'We’re going to impeach the motherf---er': Democrats rip into Donald Trump, but Republicans not abandoning US president

New York: “We’re going to go in and impeach the motherf—er” - that’s the fiery new vocabulary from freshman Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in Washington DC less than 24 hours after Democrats roared back to power in the US House of Representatives, ready to make life hell for US president Donald Trump but Republicans are not showing any signs of ditching Trump despite his rapidly rising legal and political peril. This playbook isn’t new, although the Trump era makes it seem surreal. Back in the late 90s, during the Bill Clinton impeachment process, Democrats resolved to band together and oppose Republicans as pure strategy. They decided to turn every issue into a party line struggle, regardless of merits and that’s precisely what’s going on in 2019. [caption id=“attachment_5838841” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Freshman Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. AP[/caption] Yes, there’s a new sheriff in town - Speaker Nancy Pelosi; yes, the government shutdown, 17 investigations, potential indictments and impeachment talk are casting long shadows on the White House which is in complete chaos, the mood in American politics is raw and combustible but both Trump and his party are playing hardball like the Republicans did in the Nixon era and the Democrats did in the Clinton era. How long will it last? History tells us that when support for an embattled president fades, it cascades. In March 1974, merely a third of Americans favoured Nixon’s removal from office despite nearly two years of Watergate related revelations. Within a month, nearly half of America supported his dismissal. Americans changed their minds when the facts changed, when Nixon’s “smoking gun” tape offered evidence of complicity and guilt. That’s the reason why the 17 investigations against Trump become crucial. Until Robert Mueller releases some bombshell report or House investigations unravel more dirt on the Trump world, Republicans are not budging: “You had a Democratic president caught with his pants down and no Democrat deserted him”, is a stock response, referring to the Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky scandal. That support has been steadfast for Trump. Over the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the typical Republican member has sided with Trump 93 percent of the time in the House and 91 percent of the time in the Senate. Trump has dismissed talk that he might be impeached as “ridiculous”, his tweet claims he’s the most popular Republican in history and that he’s “done nothing wrong.” In a second tweet, he added, “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” - with no evidence to back up his claim through two years of his administration. The surface similarity of the Nixon case is a popular theme in current politics, like it was in the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The phrase “witch hunt” is one of them. Nixon used it, so does Trump. Both then and now, proof matters. Documents, tapes, bank records - anything that the general public can easily understand and staunch defenders can use as a fig leaf to justify their abandoning a man who they supported. Clinton was impeached on the narrowest grounds of all - perjury rather than harming the American people, private stupidity rather than say, collusion with a foreign power. Trump is betting from the beginning of his presidency till today that anything less than 100% criminality is okay and he needs 34 Senators to believe this and stick with him. So far, the numbers are on his side. Trump’s enemies cast his rage tweeting as a constant stream of lies and they want more Americans to feel the same and understand how the breadcrumbs lead to impeachment or indictment. How many Americans distrust the US president matters less in the current time than how many trust him no matter what.