QUITE A FEW ELITE JOURNALISTS DESCRIBE THE IMPEACHMENT FIGHT THE SAME WAY THE DEPLORABLES DO

President Trump's biggest fans see impeachment this way: A powerful permanent government -- call it "the swamp" or "the deep state" -- doesn't like the president and is determined that its way of doing business must always prevail. The swamp creatures insist on this because they have a highly developed sense of entitlement. They think they were bred to rule, and Donald Trump wasn't.

Some members of the elite media appear to agree.

A couple of days ago, in The New York Times, Mark Leibovich wrote this:

In a sense, seriousness itself stood trial on Wednesday as William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a top State Department official, strode into the velvet-draped hearing room just after 10 a.m.

... [Taylor] and the bow-tied Mr. Kent presented as traditionalists of an ilk distinct from any Trumpian vintage. With his wire-rimmed glasses and up-arrow eyebrows, Mr. Taylor in particular resembled a prep-school headmaster, tough but fair and near impossible to discredit.

In pursuing an impeachment inquiry, Democrats were not only asserting authority over a president they believe had run amok. They were also showcasing career diplomats who embodied so-called permanent Washington — the quiet norms that President Trump has so thoroughly rejected to the delight of so many of his supporters.

This is accompanied by a tight shot of George Kent's tastefully clad upper torso.



The caption reads:

Mr. Kent wearing a bowtie and pocket square. He and Mr. Taylor presented as traditionalists of an ilk distinct from any Trumpian vintage.

In other words: These are men of breeding. Trump is an unlettered ruffian. Such men must not be allowed to run the government.

Trump is unlettered (despite a fairly elite education) and a ruffian. But the two aren't inextricably linked. There are many good, decent people who read as little as Trump does, and there are terrible people who know how to wear a pocket square (cough Roger Stone cough). Trump's voter base sees the impeachment battle precisely the same way: It's the well-bred versus the barbarians, and we're rooting for the barbarians.

We see a variant of this worldview in an overwritten Washington Post op-ed by Jon Meacham, Walter Isaacson, and Evan Thomas (talk about your Establishment elitists).

Geography, Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, is destiny, and this axiom came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan.

Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south — you don’t even need a Town Car — and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post....

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world.

That's how the deplorables see it, too. They know that if they were elites, they wouldn't want to be knowledge elites -- people who understand global affairs and quietly, responsibly try to influence them. They'd want to be strutting bigwigs who smoke smelly cigars and regard themselves as street toughs and thumb-breakers.

But this battle isn't just between Foreign Service professionals and Trump. Most of America wants Trump to go, and the vast majority of us have no idea how to tie a bow tie. This isn't class versus class. It's good versus evil.