Impeach This!
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine. We ask what it would take for Republican senators to desert him and what the collateral damage is likely to be for the Democratic presidential candidates. Plus is Hillary really - really?! - back in the game?
Talking Points:
What are the grounds for impeaching Trump?
- There’s a legal argument: Trump breached campaign finance laws.
- There’s also a constitutional argument: that Trump is trading American interests for personal gain.
More specific charges are less open to counter-attack. Politically, it may be advantageous for the Democrats to focus on Ukraine.
- But a too narrow charge might not resonate. The Democrats need to make the case that this matters morally and link it to a broader American narrative.
- Elections are a sacred event in American democracy.
- But the U.S. electoral system also depends on a certain amount of corruption to work.
- Is fear of foreign interference really just displacement?
The chances of a successful conviction that passes the Senate are next to nothing, but they’re not nothing.
- The latest polls show a modest rise in Republican support for impeachment.
- Republicans might see Pence as the best way to secure the interests of the party.
A foriegn policy crisis may be what dooms Trump.
- Republican Senators are furious about what Trump just did in Syria.
- The Republican establishment can’t pull Erdogan back.
- But during foreign policy crises, people usually rally around the president.
Biden’s campaign may be collateral damage in all of this. Elizabeth Warren now appears to be the front runner.
- There doesn’t seem to be a centrist candidate capable of picking up Biden’s banner.
- Warren poses an existential threat to the Silicon Valley titans.
- But she fits into a long American tradition of anti-monopoly dissent.
- If Warren runs, and wins, as a candidate from the Democratic left, she would make history.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Further Learning:
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. It has been quite a while |
| 0:08.8 | since we checked in with Gary Gerstle to talk about the state of the Trump presidency |
| 0:13.5 | and indeed American democracy. Quite a lot has happened since we thought this would |
| 0:17.7 | be a good week to get right back in. |
| 0:26.0 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books which is celebrating |
| 0:30.6 | its 40th anniversary for the next few months with an unimprovable offer. Get a year's |
| 0:36.0 | subscription and a limited edition LRB tote bag for just 40 pounds by using the URL |
| 0:43.4 | lrb.me forward slash birthday. |
| 0:53.3 | Along with Gary Helen Thompson is here. We're going to try and cover quite a lot starting |
| 0:59.1 | with the impeachment and working our way out from that back to the thing. I think the last |
| 1:04.2 | thing we talked about which was the state of the democratic nomination race. But if we |
| 1:08.8 | start with the impeachment then before we do the politics I don't know if this is the |
| 1:12.4 | law or the or something else but some of the slightly more technical issues here because |
| 1:18.0 | I'm not 100% clear on my own mind what he's being I know what he's being impeached for |
| 1:24.2 | but on what grounds because you do get two rival accounts on one account it's because |
| 1:30.4 | he has done something illegal and the illegal thing is essentially breaching campaign finance |
| 1:35.5 | law because he solicited a thing of value from the Ukrainian president. On another account |
| 1:43.2 | it's unconstitutional because he's done something that doesn't need a campaign finance |
| 1:47.4 | law for people to know it's wrong which is basically trading America's interests for |
| 1:51.7 | his private political interests and then not exactly the same thing and also one of them |
| 1:58.4 | refers back to a law that was passed in the 1970s and the other goes back to the origins |
| 2:03.6 | of the Republic. So I'm now looking at Gary which one is which one is he on the hook for most? |
... |
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