President Donald Trump and his Republican allies spent weeks trivializing the House impeachment inquiryahead of Tuesday’s historic unveiling of formal charges against the president.
Where Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton treated the prospect of impeachment as a serious threat to their presidencies, Trump’s boosters have tried to brush off the whole thing. Believing that acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate is all but certain, they’re out to convince voters to punish the president’s Democratic accusers — or at least tune out the Washington spectacle.
To that end, they have belittled the impeachment process with mockery, schoolyard taunts and an unyielding insistence that Trump did not a single thing wrong. They have stonewalled, refusing to allow witnesses to testify; protested by declining to send their own lawyers to hearings; and dished out the ultimate Trumpian insult: calling the proceedings boring.