The defeat, for Donald Trump, may have had a taste of victory, Wednesday, December 18. Certainly the 45e President of the United States has, as expected, become the third in the country’s history to face an indictment by the House of Representatives. But the Republican bloc, which opposed it, without missing a voice, as in the solemn vote formalizing the procedure in October, testified to its grip on its party.
The successive and fluctuating explanations of the White House, the overwhelming revelations of witnesses, and the fits of fury of a president denouncing a "Crusade" and one "Coup" about a perfectly constitutional procedure, left to the full discretion of the Chamber as stipulated in the American Basic Law, did not instill the slightest doubt in the minds of elected officials who were obviously sensitive above all to the pressure of the based.
This hold is the guarantee of a one-way trial in the Senate; two key players in the upcoming episode – the leader of the Republican majority, Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and the Republican chairman of the Judicial Affairs Committee, Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) – have already made it known that they don't did not intend to be impartial, and, for the first time, that it would coordinate closely with the White House.
The turn taken by this indictment confirms the triumph of an obtuse political tribalism that the President was not afraid to reproach his democratic opponents in a long and exasperated letter delivered on the eve of the House vote.
Protected by this firewall, the image of Donald Trump has also remained stable in recent weeks, while remaining a minority as it has been since his arrival at the White House, an anomaly in the history of the popularity of presidents of the United States.
Shock treatment
Re-election campaign director Brad Parscale even assured that the impeachment had further strengthened the devotion of the Republican base, saying it would even facilitate his re-election. The same argument was put forward during the stormy confirmation in September and October 2018 of judge Brett Kavanaugh, appointed to the Supreme Court, before the rout suffered by the "Grand Old Party" (GOP) in the mid-term elections, a month later.
The willingness of Republican Senate officials to consider a historic meeting and responsibility as so many annoying formalities testifies to the effectiveness of the shock treatment that Donald Trump imposes on American institutions and in the first place on the system of checks and balances (checks and scales) that the Founding Fathers designed as a safeguard against the hegemonic claims of power at the expense of others.
