With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party now determined to try to impeach President Trump, is there any reason for him to seek common ground with them on any issue?
In the current political atmosphere, the White House might well believe that bipartisanship is for suckers. That’s part of the reason why nothing has come of the president’s reported interest in expanding background checks on gun sales after last month’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Following these incidents, the White House appeared to recognize that most Americans, including Republicans, were firmly behind measures that would bring online and gun-show sales into the background-check system. Likewise, most Americans back so-called red-flag laws that keep firearms out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill.
Trump had previously telegraphed support for these ideas and even vowed to defy the National Rifle Association’s knee-jerk opposition to any sort of regulation, even those that involved only minimal inconvenience to gun buyers.
Rather than pushing ahead with a measure that would have bipartisan support, the president delayed. The cautious rollout seems to have been sabotaged by the leak of a document stemming from a White House briefing of Republican senators, about a proposal to expand background checks. That provoked a massive pushback from the NRA this month, and the White House folded, disavowing the document and thus reinforcing the impression that the gun-rights lobby exercises veto power over administration policy.
That shouldn’t be allowed to stand. Yet with Democrats seizing on the Ukraine controversy as an excuse to try to relitigate the 2016 election and Republicans circling the wagons around the White House, keeping this proposal alive may be the last thing on the minds of Trump and his advisers. Instead, they are concentrating on rallying Republicans for an all-out war against the left, leaving no room for efforts to appeal to centrists.
But if Trump thinks that the boat has sailed on efforts to win over the independents and suburban voters who cost the GOP the 2018-midterm elections, he’s wrong. To the contrary, by hunkering down and thinking only about appeasing the conservative base, he s playing right into the hands of Pelosi and the liberal–media echo chamber.
The last thing Trump should be doing is acting as if the White House is under siege and solely concentrating on defending himself against what appears to be little more than a rerun of the Russian-collusion hoax.
His media critics are breathlessly hyping the impeachment effort, as if his phone calls to Ukraine’s president really were “worse than Watergate,” as Sen. Cory Booker absurdly claimed. The president is right to be outraged. But his best response is to dismiss this attempt to delegitimize his presidency and go on governing.
That means understanding that the real referendum on Trump’s tenure in the White House comes next year at the ballot box — not in a House impeachment debate, where those who have been trying to oust him even before he took the oath of office will stack the deck against him.
The best argument for re-electing Trump will involve him showing that he has the spine to stand up against allies to do what the overwhelming majority of Americans want him to do.
Expanding background checks and red-flag laws are no guarantee against more mass shootings. But they will close some loopholes that might keep a few guns out of the wrong hands and do so in a manner that will be no threat to Second Amendment rights or Trump’s popularity among GOPers.
Trump can still counterpunch the Democrats on impeachment. But he should also start thinking of winning over the suburban moms who can preserve the Electoral College majority that sent his opponents into a delusional funk.
It is those voters — and not the loud voices in the NRA — who can re-elect him next year. Ignoring the NRA’s threats and concentrating on appealing to independents and voters in the middle is not only the best response to impeachment. It’s a vital step toward Trump’s re-election.
Jonathan Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review.