Expunging Trump’s impeachments is history for dummies
‘History is what losers say it is’
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.The adage “History is written by the victors” is often attributed – wrongly, like so many catchy expressions – to Winston Churchill. In reality, versions of the saying have long existed. Today in the United States, some seem keen to refashion the well-worn expression into: “History is what losers say it is.”
The GOP’s obsession with controlling the historical narrative by any means necessary is hardly new. After all, a beloved right-wing talking point in recent years is that Leftists, elites, whoever the latest so-called ‘threat’ to the Republic is, won’t stop picking at the wounds of America’s problematic past. Can’t we just move on?
Removing the names of Confederate traitors from military bases? That’s erasing history!
Teaching kids about the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Japanese internment camps? That’s cherry-picking history!
Highlighting the ongoing battle for LGBTQ rights and, specifically, the virulent “anti-woke” demonization of trans men, women, and teens? That’s a threat to heteronormative history!
But in a recent development that illustrates just how far Republicans are willing to go in order to appease Trump, two autocracy-curious members of Congress, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and New York’s Elise Stefanik, have come up with a plan so bonkers, it just might work.
Their separate but eerily similar proposals? That former president Donald Trump’s two impeachments should be expunged from the historical record.
Greene’s proposal would excise Trump’s 2019 impeachment, on the grounds that the former president was “wrongfully accused of misconduct” after he (allegedly — but obviously) tried to strongarm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into finding dirt on Trump’s then-rival, Joe Biden, which would incidentally free up $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.
Stefanik’s measure aims to rescind Trump’s 2021 impeachment because, in Stefanik’s multiverse, the proceedings failed to prove that the loser of the 2020 presidential election committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he (allegedly — but obviously) incited a mob to attack the Capitol.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Friday that he supports the idea of expunging the two impeachments. McCarthy said: “I think it is appropriate, just as I thought before — that you should expunge it, because it never should have gone through.”
Never mind that more than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes related to the Jan 6 attack, that hundreds have been found guilty, and that many of those who attacked the Capitol cited Trump’s lies about a “stolen” election and his violent rhetoric as reasons why they descended on DC in the first place.
And never mind that a number of police officers who battled rioters on Jan 6 subsequently died by suicide; that scores of cops retired early due to mob-inflicted injuries; and that untold numbers still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In MAGA’s alternate timeline, the rioters who fought the peaceful transition of power are not violent goons, but patriots maligned by lamestream media, RINOs, and Marxists like Adam Schiff, officer Michael Fanone, four-star Gen. Mark Milley, and other blue-pilled betas.
Greene’s and Stefanik’s MAGA ideology seems to celebrate misinformation and hanker for an ill-defined American “golden age” that, by all accounts, thrived sometime prior to 1861. If the arc of history needs to be twisted into a shape more closely aligned with that ideology — by blotting out two impeachments, for example — so be it.
That Greene’s and Stefanik’s proposals have no precedent is beside the point.
As Georgetown University Law Professor Jonathan Turley — a frequent legal analyst on Fox News and hardly a raving liberal — recently explained to Reuters, expunging impeachments is not something the Constitution is built for.
“It is not like a constitutional DUI,” Turley noted. “Once you are impeached, you are impeached.”
On the other hand, while impeachment carries no legal weight, it has the trappings of a judicial proceeding. And if criminal charges can be expunged from civilian records, one can see why Republicans embrace a kind of legal magical thinking in their efforts to legitimize what is, ultimately, a political charade.
“We will have so much winning if I get elected,” Trump vowed during the 2016 campaign, in his trademark, juvenile idiolect, “that you may get bored with the winning.”
And yet Democrats have won the popular vote in the past two (actually, in seven of the past eight) presidential elections. Republicans performed abysmally in the 2022 midterms when they had every right to expect a landslide victory.
Losing is becoming baked into the GOP brand, in part because millions of Americans find the MAGA worldview so cruel, divisive, and obviously authoritarian.
Who is going to tell Greene, Stefanik, and the rest of the MAGA crowd that, despite their best (or worst) efforts, history is not, and with luck will never be, what the losers say it is?