Remember the phone call between then President Donald Trump and new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy? The one that got a “whistleblower” so upset that he ran right to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and helped prep Democrats for an impeachment fight?
Well, that call was legal, and Trump was acquitted, as he should have been. Democrats clutched their pearls over how Trump had used U.S. foreign policy for political purposes. It was an outrage that could be addressed only by impeaching him, even though the transcript showed nothing especially troubling.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. President Joe Biden is stalling a shipment of ammunition to Israel in an attempt to placate the extremists within the base of his own party. Will any Democrat even notice?
The Trump phone call was a congratulatory one after Zelenskyy had won his election. In it, Trump mentioned all the allegations of influence peddling against Joe Biden, which serve as a litmus test for partisanship. Republicans see corruption and demand an investigation; Democrats see nothing and demand that there be no questions — in fact, that the media black out the entire topic.
Personally, that second option seems a little defensive, considering how a genuine investigation will, if there is no corruption, merely exonerate Biden and make Republicans look foolish.
Still, Democrats insisted there be no action taken to clear Joe Biden. And when Trump made his phone call, they impeached him over it.
In the course of arguments by Democrats, Trump took the unprecedented step of releasing the transcript of the phone call. The whole world was free to read what had been said. And read it they did.
The case Democrats laid out against Trump required the omission of 540 words — the words spoken between the mention of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and the only mention of Biden. That is one hell of a tie-together.
But for Democrats, given ample political motivations, this was enough to impeach. The Senate happily held a trial. Trump was acquitted, and easily, but the deed was done. Democrats had manufactured a scenario in which, for the first time in American history, an impeached president would be running for reelection. The lack of conviction was hardly a problem, it wasn’t even the point. The label of “impeached” was what mattered.
Now, we have a president who, in a fight for reelection where he needs votes from an angry, antisemitic base of young college progressives, is putting politics ahead of a longstanding ally — in fact, ahead of obeying the law and delivering aid to that ally. Yet for some reason, no one sees the obvious problem with this. No one is saying anything.
Michigan is in play in 2024. And Biden’s odds of losing reelection if Trump wins Michigan are basically 100 percent. Democrats need the voters in Dearborn to carry the state. They also need Hamtramck, an often-overlooked enclave of Detroit that used to be heavily Polish but is now majority Arab like Dearborn.
If voters in those two places stay home, it could easily swing the state to Trump.
While the enthusiastic support of young voters is something any candidate would love to have, it’s the voters in those two heavily Muslim areas that are the real prize. Democrats can’t fully abandon Israel to get it. They’d lose too many other voters. So, they are trying to thread the needle between the two by publicly criticizing the Jewish state and taking other shots like delaying military equipment approved by Congress.
Donald Trump never even went that far, yet he was impeached for it. When asked about Biden’s action, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby refused to “confirm that reporting.”
There was no outrage. There were no calls for impeachment. The two leading cheerleaders of the Trump impeachments, Schiff and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), both of whom happen to be Jewish, not only haven’t called for an investigation, but they haven’t even said anything about it.
But Biden is using U.S. foreign policy to help himself domestically. It’s what Trump was impeached for.
I guess it’s it’s different when Democrats do what they accuse Republicans of doing. Weird how that works out, isn’t it?
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).