(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)
It’s confirmed: the president of the United States of America is under investigation by the FBI for Russian interference during his electoral campaign and foreign compromising in his elected office. In normal times, this investigation would be enough to force his resignation, as happened to Nixon in the Watergate scandal. We don’t, however, live in normal times.
There’s no moment in which the elected administration has distanced itself from the electoral campaign, largely due to behavior related to scandals it’s involved in. The administration maintains the same staffers as well as discourse, blaming any kind of mishap on the previous administration or Hillary. This last point in particular demonstrates a profound dissonance in the Republican Party’s discourse faced with the reality of what happened before and during the campaign.
Trump is not yet on the verge of impeachment for the same reason there were 37 hearings for the Benghazi case, continuing well after it had been settled
What is curious, then, comes from all of the supposedly bad things attributed to his opponent being, on the other hand, the very real target of open investigations against Trump and his campaign. Hillary, they said, was corrupt and compromised, incompetent for using her own email server. Meanwhile, the current administration is using private email servers and the president continues to use his old, unsecured Android phone. The FBI is openly investigating potential compromising of the administration and involved figures in it and the campaign. The inversion of culpability shows the hollowness of the rhetoric that secured Trump’s victory among just the right electorate in the final stage of the campaign.
The sudden amnesia to the consternation demonstrated for Hillary in the context of the same types of accusations the president faces hides the lesson the Republican Party has learned in its time as the opposition: it doesn’t matter what the words themselves mean, it matter what kind of implications they carry. Trump is not yet on the verge of impeachment for the same reason there were 37 hearings for the Benghazi case, continuing well after it had been settled.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an accusation of corruption, restriction to free speech, or ethics violations: it’s the capacity of that moment to generate a point of political conflict that sticks. The moment it no longer sticks or no longer serves the accusing side to advance its political agenda, sure enough, we get a curious case of amnesia.