History could forgive Trump's defenders. But we know it will reward his deserters.
"History will judge us,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently said on the Senate floor, arguing for impeaching President Trump. It’s a line we hear a lot, pregnant with ominous implications. This is no time for the usual partisan antics, the warning intimates. We must rise to the Call of History. But how can we know what history will say about Trump’s prosecutors and defenders before we get there?
It’s not easy to know what history will say about anything. Reputations and judgments fluctuate. Not long ago, most historians would have thought it laughable to honor Dwight Eisenhower with a memorial on the Mall, and few would have considered Thomas Jefferson more a villain than a hero because he owned slaves. All George W. Bush had to do was sit idly by and let Donald Trump govern to see his own image improve. Appealing to the verdict of history, as if it were stable and discernible, is presumptuous. It can also be disingenuous, a pretense for the real argument — that your antagonists are making a political choice you don’t like.
Still, people return to this notion for a reason: It acknowledges the potentially high stakes of any political action — how a single vote or decision can loom large in someone’s legacy when the day of reckoning finally comes. It appeals to transcendent ideals that may be obscured by the fervor of the moment; sometimes these coalesce crisply over time, making right and wrong seem obvious and incontestable in retrospect. When, for example, a dying Sen. John McCain went to the well of the Senate to give his thumbs-down on the gutting of Obamacare, he knew this was an act he’d be remembered for.
Today, as the president awaits a decision about his impeachment, those who caution his defenders to beware posterity are probably thinking about Watergate. They suggest that the partisans and ideologues who stood fast by Richard Nixon despite mounting evidence of his criminality forever sullied their reputations. “If Republicans are willing to go along with this, it is going to change our history,” Carl Bernstein, one of the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, told CNN recently. “Because Republicans became the heroes in Watergate who finally said, ‘We cannot tolerate a corrupt president who undermines our electoral system.’ ” As the podcaster Steve Almond put it, “What the country yearns for right now is another [Barry] Goldwater, a leader in the Senate with national name recognition and conservative bona fides” — who famously broke with Nixon during Watergate and helped turn Republican opinion against the president.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/31/when-should-republicans-jump-ship/?arc404=true
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A course in 'flipping' 201. 
[Imo, the next group of flips, should cause a cascade of flips].
