Trump’s Crypto Impeachment?
The big question: Will Democrats, for a change, emerge with their image enhanced?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
President Trump in Ankara, Turkey, July 7. Francisco Seco/Associated PressCrypto might seem the ultimate Donald Trump business: Add a Trump name of no intrinsic value to something that already has no intrinsic value.
The strategy has indeed paid off.
Crypto accounts for $1.4 billion in newly disclosed Trump earnings since he returned to the presidency.
Emotional maturity is also clearly gaining a foothold in our markets.
Retail investors who lost gobs buying worthless Trump memecoins tell the press they have no hard feelings.
They were speculating, after all.
Which leaves what?
More interesting, then, for future Democratic investigators will be cases where sophisticated moneyed interests seemed intent on putting cash deliberately in Mr. Trump’s pockets.
Look up, say, this paper’s accounts of deals involving the United Arab Emirates and Binance, the bitcoin exchange whose founder later received a Trump pardon.
One transaction they participated in, when denominated in a Trump-issued stablecoin, was potentially worth $80 million a year to Mr. Trump and his partners.
Then there are those Trump stock trades, averaging 85 per market day.
President Trump says he wasn’t involved, and we can believe him because otherwise he wouldn’t have time for anything else.
But if these were mostly algorithmic trades to reduce his tax burden, does it mean Mr. Trump never phoned in a trade based on inside information?
Democrats at least will have fun asking.
“Everybody needs money,” Danny DeVito says in the David Mamet-scripted movie “Heist.”
“That’s why they call it money.”
For his part, it’s not that Mr. Trump is unconcerned about the appearance of personal profiteering.
He believes it actually adds luster to the family brand.
This poses a challenge for future impeachers.
Americans knew exactly who they were electing.
An impeachable offense, Gerald Ford once pointed out, is whatever a House majority decides it is.
But the electorate usually wants to see its own interests implicated in a larger way before climbing aboard with impeachment.
Mere evidence of a president’s ethical lapses likely isn’t a big enough whoop for most voters.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has been turning every gerrymandering knob to win the midterms, but don’t think it means he fears Democratic investigations.
He shows every sign of expecting another installment of the Trump vs. Elites reality show, which he usually wins.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t engage in the behavior he does.
Past isn’t always prologue, though. Mr. Trump will be a lamer duck.
One thought might go through GOP members’ heads: If allowed to stay in office, what acts might Mr. Trump engage in as he sees his presidential career coming to an end?
For the moment, however, next year’s ructions aren’t shaping up as a Watergate-like high constitutional drama so much as another round of warring infomercials between Mr. Trump and his enemies.
In the past, we’ve seen that impeachment can work for Mr. Trump.
The real question now: Can it work for Democrats?
I mean beyond the way previous Trump impeachments served Democrats in their own internecine battles.
Remember when Nancy Pelosi, in early 2019, said impeachment should be broadly bipartisan then changed her mind when her speakership was threatened by militants in her caucus.
Remember how the Jan. 6 impeachment and related prosecutions benefited Joe Biden, rallying Republicans back to Mr. Trump so Mr. Biden could run against him in 2024.
For that matter, don’t underestimate the role of the first Trump impeachment (involving Ukraine) in helping now-Sen. Adam Schiff shake off some of the odor of the Russia collusion hoax.
We’re talking about something different now.
Mr. Trump is a known quantity.
Impeachment isn’t going to change minds.
Democrats (and their media allies) are the ones who need to show Americans something to cause them to trust Democrats again with the country’s problems.
The coming impeachments, after all, will likely be the finale of the Trump era.
They will likely be important in how the country internalizes the Trump experience.
Will a Democrat emerge from the show having earned that increasingly forlorn quality, genuine respect?
Democrats don’t admit it to themselves, but they need an impeachment that douses the lingering smell of shambolism that has hung around their proceedings over the past decade as much as it has Mr. Trump’s.
Right now the stage looks likelier to be dominated by the sort who’ve been winning primaries in Manhattan and other ultrablue districts while causing the larger electorate to reach for its barf bag.
If so, the logjam-breaking, air-clearing sense of relief the country might want from impeachment won’t be delivered next year.
Impeachment will complete its transformation from the ultimate constitutional sanction to just another degraded political antic.
I know which outcome I expect but the world still can supply surprises from time to time.
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