SALT LAKE CITY — Since the impeachment inquiry began, President Donald Trump has blasted his critics on Twitter and lambasted the inquiry as “witch hunt garbage.” Behind the scenes, the president has been turning that “garbage” into gold.
The Trump campaign raised $13 million and reportedly gained 50,000 new small-donors in the days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced a formal impeachment inquiry, The Hill reported.
“It’s a total boon,” said Roy Bailey, the campaign’s national finance co-chairman, to The Los Angeles Times. “Money is flying in.”
It’s not just Trump: Democratic candidates have also used the impeachment inquiry to shore up fundraising support. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., sent out emails to supporters with links leading to donation pages, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., ran Facebook ads on the subject of impeachment. The Joe Biden campaign tripled its daily online fundraising average in the days after the announcement, a Biden adviser told The New York Times.
But presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, berated her Democratic opponents for using impeachment as a reason to fundraise.
“Candidates for POTUS who are fundraising off ‘impeachment’ are undermining the credibility of inquiry in the eyes of American people, further dividing our already fractured country,” she tweeted. “Please stop. We need responsible, patriotic leaders who put the interests of our country before their own.”
Gabbard’s criticism raises an important issue. Impeachment is one of the most serious actions possible for the American government to undertake. But in a political era defined by partisanship, gridlock and cynicism, has impeachment become nothing more than a political scandal used for the purposes of fundraising?
“This whole impeachment process will tell us more about who we are as a society than about what the president does or doesn’t do,” said Doug Spencer, professor of election and constitutional law at the University of Connecticut. “Is this the kind of behavior we’re willing to tolerate because we’re separated into partisan tribes, or do we have some unified sense of what would be a national security issue for our country as a whole, regardless of our party?”
Trump is ‘being attacked’
There’s nothing illegal or immoral about fundraising, said Spencer, and fundraising in the midst of a heightened political moment is nothing new.
“It seems fairly normal for party fundraising messages to stoke controversial issues to fire up base supporters,” said Michael J. Malbin, director of the Campaign Finance Institute and professor of political science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.
In fact, Trump has a stronger case to make to his supporters for fundraising in the midst of an impeachment inquiry than his Democratic opponents do, said Spencer.
“It’s probably more defensible for Trump to fundraise, because he’s being attacked,” he said, adding that during former President Bill Clinton’s term he also used impeachment as a wedge issue to mobilize support among Democrats.
Some of that fundraising money will cancel itself out by going toward fighting the negative publicity associated with the impeachment inquiry, said Christopher Witko, professor of public policy at Penn State University.
The Republican National Committee announced last week it would spend $2 million on a cable buy fighting the impeachment inquiry and $8 million to target Vice President Biden in particular and criticize Democrats for their focus on the Ukraine scandal, NPR reported. Trump is also using campaign funds to pay for his legal defense team, said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of “Political Brands.” Overall, the Trump campaign and the RNC have raised more than $300 million this year alone — double the total that then-President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had raised at this point in time in Obama’s reelection bid, according NPR.
Democrats have a more ambiguous message in terms of impeachment-related fundraising, said Spencer, asking donors to give them money because they disapprove of Trump.
For example, Biden sent a campaign email that suggested that Biden’s slipping poll numbers were as worrisome as Trump’s foreign dealings, The New York Times reported.
“Look, here’s the bad news: Trump is using the Oval Office to pressure a foreign power into interfering in the 2020 election,” his campaign sent in a fundraising email, according to the Times. “And it gets even worse: a new poll has us down in Iowa, a key first state in this Primary (sic) race.”
Spencer said Democrats are unlikely to get too much political mileage out of drawing attention to the impeachment inquiry because at this stage, they are mainly competing with each other, not Trump.
“They’re just candidates, and there are 20 of them,” said Spencer. “So Trump gets to reap all the benefits of being the one victim, and they have to struggle and break through all the other 20 people.”
Impeachment inquiry or ‘coup’?
This fundraising by both parties in the wake of the impeachment inquiry is in part being driven by two competing narratives about the inquiry itself, said Torres-Spelliscy.
Pelosi and Democratic candidates are putting forth the notion that the inquiry is about getting to the bottom of a crime or an impeachable offense. But it’s also about something larger and more noble, “ensuring the integrity of democracy, restoring the rule of law and restoring respect to the White House,” said Torres-Spelliscy.
But the Trump campaign has a different take: that the inquiry is not for the purposes of a potential impeachment at all — but a “coup.”
“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the...People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” Trump tweeted.
Trump has framed the impeachment inquiry as itself anti-democratic: fueled by a desire by Pelosi and the Democrats to undo the election of 2016. Thus, for the Trump campaign, impeachment becomes a tool not of ensuring democracy but of the opposite —a strategy for circumventing the democratic electoral system in order to unjustly oust him from power, said Torres-Spelliscy.
This framing of the impeachment actually is in line with a theme that has defined his 2016 campaign and his presidency thus far — of being unfairly attacked and underestimated by his opponents and by the political establishment as a whole. This has driven his supporters to open their wallets.
“Trump’s sudden rise to power was fueled by a potent mix of outrage and victimization,” the LA Times reported. “The impeachment inquiry thus is the ultimate grievance since it threatens his grip on the White House — and the hopes of his hardcore supporters.”
The polarization of the media contributes to this problem, says Torres-Spelliscy, which places people firmly in what she calls “information silos.” People who watch Fox News, she said, are likely to only hear the Trump’s campaign’s viewpoint, and people who watch MSNBC are likely to only hear the opposing narrative.
“Depending on what echo chamber you happen to inhabit, you’re probably not going to hear the other side that much,” she said.
And yet, oddly, both sides seem to agree: what’s at stake in the impeachment inquiry is American democracy itself.