In broad strokes, Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment was relatively straightforward: The then-president, hoping Ukraine would bolster one of his partisan election schemes, withheld aid to the U.S. ally. It wasn’t subtle: The Republican realized that Ukraine was desperate for support ahead of a feared Russian invasion, so Trump tried to leverage those fears for his own gain, trying to tie strings to congressionally approved military assistance.
The evidence of Trump’s culpability was overwhelming, and even some of the GOP senators who voted to acquit him publicly conceded that he was guilty.
To hear Sen. Susan Collins tell it, the public could rest easy about the near future. “I believe that [Trump] has learned from this case,” the Maine Republican said in February 2020. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”
The relevance of that quote continues to linger — because the former president keeps discrediting the idea that he “learned” anything from the ordeal. The Washington Post reported on Trump making comments at his latest rally that were directly relevant to his first impeachment:
Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden.
“Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ, and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” the former president told attendees.
Trump said GOP lawmakers who resisted his demands should — you guessed it — face primary challenges.
For good measure, let’s pause to appreciate the fact that Trump made these comments almost exactly four years to the day after the infamous phone meeting in which he tried to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
While it’s likely that the Kremlin found the Republican’s rhetoric encouraging, since anything that threatens U.S. aid for Ukraine is necessarily good news for Russia, Trump’s comments were plainly absurd. Not only is there no reason to believe President Biden engaged in corruption, and not only is there no reason to believe federal agencies are hiding incriminating information, but none of this has anything to do with the U.S. ally abroad in the midst of a deadly war.
Trump, however, appears to have a playbook with a limited number of pages. In 2019, the then-president sought anti-Biden dirt, so he thought the smart move would be to threaten aid to Ukraine. In 2023, he’s again looking for anti-Biden dirt, and he’s again decided that the smart move would be to again threaten aid to Ukraine. All of this comes against a backdrop of Republicans taking fresh aim at Trump’s first impeachment. The recent censure effort targeting Rep. Adam Schiff, for example, condemned the California Democrat for having helped launch the 2019 impeachment effort, as if this were somehow evidence of wrongdoing. Soon after, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who continues to move sharply to the right, insisted that the basis for Trump’s first impeachment was “based on a bed of lies,” despite that the fact that she wasn’t in Congress at the time. Meanwhile, a GOP effort to “expunge” both of Trump’s impeachments has gained considerable support within the party, including receiving an endorsement from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. All the while, the former president himself is reminding the political world of just how little he learned from his 2019 wrongdoing.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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