The constituents of Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash — the sole Republican lawmaker to call for impeachment of President Donald Trump, criticizing his own party in the process — proved his point in a town hall this week.
Republicans’ successful campaign to protect Trump from Mueller’s report, in one quote
Rep. Justin Amash’s constituent captures the state of partisanship around Trump.
Amash didn’t have to just defend his call to begin impeachment proceedings against the president when facing voters in Grand Rapids for the first time since he made that call in a viral tweet thread earlier this month; he also had to explain why he was talking about it in the first place.
Core to Amash’s conclusions from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is that his Republican colleagues in Congress, blinded by partisanship, have abdicated their responsibility to hold Trump accountable. Instead, they’ve sowed distrust in the FBI and in Mueller’s investigation, and deemed it political suicide to question Trump in any way.
The success of this Republican campaign, reflected in conservative media coverage, to protect Trump was best captured by Amash’s own constituent Cathy Garnaat, a Republican, who NBC reported was “surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump.”
“I hadn’t heard that before,” she told NBC after the Tuesday town hall. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”
That comment alone cements that Amash, in becoming the first and only Republican to call for impeachment, is fighting against an entire machine — from the elected leaders to sympathetic media outlets.
Outlets like Fox News have played a central role in the Trump presidency. Trump has repeatedly endorsed the network’s coverage, congratulating Fox’s high ratings while calling other outlets “Fake News.” Meanwhile, Trump and Fox News, which has always had a strong read of the conservative base, have had a symbiotic relationship, sharing talking points and a political agenda, so much so that the president has a direct line to the outlets’ pundits and several of the outlet’s contributors now work for his administration. Bill Shine, a veteran Fox News executive, was Trump’s deputy chief of staff until March, when he stepped down to join the Trump campaign.
This dynamic has created two worlds: one where Trump is heroically defending himself against a liberal witch hunt, where there was “no collusion” and “no obstruction” — and the reality, where the nation’s highest law enforcement agency, after a nearly two-year investigation, outlined 10 instances in which Trump may have attempted to obstruct the special counsel’s work, as well as numerous connections the Trump campaign had with foreign actors.
Amash is a member of the party that’s trying to convince voters to live in the former world, where Trump can do no wrong. That goal is much easier when most of the information voters receive is filtered through conservative media, and not directly from the report itself. But after reading the Mueller report, Amash is explaining to his constituents why he feels he has to speak out.
