Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) attempt to gain leverage by withholding the House’s articles of impeachment from the Senate is doomed to fail, Fox News’ Jesse Watters said Thursday.
The Fox host suggested on The Five that President Donald Trump should focus on attacking Pelosi for looking “weak” by trying to keep a Senate trial at bay. “If I were the president, I would stop, declare victory — I would say Nancy looks weak, she looks scared and tired, and eventually the articles will get kicked up and he’ll get the acquittal he’s looking for,” Watters said, according to Fox.
Doomed to fail?
Impeachment is at an impasse after Pelosi’s delay, which the House speaker has said will continue until Republicans in the Senate promise a fair process. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has refused to play Pelosi’s game, insisting that Democrats must act first before the Senate trial gets underway.
The limbo has opened up Pelosi to a new line of attack from President Trump and his allies, who have capitalized on the about-face to attack the impeachment as insincere and fundamentally fraudulent. In a tweetstorm during and after Christmas, Trump contrasted the urgency with which Pelosi sought his impeachment with the sudden stalling, calling Democrats “liars” and hypocrites for wanting “fairness” that they did not give him in the House, according to Fox.
The Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats said they wanted to RUSH everything through to the Senate because “President Trump is a threat to National Security” (they are vicious, will say anything!), but now they don’t want to go fast anymore, they want to go very slowly. Liars!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019
Republicans on Capitol Hill have meanwhile responded to Pelosi’s delay with smug confidence, insisting that she is only trying to put off Trump’s inevitable acquittal. For his part, Watters echoed GOP predictions that Pelosi’s strategy will eventually fail, setting up Trump for a victory lap in the near future.
“She wants the impeachment without the acquittal but she’s not gonna get what she wants because eventually, this strategy is gonna run out of the road,” Watters said Thursday. “The only thing she’s enjoying right now is watching Trump complain.”
Pelosi’s “filthy” district
For all his anger, Trump seems to sense that he is in a position of strength by attacking Pelosi’s impeachment as not just a bad-faith effort, but also a distraction from the nation’s more pressing problems, like the homelessness and squalor in her own backyard. While excoriating Pelosi’s impeachment delay, Trump has begun attacking the Democrat for ignoring the conditions in her “filthy” district to focus on impeaching him and even floated a primary challenge against her.
California leads the nation, by far, in both the number of homeless people, and the percentage increase in the homeless population – two terrible stats. Crazy Nancy should focus on that in her very down district, and helping her incompetent governor with the big homeless problem!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019
Trump also threatened to intervene if Pelosi and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) can’t rise to the challenge of dealing with the state’s homelessness crisis. California has the nation’s highest homeless population of any state — nearly 130,000 in January 2018 — and San Francisco, in Pelosi’s district, has a homeless population of nearly 10,000, according to the New York Post.
“He’s attacking her as from a ‘dirty district,'” Watters said of Trump. “I think it’s effective because everybody can see the dirt in that district in San Francisco and it just reinforces the image of her as a hypocritical politician that cares more about the party than the people of the country.”
It’s really only a matter of time before the Democrats give in, but Trump’s rhetoric can’t hurt in the meantime. If Pelosi can’t even keep her streets clean, how can she be taken seriously on impeachment?