to convince more voters that the parts of our democratic process that bring stalemate are still worth the effort. |
“If you start to trivialize this or that, you’re saying only the stuff that matters to you matters,” he said. “Elections matter, impeachment matters. There has to be some group of people way smarter than me that have to figure out how to make that argument work.” |
What can the polls tell us? |
Mr. Iannacci’s frustrations are reflected in the polling around impeachment. There was a surprising trend for Mr. Trump: His, and the Republican Party’s, numbers remained steady, and occasionally ticked upward, during the impeachment trial, offering him the sheen of affirmation. According to a FiveThirtyEight polling average, the president’s current approval rating is on the high end of the very narrow range we’ve seen throughout his presidency. |
I spoke with David Leonhardt, an opinion columnist at The Times who writes about polling, to help me understand what these kinds of trends mean. |
David, what have the polls told you about how impeachment has affected voters? |
If aliens landed from outer space and looked at Mr. Trump’s approval ratings, they would never know impeachment had happened. They would never know that anything had happened. They wouldn’t know about his successes — getting judges confirmed, passing the tax cuts — or his failures, like health care or the Mueller investigation. His approval rating has been remarkably solid. |
Do we as journalists have a mistaken idea of how events influence people? |
We live in such a polarized country. People have already made up their minds about Donald Trump and the two parties. That’s not completely irrational. If you are in favor of gun rights and against abortion rights, I understand why you wouldn’t change your mind about Donald Trump because of the news of the day. If you want more gun control and you want abortion to be available, the fact that the economy added several hundred thousand jobs in the last few months is not going to suddenly make you like Donald Trump. |
The problem with this system is that it can really reduce accountability in politics. People are going to stand by their side even in extreme cases. It happened during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and we’re living in an even more polarized time now. There is even less room for persuasion than there was back then. |
Did impeachment end up mattering to people? |
We don’t know right now. If you looked at the polling, you can say it didn’t matter much. But the only poll that really matters is the election in 2020. Polling also suggests that Americans are somewhat exhausted by the Trump presidency. There are some number of people who don’t hate him but are tired by the chaos. I think it’s too early to know whether this damaged him at all with those people. |
Throughout impeachment, polling constantly indicated a split of some kind oriented by party, even with slight majorities. The final acquittal vote was almost perfectly party line. Why are we seeing so little gray? |
Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former White House adviser, has said that we’re not going to hug it out, meaning America is not going to hug out these big issues. There’s a really dark version of that, which is that we have a level of societal conflict that we haven’t had in some time. |
There’s also some truth in that, whether it’s about the social issues like gun control or abortion, whether it’s about how religious a society we should be or how diverse a society we should be. There are these huge debates, like impeachment, where basically the parties neatly line up on either side of those debates. It is very hard given the stakes and the starkness of the disagreements for any individual news story, even one this big, to move someone. |
What to make of an age of impunity |
The acquittal was another instance of how the biggest stories in the Trump years have eventually concluded without politically fatal consequences. |
My colleague David Brooks, a longtime opinion columnist here, considered that phenomenon recently. The big news events in our lives, David wrote, “have ceased to drive politics the way they used to. We’ve seen gigantic events like impeachment, the Kavanaugh hearings, the Mueller investigation and the ‘Access Hollywood’ tapes. They come and go and barely leave a trace on the polls, the political landscape or evaluations of Donald Trump.” |
The organizing principle that can explain the trend, David says, is sociological. “When a whole country sees events through a similar lens, then you don’t have to think a lot about the process people use to make meaning. It’s similar across the land,” he wrote. “But when people in different regions and subcultures have nonoverlapping lenses, the process by which people make sense of events is more important than the event itself.” |
I asked David about how we — and those we don’t agree with — can think about the cycle of impunity we seem to be in. |
Both sides walked away from impeachment with similar levels of indignation. What explains that? |
We started out with the premise that this impeachment trial was like a jury, that people walk in with a blank slate and see the evidence, decide whether there’s a crime and decide whether to convict. But this is happening in the middle of basically a political cold war. The price of convicting someone of your own party is perceived as the essential elimination of the self. It’s perceived as losing the moral war to the other side, as giving in to each other, of giving up your loyalty to sacred ideas. |
This is the problem with scandal politics. It’s the dark legacy of Watergate: When Richard Nixon fell, you realized you didn’t have to defeat your opponent in the ballot box. You could destroy him through scandal. It was easier and more morally satisfying. It also fed the fantasy that infects our politics that you can make the other 42 percent of the country go away. |
But did Democrats have a case? |
They did. The president was absolutely guilty. If I had been a senator, I would have voted to convict and remove him from office. But where I fault the Democrats is that there was never any chance of that. If you’re like myself and think he shouldn’t be president, you have to notice that his approval ratings are up and that the G.O.P. is popular. The reactions by the two sides are remarkably similar to the Clinton impeachment. There’s something about the country that just doesn’t like this process. |
How much of this is about how the journalists communicate the news? In our pages and on TV, for example. |
A story on social mobility in Idaho isn’t grabby. Something about cable likes the soap opera of the unfurling of scandal, and the daily adrenaline rush of: “We’re about to get him.” The accumulation of the feeling of nearing defeat. But as we’ve seen in these big stories in the Trump years, the defeat doesn’t arrive. |
You wrote that “ideological polarization is not on the rise, emotional polarization is on the rise. We don’t necessarily disagree more. We perceive our opponents to be more menacing.” That felt like the theme of the president’s news conference yesterday: The enemy is never thy friend. |
It’s two things: negative polarization, that politics is the organization of hatred. The second effect is affective polarization. It’s all emotional, especially when we’re in scandal mode. It’s not about how craft an infrastructure plan, which is a boring, practical question. It becomes a moral war for recognition. |
Nancy Pelosi understood this before impeachment got started, that each team needed to police its own side. And if each team was unwilling to do it, then the other side trying to police it would make everything worse. That lack of policing our side, on the conservative side — that started with the first Republican primary debate in 2015. |
What do we take away from the last four months? |
Progressives think that the basic norms of our democracy have to be enforced. And I think that’s an extremely fair point. |
It’s been an immense pleasure writing this newsletter every weekday for four months. There was always something to explore and think about, even on days without as much news, and I’m grateful to my many wonderful colleagues who helped me and you organize and grasp what we were seeing on Capitol Hill and in the White House. This story stretched across practically every desk in the newsroom. |
We received tens of thousands of emails from you describing your reactions to the impeachment saga. The notes that felt especially important were from those who said they had young children, or long days in classrooms, that prevented them from staying on top of the news. I hope this newsletter was informative to the end. |
If you’d like to continue reading New York Times newsletters, I recommend subscribing to “On Politics,” a smart daily snapshot of American politics that will help you keep up with an increasingly busy campaign season. |
Thank you for reading us. |
