Democrats are helping Donald Trump avoid impeachment

THE Democrats should learn from the mistakes of the Republican assault on Bill Clinton, writes James Morrow. The more hysterical they get about Trump, the greater his chances of survival.

YOU wouldn’t know it reading much of the press, but Donald Trump just enjoyed a big victory over American progressives and their self-styled — and self-congratulatory — “resistance” movement.

You might even say he won bigly.

A few days ago after a campaign touted as the most expensive race for a seat in America’s House of Representatives in history — which is saying something — candidate Jon Ossoff failed to flip Georgia’s 6th District, traditionally a Republican safe seat, into the Democrat column.

The loss came after Ossoff’s campaign spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$30 million to win what had been set up as a “referendum” on the Trump presidency and the public’s appetite for impeachment.

Doing the maths, that means Democrats spent around US$250 for each vote cast their way and still managed to lose, 52 to 48 per cent.

For the Hollywood stars who dumped money into Ossoff’s campaign, it was the worst possible remake of Groundhog Day (“grouphug”, tweeted a despondent Alyssa Milano after Ossoff’s loss).

The Republican obsession with impeaching Bill Clinton saw them spend a decade in the political wilderness.

And in a volte-face worthy of the perpetual war with Eastasia in George Orwell’s 1984, progressives went from pumping up this election as being bigger than the Bastille in terms of their ongoing revolution against Trump to speaking of it as an event with about as much significance as a ham sandwich.

Australians watching from afar may be wondering how the party of an American president suffering flagging popularity and a palpable push by large segments of the media, judiciary, and the administrative bureaucracy to evict him from the White House as the illegitimate usurper of Hillary Clinton can keep winning. (This was the fourth straight special election to go to the Republicans since Trump’s victory).

The answer is that America has been here before, only with the parties reversed.

In the 1990s, Republicans became obsessed with delegitimising Bill Clinton to the point where they couldn’t see the bigger picture and looked like a bunch of partisan hacks pushing independent investigations and impeachment. As a result, they spent the decade in the wilderness.

Sound familiar?

Today in America, hard core Trump-loathing Democrats — the sort who have been in a state of rage and apoplexy since last November — are pushing all the same buttons.

It feels good but it doesn’t win votes, particularly not where voting is not compulsory.

Such behaviour also has the flow-on effect of inoculating Trump against whatever scandals might come down the pike: No American who cast his vote for Trump did so because he believed the man was a paragon of virtue, and the longer the drumbeat of Russia, Russia, Russia continues without any hard evidence, the more voters will dismiss attacks on him as purely partisan.

Instead of learning these lessons long absorbed by Republicans, Democrats — and their progressive allies around the world — are fighting the same wars again, likely to the same result.

Trump may be unpopular and his character questionable, but the greater the hysteria of his opponents, the better his administration’s chances of survival.

James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor.