Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

On the Right, Impeachment Is a Distraction, Not a ‘Witch Hunt’

Conservative allies of President Trump are borrowing from the Democrats’ 1998 playbook, claiming the inquiry is all a waste of time.

William B. Taylor Jr., the top United Sates diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy, arriving for the impeachment hearing on Wednesday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

They’re not calling it a “coup” or a “witch hunt.” There’s no “deep state” hoax, and the phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president wasn’t “perfect.”

Key conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have expressed concern about the lack of focus and consistency in the White House’s public response to the impeachment inquiry against him, which continues with a second day of public hearings on Friday, have begun a campaign to shift public opinion before they lose any more ground.

The goal, according to the strategists behind the effort, is to cast the impeachment hearings unfolding in Washington as a circuslike distraction that does little to help people worried about health care, jobs and financial stability — concerns that are far more front of mind for most Americans.

And the intended audience is the relatively few Americans in roughly two dozen congressional districts in a handful of battleground states who do not already have strong opinions about the president, and whose ambivalence toward both political parties is largely overshadowed in national polls showing widespread support for impeachment.

The argument is not entirely novel. Democrats may recognize its similarity to the one they used against Republicans in 1998 when they successfully portrayed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton as a partisan-driven exercise in futility. Conviction in the Senate at the time seemed unlikely, opening the door for Mr. Clinton’s defenders to accuse Republicans of putting the country through a needless national trauma.

Today, Republicans have seen, in surveys they have conducted, that one of the most effective ways to defend Mr. Trump is to remind voters that they will have a say about his fate in less than a year, and that regardless of what happens in the Democratic-controlled House, the chances of the Republican Senate removing him from office are remote.

“Anyone running in a swing district or talking to voters in a swing state should be driving this very message: This is a complete waste of time, a complete waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Jason Miller, a former strategist for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

To that end, part of the way Republicans plan to discredit the impeachment process is by claiming the hearings so far have uncovered little that is new, revelatory or damning. Even before the witnesses in Wednesday’s hearing uttered a single word, the White House and its allies had already discussed how they should insist it was all a terrible bore that failed to live up to the hype.

The president’s boosters in conservative news media were delivering this message while witnesses were still testifying.

“It’s going to be a blockbuster. You’re not going to want to miss this,” Rush Limbaugh declared at the opening of his show on Wednesday, with several hours in the hearing yet to go. But then he concluded, “It has been flat-out boring.”

Sean Hannity told his radio listeners almost the same thing. “This was supposed to be their big day. This was supposed to be their takedown day,” he said. “It is just dull. It is just boring. It is just meaningless.”

(For its part, the White House has not been absent from the fight. It has been arming its high-profile supporters and news media surrogates with talking points in a “What You Need To Know” email blast several times a day that rebuts Democrats’ claims point by point. It also hosts regular messaging conference calls with conservative activists.)

Some of the groups and strategists involved in the push to reframe the impeachment hearings are veterans of the fight over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh last year — a multimillion dollar, nationwide campaign that marshaled the resources of virtually the entire conservative movement, from the libertarian-minded organizations funded by the Koch brothers to the National Rifle Association.

So far, impeachment has yet to galvanize that kind of broad-based coalition, in part because Mr. Trump remains a disliked and mistrusted figure by some conservatives, including among the leaders of the Koch network, whom he has personally attacked. And many of the policy-based groups that focus on guns, abortion or religion have no obvious role to play in a presidential impeachment.

But the groups that are involved are pressing ahead. Mike Davis, a Republican strategist who worked on the Kavanaugh confirmation, said his party’s goal, until impeachment is resolved, should be “just talk to Americans using common sense.” Republicans should not speak like lawyers, making points about “quid pro quo” as they often have, or invoke the names of Ukrainian officials, whom most Americans have probably never heard of. He advises them to “act like you are speaking to a high school-educated aunt you respect.”

The Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions in ads targeting Democratic senators during the Kavanaugh battle, recently conducted a poll it shared with other conservative groups to determine how voters viewed the impeachment proceedings. It found that voters were most persuaded by the argument that the impeachment inquiry was a reckless act by a dysfunctional, do-nothing Congress. This message was especially potent, the survey found, with voters in districts where Democrats won in 2018 but where Mr. Trump secured a majority in 2016. The takeaway for voters, said one Republican who saw the results, was, “I voted for these folks to go to Washington and get things done, and now they are all focused on impeachment.”

And with the congressional hearings beginning their first public phase this week, conservative activists across the country have begun adopting this message in recent days.

“The Democrats are no longer a party, they are a circus,” Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said.

The American Action Network, an outside political group that supports Republican lawmakers, started a digital ad campaign in 37 swing districts this week challenging House Democrats to “get back to work on the issues that will actually make a difference in the lives of Americans across our country,” the group said.

Democrats realize that they are not immune from these criticisms — especially in their most competitive districts. And lawmakers who represent these districts, many of whom initially resisted starting impeachment proceedings, said they needed to demonstrate that they were spending adequate time on issues more urgently connected to their constituents’ well being.

Representative Debbie Dingell, who represents a politically and economically diverse district outside Detroit, said that while she has heard from constituents who are upset about impeachment, there were also many who voiced concerns about maternal health care and prescription drug prices.

“We’ve got to keep doing our jobs,” she said, which at the moment also involves the enormously fraught and historic obligation of deciding whether Mr. Trump should be the third president ever impeached. Though she found the charges from Republicans ironic — “Mitch McConnell hasn’t been doing anything in the Senate,” she said — she acknowledged the pressure. “You’ve got to get back to doing the business of the country,” she said, paraphrasing what she often hears from voters.

And on Thursday Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that she had received the message too. She announced that the House was close to reaching an agreement with the Trump administration on a major trade deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But in the end, it may be Mr. Trump who ultimately determines his party’s message. As his allies have learned, they can never predict whether he will work with them or improvise on his own.

“He’ll stick to his game plan,” said J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative activist who is on the board of directors of the N.R.A. “The question is, can we follow? Does he cut to the left, cut to the right or go straight up the field? If I’m ready to block to his right, and then all of a sudden he decides to cut left, well…” he added, trailing off.

Jeremy W. Peters covers national politics in the Washington bureau. His other assignments in his decade at The Times have included covering the financial markets, the media, New York politics and two presidential campaigns. More about Jeremy W. Peters

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: To Allies, No ‘Witch Hunt,’ Just a Big Waste of Time. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT