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Does Congress have the spine to impeach Trump?
William G Naggaga
What you need to know:
- Determination. Trump appears ready to run for his second term in 2020 and his slogan will be “Keep America Great! Since he won in 2016 against all odds and proving political pundits wrong, Trump may pull it off again!
In August 1974, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, resigned from office after serving less than two years of his second term to avoid impeachment by Congress over the “Watergate Scandal.’’ This infamous scandal had its origins in 1972 when five burglars under the employ of Nixon associates in the White House, attempted to bug the National Democratic Committee offices of Senator George Mc Govern, the Democratic Party presidential candidate in the Watergate Building Complex.
The burglars or “plumbers’’ as they came to be known, were caught red-handed and arrested at 2.30am on June, 17 1972 in the process of planting surveillance bugs in the said offices. Bob Woodward, a reporter with the Washington Post, kept the story alive and with help of an informer (nick-named ‘deep throat’) spilled out the details for the break-in for weeks, shocking the nation beyond belief.
Nixon’s own Republican Party was appalled and saw the writing on the wall. A bipartisan vote on impeachment in US Congress was inevitable if Nixon did not throw in the towel.
I had the opportunity to witness ‘live’ the unfolding of these events as Second Secretary at the Permanent Mission of Uganda to the UN in New York. A clumsy and unnecessary burglary (Senator McGovern stood no chance of defeating Nixon), ended the carrier of this brilliant politician. President Nixon’s foreign policy achievements were phenomenal - the opening up to China and the improvement of relations with the then Soviet Union were definitely the beginning of the thawing of the cold war. His chief architect in the foreign policy moves was the incomparable Dr Henry Kissinger, a former Havard University professor, who served as National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State.
It has been said that only a ‘visionary’ Republican president like Nixon could have convinced Americans that it was time for the United States to recognise the Peoples Republic of China as the legitimate representative of the Chinese people and abandon the 25 years illusion or fiction that the regime in Taiwan represented the people of China.
The name “Watergate’’ and the suffix “gate’’ has since become synonymous with political and non-political scandal in the United States and world over. It is unfortunate that Nixon’s legacy was forever tarnished and as Mark Anthony would have said “the evil that men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred in their bones. So let it be with Nixon”.
Since Nixon’s departure in 1974, the Oval Office in the White House has been occupied by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., Barack Obama and Donald Trump who succeeded Obama in 2017. With the exception of Trump, all the others came to the office having served in government at various levels, including vice president, senator, governor, etc. They were truly “establishment’’ figures. They knew their way around Washington and knew how to handle the legislative arm of government, not that they won all battles with the legislators.
In fact, they lost many, but that is democracy. Donald Trump was, however, a different ‘kettle of fish’. He had no prior government experience, a self-employed billionaire businessman, the richest president in the history of the US. He came to “make America great again’’ and to “drain the Washington swamp’’. He has in his first year in office fired more senior officials from his administration than any of his predecessors couldn’t even dream of in eight years. He abuses women, Blacks, the poor and even insulted the whole continent of Africa by calling its countries “shithole nations’’.
Having hired most of his senior colleagues from outside Washington establishment circles, one would have expected a better working environment, but president Trump is his own man and runs the government like his private business. He has been called a moron by his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson - (whom he later fired) and many damaging books have been written about him by former staff members calling him “mentally unfit to be president’’ and worse, calling for him to be impeached.
But he keeps going, firing and hiring at will. Trump appears ready to run for his second term in 2020 and his slogan will be “Keep America Great!’’ Since he won in 2016 against all odds and proving political pundits wrong, Trump may pull it off again! He already has a core support of 32 per cent consisting mainly of white supremacists and racists, evangelicals, working class whites and fellow travellers.
The question which arises is: Has Trump done anything impeachable? If so, does Congress have the stomach for impeachment?
Mr Naggaga is an economist, administrator and retired Ambassador.
[email protected].
