The much talked about impeachment of US President Donald Trump is "very unlikely" to come true, famous American columnist Thomas Friedman said Monday, calling the talk of impeachment "way, way premature."
It is "very unlikely because we are not your grandfathers' America. This is not your grandfathers' Republican Party," the New York Times columnist said in a lecture in Seoul to showcase his new book "Thank You for Being Late." The event was arranged by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
American columnist Thomas Friedman (Yonhap)
"That party was a coalition of northern liberal republicans and southern and western more conservative republicans, and when asked to do the right thing between Nixon and Watergate and not, republicans rose to that challenge," he said, responding to a question on the likelihood of Trump's impeachment.
"Today's Republican Party is not a party, it's a tribe ... and you don't abandon your tribe just because the tribal chief is behaving badly, because it just means other tribes will come in," according to Friedman.
"So the only way Trump will be impeached is if the tribe thinks he's threatening them, that he's gonna be a threat to them. If you see that, then you could talk about impeachment, but right now, it's way, way premature."
Analyzing the reason of Trump's election victory, Friedman pinpointed jitters among America's white middle class as Trump's main supporters who drove him into the presidency.
"America post war (in the three decades from the 1950s), such dominance in industry and services ... those were the golden years of the American middle class," Friedman said. The advent of computing and global trade and competition in the early 1980s, however, led to an increased demand in more skilled workers.
But instead of lifting the working skills, the US "did a lot of tricks" like house building and cheap mortgage issuance as means to sustain the middle class, he said.
With China joining the global market with its membership at the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, coupled with a global financial crisis and the advancement of technology, the middle class clustered in the rust belt of America were devastated, Friedman said.
"So this automation, computing robots just devoured those jobs, and a lot of people got crushed between the China train and my 2007 train," he said, referring to the year 2007 as time for many pivotal technological advances, including the launch of IBM's cognitive computing system Watson.
"They were 5 to 6 million people, not the whole country, but there is a cluster of people who were really hurt in that transition and many of them became Trump voters." (Yonhap)
