Impeach Trump: what’s the downside, really?

The Trump impeachment proceedings don’t really have a downside.

• No major legislation was going to happen between now and 2020 anyway.
• People who despise Trump will continue to despise Trump.
• People who somehow don’t despise Trump will continue to somehow not despise him.
• Anti- and pro-Trump media (the anti-Trump media generally aided by actual facts) will continue to blare their horns at their respective tribes anyway. Neutral media will report facts inexorably pointing to Trump’s myopic, racist, environmentally damaging, pro-fossil-fuel, plutocrat-friendly, screw-the-poor policies.
• Senate Republicans will stand by their man, so he won’t actually get impeached either way. But it’ll demote U.S. Sen. Cory Gardener (D-Colo.) into a well-paid fossil-industry lobbyist and jeopardize other purple-state politicians who put party before country.
• The idea that impeachment proceedings and Trump’s unremitting whinging that he’s being subject to a “witch hunt” will somehow provide some magical motivation to the Trump base that would somehow blossom into marginal electoral turnout disproportionate to that sure to be delivered by the anti-Trump base is fanciful.
• Should we be so lucky as to have this incompetent, lying, scheming malignant narcissist voted out of office in 2020 – which the math should dictate, based on dismal job-performance polling done long before the attack ads have been filmed – Trump would declare the election rigged either way and tweet his usual toxic bullshit until his dying breath.

And the big upside: American constitutional democracy demonstrates its resilience and its fundamental allegiance to the rule of law.

N.B.: Good on Colorado’s freshman Congressman Jason Crow (D-Aurora) for co-authoring the Washington Post op-ed that finally tipped the scales.