michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, get ready for impeachment.

michelle goldberg

I don’t think you can overemphasize just how abrupt the change has been. The dam sort of burst all at once.

david leonhardt

Then we talk about the 2020 primaries on the Republican side.

ross douthat

Anyone who runs for president against an incumbent president who probably shouldn’t be president deserves a certain amount of credit and admiration.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

I have had a feeling that I’ve never had in the past, which is this desire to be in the future looking back analytically at right now. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Just one week ago, it seemed highly unlikely that House Democrats would impeach President Trump. But then came the news about Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to produce dirt on Joe Biden. And suddenly, everything changed. This week, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house, who has long been opposed to impeachment, announced that she’s going to open a process that could ultimately lead to the president’s impeachment. Michelle, you’ve been in favor of impeachment for a long time, and I know you’ve been frustrated that it wasn’t happening. But I assume now you think it really is likely to happen.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I really do. And I think it’s— I don’t think you can overemphasize just how abrupt the change has been. The dam sort of burst all at once. I had a column calling out Nancy Pelosi for her failure to begin impeachment proceedings, and for her failure to do it after the Mueller Report, which I think emboldened Trump in his latest betrayal of the country with Ukraine. I had background conversations with people on both sides of this issue and got no sense, as of Monday morning, that there was any real movement. And then by Monday evening, impeachment had seemed inevitable.

david leonhardt

Well, I agree with you that it’s likely to happen. And as regular listeners know, you and I’ve been on different sides of this. I have previously thought impeachment would be a mistake. I thought it would have been a mistake after Mueller because I don’t think it would have persuaded people who didn’t already think Trump should be gone. Given that the Mueller Report was a letdown, we don’t need to revisit that whole argument. I know you disagree, Michelle. But I think it’s the right thing now, and I think it’s really telling that a lot of these House Democrats, who don’t just have to run in San Francisco or in New York City or in Massachusetts, but have to run in real swing districts are also coming out for it. Out of a combination of thinking, it’s the right thing and also thinking the politics have changed. Ross, you are particularly good at throwing cold water on liberal excitement, and you did that again this week with your column arguing that President Trump actually wants to be impeached. I will confess I’m a little skeptical of this particular tossing of cold water, so why don’t you make that case?

ross douthat

So I don’t know if this counts as cold water. I mean, just because the president wants something doesn’t mean that it’s actually good for him. What might be the things that Trump thinks he could get out of an impeachment fight? The first is, basically, that for now, impeachment is a lot less popular than the Democratic policy agenda. And so it shifts the conversation, maybe only temporarily, to terrain where the Democrats are doing something that a majority of the country doesn’t necessarily want them to do. Two, I think Trump has benefited throughout his campaigns and presidency from this contrast between his overt corruption and the kind of business-as-usual corruption of the DC establishment, where he basically presents himself as sort of a man who’s sort of honest about his cynicism and self-dealing, unlike the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation and the D.C. elite and the deep state and so on. And so I think he probably imagines that something similar could happen if we have a battle that sort of loops in everything Hunter Biden has ever done and the Biden family has ever done to profit off their family name. And then the third and fourth all sort of run together. I think that Trump has always delighted in watching Republicans who claim to have principles and honor bend the knee to him. And I think an impeachment battle might not, but is likely, to end with lots of Republicans who might be Trump’s successor voting not to remove him from office. I think Trump likes these kind of highly personalized Twitter-ready battles in this primal way that I think even he maybe doesn’t fully understand. I think there was part of the Mueller investigation that he enjoyed. I think there’s part of an impeachment fight that he’ll enjoy, maybe a little more because he can only be removed from office whereas Mueller could actually put his family in jail.

michelle goldberg

So first of all, I think that that kind of overrates— I mean, and your column gestures at that this too— that I don’t think Trump thinks about things that logically or projects things into the future that much. I mean, he clearly has a drive towards chaos and destruction and overplaying his hands and always one-upping whoever he thinks he’s up against. I really disagree that Trump enjoyed the Mueller investigation. He was more restrained during the Mueller investigation and became more unleashed afterwards. He’s just been much more overtly lawless since the Mueller investigation ended, which suggests to me that the Mueller investigation worried him enough to provide some modest check on his criminality and corruption. And then finally, I think it was interesting to watch him give this speech at the U.N. As the dam was breaking and more and more Democrats were coming out for impeachment, it was this fascist speech that was delivered as if he had been tranquilized and was then reading from a phone book in, maybe, a foreign language. He seemed exhausted. He seemed deflated. And so, yeah. He might become energetic in battle, and he obviously drove himself to this point, but I don’t think he’s going to be happy about where he has ended up, at least right now.

david leonhardt

Ross, I’ll add one thing on that before you reply, which is I’m not so sure that the conversation in the Democratic primary has been so good for the Democrats. I think it’s really unfortunate. But many of them have come out for things that are unpopular, like taking away people’s private health insurance or border decriminalization. And the only frontrunner who hasn’t is Joe Biden, who—

michelle goldberg

—and Pete Buttigieg.

david leonhardt

—and Pete Buttigieg, who’s now way, way back in the polls. So I don’t think this campaign has been so great for the Democrats. And it’s not clear to me that focusing people on Trump’s misdeeds is actually so terrible.

ross douthat

So two things. First, to take the example you picked, David, where maybe this is better for the Democrats than focusing on the health care debate in their primaries. I think from his perspective, it could be a win-win because his theory might be that this helps take down Biden. Hunter Biden is emblematic of the kind of totally legal self-dealing that’s really common in Washington, D.C. And so if Biden is associated with that, it helps Elizabeth Warren. So the end game is Trump gets impeached. He doesn’t get removed from office. The impeachment helps elevate Warren. Warren is easier for Trump to beat. Trump feels victorious. That’s another impeachment helping Trump scenario I could spin out. Now, I think everybody may be overestimating the political import of impeachment, that it could happen, and Trump could not be removed from office. And then in the time between impeachment and the election, 17 other controversies will cycle through. And it’s not either going to be the game changer that impeachment advocates think or the debacle that I think Nancy Pelosi has been afraid of.

michelle goldberg

I just want to say a couple of things. First of all, I think we need to be really, really careful to distinguish Hunter Biden and, quote, unquote, “the Biden family.” There’s a New Yorker piece that I hope people read about Hunter Biden, who is a really troubled man who has obviously done some sketchy things. But there is no evidence that his father has enabled any of that. Joe Biden was sort of troubled by some of the things that Hunter was doing but also just decided not to get involved.

david leonhardt

I’m not sure that impeaching is a game changer, but Michelle, you’ve really persuaded me, particularly at this point, that not impeaching now looks like a game changer. If Democrats look at this latest outrage by Trump and say, ah, just another one, that not only sends him a message that he can keep doing whatever he wants, but I actually think it brings political risk for the Democrats in terms of just making them look feckless.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I mean, I also don’t necessarily think that impeaching will be a game changer. I don’t think we have any way of knowing how this is going to unfold. I know that some of the Democrats who have been against impeachment have worried that, yeah, what if we do this, he doesn’t get removed, and then he just sits there for another eight months and feeling even more emboldened? But I do think that the failure to impeach — it both sends a message that the conduct that he’s engaged in so far is not impeachable and is, therefore, somehow tolerable in a president. And I also do think it makes Democrats look overcautious, overcalculating. And when in doubt, just do the right thing.

david leonhardt

The assumption all along has been that Senate Republicans will line up behind Trump and acquit him, just as they have lined up behind him on the vast majority of things during his presidency. Ross, do you think that should still be our working assumption? Or can you see a not ridiculous scenario in which Marco Rubio and some others start to think, wait a second, we’ve got Mike Pence in waiting — I really don’t want to define my career by defending this guy?

ross douthat

I think it should be our default assumption that all but maybe one or two or three Republicans will stick with him. I think there’s some space where something else could happen. And look. I mean, we don’t have all the details at all. But the default here is just— this is a point I stole from Jonathan Last, a writer for the anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark. But he was saying, look, the difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon was a man who belonged to the Republican Party, who believed in the Republican Party as an institution. And when Republicans in Congress went to Nixon and said, look, the game is up, they knew that Nixon would listen to them. Part of the bind that the Republicans are in is that what I think of as sort of the smartest and brightest Republican senators, the sort of range of younger senators that includes Rubio and Josh Hawley, and Ben Sasse and three or four others— all of these guys have long-term and short-term political ambitions that Trump himself can carpet-bomb from retirement after he’s defeated. These guys are politicians. They’re political animals. I can imagine getting a couple profiles in courage. I can’t imagine getting anywhere near enough to get to — you don’t just need 60. You need 67 votes in the Senate. That seems very hard.

david leonhardt

I do think there’s some chance of a cascade, though.

ross douthat

Yeah. If you could get to 10 — maybe you could get to 20 — but getting from 2 to 10 is really hard.

david leonhardt

Michelle, you get the last word. Do you see a scenario where Republicans turn on him?

michelle goldberg

No. Not absent some huge shift in public opinion, although, I mean, I do agree that there could be a cascade because it’s not like any of these people like him. They hate him. My read on most Republicans is that they hate liberals far more than they love this country or that they love our Constitution. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

O.K. We’ll leave it there. Something tells me this topic is going to dominate much of the next couple months of news, and we will be talking about it again. But for now, we will take a quick break and be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Their supporters call them the Three Musketeers. President Trump calls them the Three Stooges. They’re the other Republicans running for president in 2020. Mark Sanford is a former governor and congressman from South Carolina. He supported Trump in 2016, but he is now one of Trump’s biggest Republican critics.

archived recording (mark sanford) I think we need to have a conversation there. I think we need to have a conversation on the degree to which institutions and political culture are being damaged by this president.

david leonhardt

The next candidate, Joe Walsh, is a former Tea Party congressman from Illinois. He’s somewhat of a Trumpist on Twitter. He has attacked the parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims and supported the lie that Barack Obama was a Muslim.

archived recording (joe walsh) And I wouldn’t call myself a racist, but I’ve said racist things on Twitter. There’s no doubt about it.

david leonhardt

Finally, Bill Weld. He’s the former governor of Massachusetts, and he he’s a classic moderate New England Republican.

archived recording (bill weld) And we’re now talking about trillion dollars of accumulated deficit. That raises a fairness issue to the young people, the millennials and Gen Xers who are going to have to pay that bill. I’m not going to pay that bill.

david leonhardt

So Ross, have any of these musketeers won your heart, and why do they matter?

ross douthat

They haven’t won my heart. I find anyone who runs for president against an incumbent president who probably shouldn’t be president deserves a certain amount of credit and admiration. I think that you have to temper that admiration with the realization that running for president in this way can also be a little bit of a grift. I think a lot of anti-Trump Republicans sort of watched a version of that happen with Evan McMullin, who ran this doomed third-party conservative campaign against Trump and then seemed determined to monetize it for the next two to four years. And I think someone like Walsh, who is sort of a professional bomb thrower — this gets him on cable news and gives him a different profile. Now, obviously, he’s sort of torched his preexisting brand, so maybe he is exonerated from the grifting charge. All of these three guys have what you might call the sort of Marianne Williamson-versus-Oprah problem. They all represent different tendencies within the Republican Party — Rockefeller republicanism, Tea Party conservatism— without having the kind of profile or footprint necessary to be more than just cable news challengers to Trump, which is basically what they are right now. They’re characters for MSNBC and CNN.

david leonhardt

I understand who Sanford is as a candidate and who Weld is. I don’t totally understand what Walsh’s game is because I get that he’s more Trumpist than Sanford, but what’s his problem with Trump?

michelle goldberg

He pretty early on was getting frustrated on Twitter about Trump’s evident bald-faced lies and also his deviations from conservative orthodoxy on all sorts of things, particularly his deviations from conservative economic orthodoxy. You saw this anger and opposition building over a long time. And I think there’s something that happens with apostates, which is that as you were rejected from the world that sort of once defined you and that you once lived fully inside of, your entire worldview sort of shifts. And I think that that’s what has happened with Joe Walsh out of maybe some combination of grift, principle, and social psychology.

ross douthat

Yeah. And you can make a case that Walsh is actually the closest thing to what you would really want in a primary challenger. I mean, that Sanford was the genuinely principled, small government, deficit cutting conservative who really believed in cut, cap, and balance and all these ideas that were sort of in vogue among the Tea Party intelligentsia circa 2010. And Walsh was the guy talking about Barack Obama’s birthplace on Twitter. So for him to convert to anti-Trumpism is actually more interesting, and I think relevant, to where a lot of Republican voters might be, potentially.

michelle goldberg

My friend, Eyal Press, wrote this book called “Beautiful Souls,” which is basically about people who break ranks in all different kinds of circumstances. The point that he makes is that people who break ranks are often true believers who are truly disillusioned when the thing that they believe in doesn’t live up to their ideals about it. It’s the people who were most committed to Tea Party ideals and kind of conservative intellectual vision that have broken with Trump because he has set all that on fire.

david leonhardt

I don’t disagree with that, but it leaves me thinking, really, that there is no clear post-Trump Republican Party because to the extent that any of these guys have a vision that actually coheres, like Bill Weld does, it’s a vision that is based on an American public that doesn’t exist. So it’s just really unclear to me, now that Trump kind of called the lie on what the Republican Party was, that many Republican voters were not actually enamored of small government tax cuts. They’re right wing on all kinds of things, but they’re a little more populist. Now that he called the lie on that, it’s just not at all clear to me what a Republican Party after Trump looks like that is real but also just doesn’t have a ton of Trumpism still in it.

ross douthat

Because Trump is popular within the Republican Party, because the economy is good, because he has not presided over major foreign policy catastrophes, it’s very hard for any politician who wants to have a career after Trump to talk themselves into running against him. The shape of the Republican Party after Trump — I mean, who knows for sure — but I think you can see the outline of a pretty clear debate. You’ll have people in a zone between Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, who sort of want to go back to where the party was before Trump and pretend nothing has changed. And then you have people like Rubio and Josh Hawley who want to remake the party in a more populist direction, adapt to whatever Trump has revealed. But both of those groups— they want Trump to go away, but they’re afraid of what Trump can do to their plans for the Republican Party in 2024 or 2028. So you’re left with the ideologies of the past. Basically, all that’s missing here, really — we need John Bolton. He’s not a neoconservative technically, but he’s certainly a foreign policy hawk. You could add the sort of uber hawk primary challenger, and then you’d have the whole range of versions of Republicanism past that Trump defeated. And Bolton as a primary challenger would be more interesting, certainly, than the three that we have right now.

michelle goldberg

I mean, there’s very — it seems to me that there is very little appetite in either party for big, new foreign invasions. I mean, thank goodness. The thing that I don’t understand— or maybe I do understand— but there’s such a lack of vision. It’s like, do any of these people remember what happened to George W. Bush? I mean, George W. Bush, much more than Trump, was venerated across the Republican Party. I mean, they worshipped George W. Bush. It was grotesque. And then it all collapsed so quickly. And it’s very easy for me to imagine a version of the future 10 years from now, where Dinesh D’Souza, or the heir to Dinesh D’Souza, who’s like a kind of right-wing, revisionist historian troll, insists that, no, Trump was never actually a Republican. He was always really a Democrat. And they basically try to pretend that none of this ever really happened. There’s such an opportunity for the person who stakes out that anti-Trump position in the same way that Trump benefited from what was, at the time, very impolitic criticism of George W. Bush.

ross douthat

See, I think — so two things. One, Michelle’s future — you also have to have the mirror image, which is that there’ll be the liberal pundits who are saying, man, there’s nothing worse than President Tucker Carlson and Vice President Peter Thiel and if only we could get back to the civilized republicanism of the Donald Trump era.

david leonhardt

Michelle and I hereby promise never to say that, and you can hold us to it, Ross.

michelle goldberg

Well, I don’t know. I also said— I remember— can I just say quickly, I remember during George W. Bush’s administration saying, my god, can you imagine if there’s ever a world in which we’re looking back nostalgically about George W. Bush?

ross douthat

The other point, though, is that Trump came along and attacked George W. Bush’s record in 2016, when nobody else was willing to do it. And it helped him. But he did it eight years after the fact. Donald Trump was not making his critique of George W. Bush in real time. He made it long after the fact when many Republican voters had sort of come around to this view. And watching Trump’s rise has given me a pretty low opinion of Republican politicians, so I’m not surprised that you don’t have profiles in courage. And I don’t think that there’s some long-term upside for a would-be future leader of the Republican Party in opposing Trump directly right now.

david leonhardt

Well, in this absurd political era, I think we should end this with a little bit of absurdity, which is these candidates who are running against Trump are going to run into an obstacle that previous presidential candidates have not run into, at least recently, which is the Republican Party is now so in thrall to Donald Trump that in at least four states— Alaska, Nevada, South Carolina, and Kansas— party leaders in the state have voted to cancel their presidential nominating contests in 2020 to make sure they can award their delegates to Donald Trump. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the day’s headlines. I’m going to cheat just a little bit here but make a recommendation that is not on the news but related to the news. And I’m going to encourage our listeners to go study up on Watergate history because it suddenly seems to have a new relevance. I am going to specifically recommend the podcast “Slow Burn” by Leon Neyfakh, which tracks the Nixon impeachment process and his resignation. But if you’ve already listened to that, I’m going to encourage you to dig into a book, like “Final Days” by Woodward and Bernstein, or, really, any Watergate history that you find appealing. First of all, it’s just super enjoyable. And second of all, I think it’ll leave you with some humility about our being able to forecast exactly what’s going to happen. We look back on Watergate, and we think it’s this nice, tidy thing in which President Nixon broke the law and got removed from office. But anyone who lived through it remembers that that’s not at all the way it happened. And it wasn’t clear at all from the beginning that he was going to get removed from office.

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I mean, I absolutely would second your recommendation for “Slow Burn.” And I have had, since this whole thing started, a feeling that I’ve have never had in the past, which is this desire to be in the future looking back analytically at right now.

david leonhardt

In part because it means we’re not living through the Trump presidency anymore, I’m sure.

michelle goldberg

Right. Exactly. But I’ve never sort of wanted a historical era to end so desperately. And so there is a certain amount of comfort in seeing that they were sort of stumbling in the dark, but then, ultimately, history moved forward, and at least other generations were able to make sense of it all.

david leonhardt

Ross, have you listened to “Slow Burn?” No. I don’t listen to any podcast other than “The Argument,” David. And indeed— — on repeat?

ross douthat

—I feel that you’ve doubly violated our rules by making an on-the-news recommendation and recommending a rival podcast.

david leonhardt

Totally fair. Well my recommendation is “Slow Burn,” specifically the first season of the podcast— Slow Burn, which covers the Nixon impeachment and resignation. [MUSIC PLAYING] That’s our show this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas about the show, you can leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat

But I mean, I sort of agree with Michelle’s last point too.

david leonhardt