Democrats pursued the impeachment of President Donald Trump for several months in late 2019 and early 2020 — not only in the hope of removing him from office, but also of tarnishing him as the country headed into the presidential election.
And yet the Democratic National Convention (DNC) totally ignored the impeachment across four nights of programming, as if the entire drama, which preoccupied the 116th Congress under Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had never happened.
CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer wrote:
Democrats avoided using the “I” word during the national convention this week. … Viewers could have walked away from the convention without knowing that just last December, the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. … Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t mention impeachment during her remarks on Wednesday.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Joe Garofoli noted that the party seemed to have hidden leading impeachment figures:
Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, one of the party’s most recognized faces, hasn’t gotten a prime speaking spot. Neither has Florida Rep. Val Demings, who was on the short list to be Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee, nor New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, seen as rising star. … [T]he party’s speaker roster at its virtual convention shows that Democratic leaders don’t think swing voters want to revisit impeachment.
The impeachment saga lasted 135 days. and began Sep. 24, 2019, when Pelosi announced that the House would begin an impeachment inquiry into the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine. The White House had already said the transcript of the call would be released the following morning, but Pelosi did not want to wait for the facts (or a House vote to authorize the inquiry, which came more than a month later).
The trial concluded Feb. 5, 2020, with Trump’s acquittal.
The crucial period was the 20 days between Jan. 15 — the day Pelosi finally handed over the articles of impeachment to the Senate after delaying for four weeks — and Feb. 5. That same period marked the arrival of the coronavirus in the U.S.: the first known patient entered the country from China on Jan. 15.
The White House formed its task force Jan. 27, and Trump declared a travel ban Jan. 31, but Congress did nothing about COVID-19 until Feb. 5, when a subcommittee held a hearing.
Perhaps that is why Democrats did not mention impeachment at the DNC: not only did it fail, but it distracted the country from the most pressing challenge.
Some pundits were upset that Democrats left impeachment out of the convention. Zelizer wrote that “[g]lossing over Trump’s impeachment in the run up to the election is a mistake,” and that Democrats should use it to cast Trump as a threat to democracy.
Evidently the party believes otherwise, and would prefer impeachment be forgotten.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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