The Persistence of Motivated Reasoning

So, the transcript--or, rather, an account of the transcript of a call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy--came out. I had been prepared to be underwhelmed thanks to multiple messages from Democratic leaders specifying that "no quid pro quo" need appear in the transcript for it to be impeachable. But I gotta say, the transcript itself seems full of quid pro quo.

David French (of The National Review, of the French-Ahmari debates) lays out the case pretty well. Zelenskyy brings up monetary support and military aid promised. Trump goes right into a "favor" he asks of him, starting first with some Russia-gate servers and progressing to Hunter Biden. There's no explicit statement along the lines of "If you want X, you'll give me Y." "But," writes French, "if I couldn’t walk a witness, judge, and jury through the transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and demonstrate that a quid pro quo was more likely than not, then I should just hang up my [attorney's] suit and retire in disgrace."

Yet French is in the minority on the right, a "never Trumper." The overwhelming spin from that side ranges from "suggestive, but no smoking gun" to "another nothingburger from Trump-hating liberals." I've studied motivated reasoning and biased cognition research enough to expect, intellectually, that no possible transcript would appear as a smoking gun to Trump's base. As he himself boasted, he could shoot someone in broad daylight and still count on their votes.

Even then, research suggests that Trumpers gonna Trump.  I know this. Nevertheless, it's still disconcerting to witness people on the other side excusing a president asking a foreign ruler directly for help in discrediting a political opponent. It drains my life energy, makes me want to give on on the world.

I would like to think that I would be better. Before news of the transcript came out today, I asked myself: is there anything the transcript could say or fail to say that would weaken my hunch that Trump was engaging in nefarious behavior? If it turned out that the conversation had avoided Biden altogether, for instance, I'd like to think I'd be back-peddling or cooling off my own impeachment fervor. Of course, my side already had a prepped response for such a possibility: the transcript is redacted by the White House. I fully expect that many of my compatriots on the left would have resorted right to this rationale. I might have joined them, alas. We are never as immune to motivated reasoning as we think we are.

But I also wanted to ask of the other side whether there was anything that the transcript could have said that would actually have been a so-called "smoking gun." I'm not sure that high-stakes political quid-pro-quo gets much more explicit than what's in the transcript now. Perhaps if Trump had uttered the words, "You'd better get me dirt on Biden, or no money for you!"

As it is, a mishmash of different, sometimes contradictory rationales fuel that stance. The transcript is OK because Obama did worse. The transcript is OK because it shows Trump doing routine political strategizing. The transcript is OK because Trump has the right to ask favors of anyone he wants. The transcript is OK because it shows he's just interested in getting rid of Ukrainian corruption. The transcript is valuable because it spotlights how corrupt Biden is. And so on.

The most depressing, I think, is the idea that of course Trump is right to pressure Ukraine like this. He holds the winning hand. He has the power. To the victor go the spoils. Might makes right. Mind you, even arch-conservative Erick Erickson allowed that "if Obama had done this, Republicans would be demanding impeachment." (Erickson argues in that piece that impeachment is inappropriate, but still.) That "if the other side did it, would we cry foul?" question used to have some power. I saw it deployed a few times in right-wing comment threads about the electoral college after the 2016 election, for instance. But even there it fell flat. Winning means more than moral standards.

Again, I doubt--though I'd love to be wrong--that my side would do much better were the situation somehow reversed.

Change is possible. The whistleblower's report, according to Erickson's sources, contains some damaging, credible material for impeachment proceedings. But I'm not optimistic.

More tomorrow,

JF