Trump's defenders are flirting with nihilism

Only one question is not clouded by uncertainty: the outcome. Barring some kind of an act of God, enough Republicans will ultimately vote to acquit the president that Trump will survive his trial. If that wasn’t clear before, it became painfully so once Representative Will Hurd, a moderate Republican of the sort who might once have been counted on to recognize a gross abuse of power when he saw it, indicated that he had found no evidence of impeachable offenses in the Ukraine hearings. So the question is just how rigidly partisan the vote to acquit will become in the Senate, or whether a few Republicans—one might look to Senators Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and perhaps a few facing tough reelection fights in the fall—will vote against the president.The nation is thus headed toward the odd spectacle of a trial whose result everyone knows in advance, yet whose trajectory remains obscure.

In the absence of any prospect of a sufficient bloc of Republicans voting to remove the president, it’s easy to write off the impeachment process as meaningless. It’s not. Done properly, the House’s amassing of a record and the Senate’s trial of the president will create a vivid account of Trump’s abuses of power and criminality on the national stage. It will force Republicans to shackle themselves to those abuses in support of the president. The stakes in whether a majority of voting Americans will vote for a party that has done so—or, at least, a majority in the states necessary to swing the Electoral College—are high. But a Senate trial of the president will pose the matter to the electorate with the starkness it deserves.

It will make Senate Republicans cast a vote for the proposition “LOL nothing matters ¯_(ツ)_/¯”—thereby enabling the 2020 electorate to evaluate nihilism as the governing philosophy of a political movement.