Analysis: Trump is winning Round 1 of the impeachment battle

President Trump wants dirt on Joe Biden, and because we know he wants dirt on Joe Biden, he’s now facing impeachment.

We know the Senate is never going to vote to remove him from office, so, immaterial, that he’s going to be impeached.

Don’t assume it tarnishes him beyond repair for November 2020, either, because, again, immaterial.

Trump is already tarnished beyond repair with a majority of the voting public.

What Trump is doing, and succeeding at doing, is engineering a voting public that can give him re-election.

Trump, wisely or not, thinks Biden is his biggest threat politically. I can see the wisdom there, actually. Biden is the centrist among the three Democratic Party contenders left standing at this stage, yes, still three-plus months out from the first votes being cast in 2020.

So, what you have going on with Trump seeking dirt on Biden is, knock down ol’ Joe a peg or two or more, and let’s see if we can throw the Democratic Party presidential race to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

That’s what the Biden thing is all about. Which is to say, it’s not about giving Trump ammunition to use against Biden in the 2020 general, but about keeping Biden from even getting to the 2020 general.

Trump thinks he can beat Warren or Sanders; he doesn’t think he can beat ol’ Joe.

Now, so, OK, the dirt that he’s seeking is so much Fake News. There’s no there there, in reference to anything substantive with Biden, his son, Hunter, and Ukraine.

It’s a non-starter of a non-story.

Doesn’t matter. The way politics works in TrumpWorld, what’s demonstrably false is only so until it’s amplified and repeated ad nauseam, to the point that it becomes true.

Biden is clearly innocent of any and all nonsense allegations being lodged against him, but, doesn’t matter.

Liberal and progressive voters who would otherwise automatically line up behind whoever gets the nomination in 2020 now have reason to have pause.

Same as liberal and progressive voters who would have been expected to automatically back Hillary Clinton in 2016 had enough pause that a sliver of them either stayed home on Election Day, or cast protest votes for third-party candidates, throwing the election to Trump.

A Quinnipiac poll from a couple of weeks back has it that 54 percent of voters are saying they will definitely not vote for Trump in 2020, which would be disqualifyingly bad news for Trump if it were the case that everybody eligible to vote would actually follow through.

As we know, they don’t, so the strategy is, get as close to 100 percent of the 33 percent who told Quinnipiac that they’re definitely, unequivocally voting for Trump, to come out on Election Day, and then scatter across the battlefield enough reasons for enough of the other 54 percent to not show up at the polls to tilt the scales in your favor.

It’s really no different than the football coach whose team is a major underdog trying to shorten the game by running the ball, maybe getting a turnover or two to shorten the field on a scoring drive, and sneaking out a one-point win against a vastly superior foe.

There’s a saying about how you don’t need to be the best team in the country every Saturday to win the national championship, just the best team in the stadium.

Donald Trump doesn’t need to be Lincoln, Kennedy or FDR to win re-election; he just needs 270.

He’s going to be impeached, not going to be removed, and he’s not going to face Joe Biden in the 2020 general.

He’s thinking: Advantage Trump.

He might be onto something.

Analysis by Chris Graham