How Trump will be remembered and Democrats’ linguistic offensive
How will history remember Donald Trump?
Presidents spend four or eight years burning bright — but fade away once they’re done, remembered mostly for their personalities and a few highlights. George W. Bush has been reduced to the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Ronald Reagan was immortalized for asking Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall. Jimmy Carter will never escape the Iran hostage crisis. Lyndon Johnson is lionized for the Civil Rights Act and demonized for the quagmire in Vietnam. JFK is forever young, his potential greatness snuffed out by assassination.
One day, Trump’s tweet storms and insults will be forgotten, and only a couple of lingering impressions from this turbulent era will shape his legacy. On Tuesday, two potentially defining features converged: Just as senators began to deliberate his fate as the third US president to be impeached, Trump laid down another marker for the future, blasting climate campaigners as “perennial prophets of doom” and slamming “their predictions of the apocalypse.” His statement in Davos was all the more remarkable since the rest of the world seems to be rethinking the politics of global warming.
Maybe Trump has this right and everyone else is off base. But if climate disaster does ensue, he may come to be seen — as he put it himself in Switzerland — as yesterday’s foolish fortune-teller.
Wordplay
To understand the politics of the Senate impeachment trial, just look at the language Democrats are using to describe it: “A cover-up.” “Impunity.” “Rushed.” “Predetermined.” “Rigged.”
Democrats have no chance of getting the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump of abusing power and obstructing Congress over his scheme to pressure Ukraine. And they know it. But before elections next November, they want to leave voters with a clear impression that Republicans are cooking up a fix to save a corrupt President.
Most Americans haven’t been following every blow of the impeachment saga. They might be hazy over the details of the case. But language that’s snappy, graphic — and probably poll-tested — can be very effective in cutting through the fog, especially for voters who were already leaning away from Trump.
We know it works, because Trump himself has proved it. For months, he fired off daily blasts of “hoax” to describe Russian election interference, the special counsel probe and impeachment. He continues to condemn a “witch hunt” and “fake news.” Once conservative media mouthpieces picked up the refrain, it became part of the vernacular of red-capped fans on the ground and online.
There’s another sign that the Democrats’ linguistic offensive might be working. On Tuesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell suddenly changed the rules of the trial, allowing each side to make its case over three days instead of two. The move threw a bone to vulnerable Republican senators in states closely contested between the parties, who are under relentless pressure to show it’s a fair trial.
Chalk up a symbolic win for Trump’s accusers. But McConnell still controls the game.
