Douthat on why Trump may survive impeachement

Ross Douthat, How Trump Survives, NYTimes 26 Nov 2019:

... that part of the country relies on general heuristics rather than the specific details of presidential misconduct to determine when it might support something like impeachment. In which case any strategy congressional Democrats pursue or any defense served up by Jim Jordan or Lindsey Graham matters less to Trump’s fate than the answers to two basic questions: Is the economy O.K.? Is the world falling apart?

We have two recent examples, Nixon and Clinton:

Nixon didn’t survive because his second term featured a series of economic shocks — summarized on Twitter by the political theorist Jacob Levy as “an oil crisis, a stock market crash, stagflation and recession” — while Clinton’s second term was the most recent peak of American power, pride and optimism. In a given impeachment debate, under this theory, neither the nature of the crimes nor the state of the political parties matter as much as whether an embattled president is seen as presiding over stability or crisis, over good times or potential ruin.

To the extent that this reductive theory is true — and clearly it’s at least somewhat true — we shouldn’t be surprised at Trump’s survival, and we shouldn’t assume that it can be explained only by polarization or hyper-partisanship, Fox News or fake news, or for that matter by the “that’s how you get Trump” progressive overreach that I tend to critique.

Of course it matters that Trump’s party is craven and debased; of course it matters that the Democrats have swung to an ideological extreme. But maybe it matters more to Trump’s not good but stable — amazingly stable — approval ratings that he is presiding over a period of general stability, at home and abroad, which would have to fall apart for the supermajority that turned on Nixon to finally turn on him.

The American president is two things: an executive who controls the apparatus of government and a symbol who represents the state in the minds of the populace. The British separated these two functions. The monarch is a symbol of the state; the prime minister runs the government. 

Trump's base values him primarily as a symbol, not as an executive. As long as the country is more or less OK (in their minds) that's all that matters. In contrast, in addition to disliking many of his policies, of the distress over Trump is grounded in the fact that he is an incompetent federal executive.

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BTW, the Netflix series The Crown is doing an excellent job of showing us the difference between these two functions, symbol and executive:  see my post, The Crown and the Presidency, 2016. I am now three episodes in to the third season.