(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In a Washington Post op-ed on Monday signed by seven freshman Democratic members of the House of Representatives, in which they express alarm at President Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the law,” the word “corruption” doesn’t appear until the third paragraph. Before a reader encounters that key word, the seven write: “We are veterans of the military and of the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies. Our service is rooted in the defense of our country on the front lines of national security.”
National security is the scaffolding upon which Democrats can build their message for impeachment.
Trump’s outreach to Ukraine, and his leveraging, implicitly or explicitly, of military aid as a reward for Ukrainian assistance to Trump’s re-election, represents corruption without all the swirling complications that made Trump’s opaque 2016 dealings with Russia such a maddening story to follow.
We enter the Ukraine story at the beginning, before layers of partisan calculation have been added to the snowball’s mass as it barrels toward a national election. There isn’t even an opposition candidate with mass of her own. Stripped to its narrative essentials, a kind of prequel, the story is a simple tale of security for sale.
Ukraine 2019 is a marked contrast to Russia 2016, the details of which fractured under partisan duress as soon as they appeared. Once the story was finally compiled, in the April report by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller, it was hard for the public to grasp its tedious, convoluted tales without mediation. Attorney General William Barr got a head start in distorting the narrative, in particular soft-pedaling Mueller’s evidence of Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. And Fox News and the rest of the Trump-o-verse echoed Barr’s version.
Mueller’s muddle and Barr’s guile foisted responsibility for explicating Trump’s misconduct back on Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wasn’t eager for the job. Democrats were never going to be the most persuasive narrators of partisan acts in which they were victims.
Trump’s Ukraine foray has reset the table. There is still a partisan element — it’s reasonable to conclude that Trump’s rationale for withholding military aid from Ukraine was to pressure Ukraine into helping him smear former Vice President Joe Biden. (Trump denies this, asserting on Tuesday, in the most recent of his varied explanations, that he was really just trying to induce European countries to spend more money on Ukraine’s development.) But Biden hasn’t actually been harmed; no election has been lost. No shock election has transpired.
That enables Democrats to follow the lead of the seven freshmen, all representing districts where there’s lots of support for Trump, and focus on Trump’s subversion of national security. In the most favorable scenario, Russia 2016 was a case of Trump passively benefiting from Russian perfidy. Ukraine 2019 is different: It was instigated by Trump for Trump. The best-case scenario of Trump’s conduct is both readily understood and impeachable.
The victim in this latter case is not the Democratic nominee for president — who isn’t yet known and may never actually be Biden. The victim is a vulnerable European ally and the network of nations, including the U.S. itself, whose security interests require countering Russian aggression. In addition, Congress appropriated the money that Trump appears to have used as leverage for his gambit, which implicates the public treasury in a way that Russia 2016 did not.
The seven freshmen are getting attention because they replaced Republicans in marginal congressional districts. It’s hard to know how much, if any, political damage they will sustain for their stand. What matters far more than their districts and their newbie status, however, is their shared experience as intelligence officers and in military service and their ability to articulate the link between national security and the need for an impeachment investigation. Trump’s subversion of law equals subversion of national interest. Yet it proved difficult to explain to a distracted and often cynical public how a democratically elected president — even one elected with the most undemocratic assistance — threatens elections and democracy.
With his outreach to Ukraine, Trump has made it easier for Democrats to concisely describe why impeachment is appropriate, and to frame his actions in the context of national security rather than partisan politics. Now it’s up to Democrats to keep a tight focus on national security and avoid the meandering, Trumpian sprawl.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
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