Why impeachment is a ‘Trumped-up charge’
Many Democrats view the push to oust Trump with contempt. Could this end up a spectacular own goal?
Richard Citrola has had enough of the impeachment saga that has all but paralysed American politics. “I’m a little guy, I’m not a rich guy, I’m just a hardworking pizza guy,” says the 50-year-old father of two who owns an Italian restaurant in Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
“I think most of the country is like me and I can tell you this impeachment stuff is garbage. Trump makes one mistake on something because he’s got a big mouth but are we going to sit there and micro-manage everything he does? People can hate him, but at the end of the day our economy is doing good, people want to come to this country and my friends have all got jobs. No one talks about that.”
The Democrat-led push for impeachment is consuming Washington and generating around-the-clock media coverage, but it is voters such as Citrola Democrats fear the most. In places such as Lee County, on the southwest coast of Florida, many residents view the impeachment proceedings with contempt and they are far from alone.
As the Democrat-led house judiciary committee draws up articles of impeachment against the country’s 45th President, polls show Democrats have failed to sell impeachment to most Americans.
This week a Washington Post average of polls found public support for impeaching Trump has stalled at only 47 per cent — exactly the same as before last month’s high-profile public impeachment hearings by the house intelligence committee.
“The Democrats talk about impeachment but they don’t talk about the big issues like the price of gas,” says Citrola. “I’ve got big trucks, I’ve got a boat, I own a restaurant. These are the issues that are important to me, and things like immigration and gun control and abortion. Trump is going to go down as the best President ever. Is he perfect? No. Does he stick his foot in his mouth? All the time. But I’ll vote for him again.”
Strong support
The Weekend Australian this week travelled in southwest Florida asking people about impeachment. It’s a fast-growing region that backed Trump strongly in 2016 and will be a key to him winning the vital swing state in next year’s election. Attitudes in this part of Florida and elsewhere in regional and rural America are far removed from the Democrat-dominated cities and dominant liberal US media that has given blanket coverage to the impeachment proceedings.
“It’s a scam, it should never be happening,” says Bernie Worrell as he takes his morning walk in the Bayside Estates trailer park-style community near Fort Myers Beach. Worrell, 81, is a retired supervisor at a General Motors plant in Indiana and often has voted Democrat but says he voted for Trump in 2016. He, like many others interviewed by The Weekend Australian, says the impeachment inquiry has made him more — not less — likely to vote for Trump next year.
“I’ve read about it and seen what Trump has said, and I don’t think he did anything bad in the Ukraine,” he says. “As soon as he was elected they started working to impeach him. It’s a made-up scam at a time when the country is doing better than it has in years.”
Around the corner, 86-year-old Pat Jeffrey turns down Elvis Presley on her earphones and vents about impeachment. “It’s nonsense what the Democrats are doing,” says Jeffrey, a former secretary who cast her first vote for Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.
“They twist all these fancy words around to make him (Trump) sound bad but it’s all politics. They are taking up all this time and money when what they should be doing is working and doing things that are positive for the country. If we had an election today I think President Trump would win by a landslide.”
Trump claims impeachment will work in his favour by galvanising his base and securing his re-election. Democrats are hoping his almost certain impeachment by the Democrat-controlled house will persuade voters to throw him out of office next November. Even if he is impeached by the house, Trump almost certainly will keep his job because the Republican-controlled Senate is likely to acquit him.
In a so-called “homecoming” rally near Miami last week, Trump — who has changed his residency from New York to Florida — revealed how he plans to use the impeachment issue to rally his supporters next year. Trump spent a large part of the rally denouncing the impeachment process as a scam and a hoax, prompting the 20,000-strong crowd to chant “bullshit, bullshit”.
“They’re attacking me because I’m exposing a rigged system that enriched itself at your expense and I’m restoring government of, by and for the people,” he told the crowd. “A lot of bad things are happening to them (Democrats). You see what’s happening in the polls?’
So far there is no sign that Trump’s supporters are turning away from him because of the Ukraine controversy that triggered the impeachment process.
The latest polls show national support for Trump among Republicans at 90 per cent, with one poll by the Economist magazine finding that Republicans believe by a 53-47 per cent majority that Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln.
In Lee County, where palm tree-lined retirement communities nestle alongside giant shopping malls, bait shops and marinas, voters turned up in force to vote for Trump in 2016.
The county had the largest jump in voting participation of any large county in the US, with Trump defeating Hillary Clinton here by more than 20 percentage points, a sharp contrast to Democrat-dominated Miami a few hours’ drive away.
“There’s not many Democrats around here,” says Matt Eslinger as he sets up Christmas decorations with wife Darcie in front of his Fort Myers home. “But I think he should be impeached,” says the 43-year-old software developer, who recently moved to the area from Los Angeles. “He is abusing his power to get another country to do him a personal favour and that is clearly an impeachable offence. I honestly don’t think he knows the difference between good and bad, and this time he just got caught. I don’t know why Republicans can’t see what he has done.”
Charter boat captain Larry Conley scoffs at such views as he sits in his boat cradling a Corona beer near Cape Coral. The 60-year-old has never cast a vote in his life but watching the impeachment saga has made him change his mind. He says he will cast his first vote ever next year for Trump.
“I heard enough about it to figure out it’s all bullshit,” he says.
“From what I hear, Ukraine says there was no pressure, it was just the opposite, but the Dems want him out because he is interfering with all their crooked stuff.”
Conley compares the impeachment proceedings to his recent divorce, where both sides claim they are telling the truth but neither listens to the other.
He says what impresses him about Trump is that unlike his predecessors in the White House, he “is actually doing what he said he would do”. “If he has to step on toes to get what he needs for the United States, then go do it.”
Democrats’ tin ear
Many of those in Florida who spoke to The Weekend Australian had little grasp of the details of the impeachment inquiry including the central allegation that Trump improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden. “Who’s Joe Biden?” says labourer Chad McClure as he sits in a tradesman’s pick-up truck in Cape Coral.
McClure couldn’t vote in 2016 because of criminal charges of aggravated drunk driving for which he was jailed but he says he is now a reborn Christian and would vote for Trump because he is more anti-abortion than Democrats. “God put Trump there for a reason and he will only be removed if God removes him,” he says.
Mother of two Jessica Stein says she simply has been too busy working to pay attention to impeachment. Stein, 30, works a 12-hour night shift as a nursing assistant before coming home and getting her two children, Tucker, 4, and Rosemary, 2, ready for kindergarten before she sleeps.
“I don’t know much about the impeachment because it’s been hard to watch it because I’ve been working so much,” she says. “But Trump is doing good. Employment is up and I was able to get a job. The prices of things are good and everything is going good for the country right now so I will vote for him again.”
By contrast, Jim Vincenti is a self-proclaimed impeachment junkie and says he has watched every minute of the hearings on Fox News. “I can’t turn the TV off,” the retired machinist for the Ford Motor Company says as he sits in Dan’s Fan Store in Cape Coral. He says whatever Trump did was not an impeachable offence. “If you go back through all the presidents you will find that everyone has done something skirting the edge, it’s just that there was nobody to complain about it,” he says.
He believes Trump will survive impeachment and be re-elected because the Democrats have a tin ear when it comes to understanding ordinary Americans. “The Democrats are not listening to what the guy on the street is telling them,” says Vincenti. ‘They listen to their pollsters and their own people, and every time they attack Trump his poll numbers go up.”
Not good for the nation
Not all Democrat voters support the impeachment process even if they believe Trump has behaved badly with Ukraine.
“Strictly speaking, what he did was impeachable,” says retired engineer Mike Keast, as he strolls along the pier at Fort Myers beach. Keast voted for Clinton in 2016 and is no fan of Trump but doesn’t believe the country should go through the saga of impeachment.
“I don’t think it’s particularly good for the country to have a sitting president impeached and possibly even taken out of office. I would rather them go the regular route and hopefully he gets voted out of office next year.”
IT worker Chris Edge, who voted for Trump in 2016, says impeachment is “a waste of time” and “a way to try to get Trump out of office for fear of him getting a second term”. “They should have brought more evidence first before they did the impeachment proceeding because the rest of the government sort of stops,” he says as he walks his dog Java in Fort Myers. “I’ve watched it but there’s only so much anyone can watch, right? I see a lot of politics, a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of ‘oh wow, I got you’ moments.”
But Edge is unimpressed with the style of Trump’s presidency and says he will look at who the Democratic candidate is before deciding who he votes for next year. “The vast majority of people who did vote for Trump would probably say he might not be such a bad leader if he just stopped talking,” says the 47-year-old father of two.
“I don’t think he has to say everything that comes into his head at a moment’s notice or throw it out on Twitter. It’s just a bit non-presidential. I really hope the Democrats bring forward a strong moderate candidate.”
One of Edge’s neighbours, 34-year-old Jacquie Bachman, a special-education teacher, is one of those Democrats who believes Trump should be impeached because of his entire presidency rather than just because of his actions in Ukraine.
“How many times can Trump simply say that those other people’s stories (the impeachment witnesses) are not true? It’s very frustrating,” she says.
“It (impeachment) seems pretty well founded in my opinion but I think there were plenty of impeachable offences before that.”
Kim Fiore, 52, a disability worker, disagrees strongly. She describes the impeachment push as nothing more than a “dirty tricks” campaign to get rid of Trump.
“They don’t like what he has to say so they are pulling out all their dirty tricks to try to get him out,” she says, as she buys a fish sandwich from a food van.
“Democrats never thought he would become president and they are just floored that this businessman is in power and that the economy is going so well.
“He is exposing the corrupt Democrats, the corrupt media and the corrupt Clintons.”
The most common theme among those who spoke to The Weekend Australian was that the impeachment inquiry was a politically orchestrated sideshow rather than a necessary quest under the Constitution to hold Trump to account for his actions with Ukraine.
These Trump voters are confident he will not only survive the process but also will emerge politically stronger from it.
“It’s all going to backfire for the Democrats. We had the whole Russian thing and now this whole impeachment thing, and people are really tired of it all,” says Ginny Vigne, 57, a yoga teacher from Fort Myers.
“This whole term of his presidency has been nothing but people trying to ridicule him. But look at the economy. He is getting people back to work and bringing work back to America. I appreciate that about him.”
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
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