If you have watched any of Tucker Carlson's primetime show on Fox News lately, you'll know that his 3 Oct. opinion piece in the Daily Caller, cowritten with the publication's publisher, Neil Patel, is a nearly pivotal shift in his impeachment presentations. Sweepingly titled "The Truth About Impeachment," it's also schizophrenic, since it diverges in sentiment from Carlson's on-air ravings of obliviousness and denial — his non-stop coddling, that is, of the most devoted Trumpeteers.
"Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden," write Carlson and Patel. "Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea…. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world’s many corrupt countries."
That's an astounding passage, with Carlson moving from "Why all the fuss?" to acknowledging Trump's corruption and debasement of American foreign policy. What follows, though, is more of the shifty Tucker we all know. He asks the "key question" of "whether the president’s actions, advisable or not [he just wrote they are not], rise to the level of an impeachable offense"? You'll be less astounded to read Tucker's answer: "It’s hard to argue they do."
He then fortifies his embattled position with gross misrepresentations. "The president did not, as was first reported, offer a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians. He did not condition any U.S. support on a Biden investigation" — which is but a restatement of the first statement. And "the Justice Department has already looked at the totality of the call and determined that Trump did not break the law."
Yes, and in 2002, every last one of Iraq's 11.5 million voters reelected Saddam Hussein as president. Had Bill Barr been in charge of that glorious event, Saddam would have won by 110 percent.
Of course Trump broke the law, as even a cursory reading of the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act tells us — along with extortion, bribery, witness tampering, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and obstruction of Congress — and that's before we get to the Constitution's fundamental precepts of foreign perils. In addition, the far right is still hammering at the "no quid pro quo" excuse, while even though one is not needed to prosecute a strong impeachment case, Trump brazenly coughed one up on the phone with Ukraine.
In fact, as James Madison would also tell us, Trump's wretched behavior and demonstrable unfitness for office have been quite enough — by themselves — to justify impeachment. Said a "former White House official" to the NY Times: "There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls. Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet."
Carlson himself detracts from what he suggests is "the political class's" detraction from what is really important: "They definitely don’t want to address seriously the issues that drove voters to the radical step of voting in Trump as our president — issues such as income inequality, economic stagnation and our broken immigration system."
These are peculiar issues to raise in Trump's defense. He has only exacerbated income inequality, is sponsoring the economic stagnation to come, and has turned a broken immigration system into a scandalous outrage.
Carlson and Patel close with a somewhat conventional argument: Having acknowledged Trump's assorted malfeasances, "how about we let [the 'American people'] sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner."
Which is pathetically laughable, since the cowriters have conceded not merely a touch of Trumpian wrongdoing, but the squalid advancement of the president's "political goals," thus rendering us "just another of the world’s many corrupt countries."
Still, Carlson and Patel's singularly convoluted argument is a notch above the multiplicity of convoluted arguments presented by Republicans so far — and almost certainly the one, in the end, they'll stick with. Just as House Democrats will narrowly concentrate on Trump's impeachable offenses in connection with Ukraine and China, so will Republicans concentrate on the per-force inadequate yet solitarily comprehensible defense of let-the-election-substitute-for-impeachment.
What else, after all, can the party of unindicted co-conspirators really do?