Endgames
BY: Evan Osnos from The New Yorker
Hours after Donald Trump's Inauguration, a post appeared on the official
White House petitions page, demanding that he release his tax returns. In
only a few days, it gathered more signatures than any previous White House
petition. The success of the Women's March had shown that themed protests
could both mobilize huge numbers of people and hit a nerve with the
President. On Easter weekend, roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people
protested in two hundred cities, calling for him to release his tax returns
and sell his businesses. On Capitol Hill, protesters chanted "Impeach
Forty-five! In West Palm Beach, a motorcade ferrying him from the Trump
International Golf Club to Mar-a-Lago had to take a circuitous route to
avoid demonstrators. The White House does all it can to keep the President
away from protests, but the next day Trump tweeted, "Someone should look
into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is
over! On Tax Day itself, Trump travelled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he
would be among his supporters again, giving a speech at Snap-on, a
manufacturer of high-end power tools and other gear. Wisconsin has emerged
as one of Trump's favorite states. He is the first Republican Presidential
candidate to win there since 1984. He included the state in a post-election
"thank-you tour. Another visit was planned for shortly after the
Inauguration, but it was cancelled once it became clear that it would
attract protests. By this point in George W. Bush's term, Bush had travelled
to twenty-three states and a foreign country. Trump has visited just nine
states and has never stayed the night. He inhabits a closed world that one
adviser recently described to me as "Fortress Trump. Rarely venturing beyond
the White House and Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes through reports
from friends, staff, and a feast of television coverage of himself. Media is
Trump's "drug of choice," Sam Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, told me
recently. "He doesn't drink. He doesn't do drugs. His drug is himself.
Trump's Tax Day itinerary enabled him to avoid the exposure of a motorcade;
instead, he flew on Marine One directly to Snap-on's headquarters. Several
hundred protesters were outside chanting and holding signs. But the event's
organizers had created a wall of tractor-trailers around the spot where
Trump would land, blocking protesters from seeing Trump and him from seeing
them. Snap-on's headquarters, a gleaming expanse of stainless steel, chrome,
and enamel, provided a fine backdrop for muscular American manufacturing,
though in fact the firm closed its Kenosha factory more than a decade ago.
Nick Pinchuk, the C.E.O., led Trump past displays of Snap-on products,
showing him a car hooked up to state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment ("It's
a different world! Trump mused), and a table of Snap-on souvenirs, including
small, colorful metal boxes that Pinchuk said some customers buy to hold
ashes after a cremation. "That's kind of depressing," Trump said. An
auditorium was packed with local dignitaries and Snap-on employees. As "Hail
to the Chief" played on the sound system, Trump stepped onto the stage. He
stood in front of a sculpture of an American flag rippling in the wind, made
from hundreds of Snap-on wrenches. Behind him was a banner: " BUY
AMERICAN-HIRE AMERICAN . For a moment, the President, wearing a red tie,
leaning on the lectern, looked as if he were back on the campaign trail.
"These are great, great people," he began. "And these are real workers. I
love the workers. "We don't have a level playing field," he said. It was a
treasured campaign line, to which he now added a vow of imminent progress:
"You're gonna have one very soon. After Republicans abandoned their first
effort to enact health-care reform, and courts blocked two executive orders
designed to curb immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, he was
determined to dispel any sense that his Administration had been weakened.
"Our tax reform and tax plan is coming along very well," he assured the
crowd. "It's going to be out very soon. We're working on health care and
we're going to get that done, too. Trump's approval rating is forty per
cent-the lowest of any newly elected President since Gallup started
measuring it. Even before Trump entered the White House, the F.B.I. and four
congressional committees were investigating potential collusion between his
associates and the Russian government. Since then, Trump's daughter Ivanka
and her husband, Jared Kushner, have become senior White House officials,
prompting intense criticism over potential conflicts of interest involving
their private businesses. Between October and March, the U.S. Office of
Government Ethics received more than thirty-nine thousand public inquiries
and complaints, an increase of five thousand per cent over the same period
at the start of the Obama Administration. Nobody oc'cup'ies the White House
without criticism, but Trump is besieged by doubts of a different order,
centering on the overt, specific, and, at times, bipartisan discussion of
whether he will be engulfed by any one of myriad problems before he has
completed even one term in office-and, if he is, how he might be removed.
When members of Congress returned to their home districts in March, outrage
erupted at town-hall meetings, where constituents jeered Republican
officials, chanting "Do your job! and "Push back! The former South Carolina
governor Mark Sanford, who is now a Republican congressman, told me that
he'd held eight town halls in his district. Trump won South Carolina by
nearly fifteen points, so Sanford was surprised to hear people calling for
him to be impeached. "I'd never heard that before in different public
interactions with people in the wake of a new President being elected," he
told me. "Even when you heard it with the Tea Party crowd, with Obama, it
was later in the game. It didn't start out right away. Trump's critics are
actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the
Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who
is judged to be mentally unfit. During the past few months, I interviewed
several dozen people about the prospects of cutting short Trump's
Presidency. I spoke to his friends and advisers; to lawmakers and attorneys
who have conducted impeachments; to physicians and historians; and to
current members of the Senate, the House, and the intelligence services. By
any normal accounting, the chance of a Presidency ending ahead of schedule
is remote. In two hundred and twenty-eight years, only one President has
resigned; two have been impeached, though neither was ultimately removed
from office; eight have died. But nothing about Trump is normal. Although
some of my sources maintained that laws and politics protect the President
to a degree that his critics underestimate, others argued that he has
already set in motion a process of his undoing. All agree that Trump is
unlike his predecessors in ways that intensify his political, legal, and
personal risks. He is the first President with no prior experience in
government or the military, the first to retain ownership of a business
empire, and the oldest person ever to assume the Presidency. For Trump's
allies, the depth of his unpopularity is an urgent cause for alarm. "You
can't govern this country with a forty-per-cent approval rate. You just
can't," Stephen Moore, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation, who
advised Trump during the campaign, told me. "Nobody in either party is going
to bend over backwards for Trump if over half the country doesn't approve of
him. That, to me, should be a big warning sign. Trump has embraced
strategies that normally boost popularity, such as military action. In
April, some pundits were quick to applaud him for launching a cruise-missile
attack on a Syrian airbase, and for threatening to attack North Korea. In
interviews, Trump marvelled at the forces at his disposal, like a man
wandering into undiscovered rooms of his house. ("It's so incredible. It's
brilliant.") But the Syria attack only briefly reversed the slide in Trump's
popularity; it remained at historic lows. It is not a good sign for a
beleaguered President when his party gets dragged down, too. From January to
April, the number of Americans who had a favorable view of the Republican
Party dropped seven points, to forty per cent, according to the Pew Research
Center. I asked Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a
libertarian think tank, if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a
Presidency. "No, nobody has," he said. "But we've never lived in a Third
World banana republic. I don't mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is
he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is
held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact
that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise. Very
few Republicans in Congress have openly challenged Trump, but Taylor
cautioned against interpreting that as committed support. "My guess is that
there's only between fifty and a hundred Republican members of the House
that are truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump as President," he said. "The
balance sees him as somewhere between a deep and dangerous embarrassment and
a threat to the Constitution. The Administration's defiance of conventional
standards of probity makes it acutely vulnerable to ethical scandal. The
White House recently stopped releasing visitors' logs, limiting the public's
ability to know who is meeting with the President and his staff. Trump has
also issued secret waivers to ethics rules, so that political appointees can
alter regulations that they previously lobbied to dismantle. On the day that
Trump spoke in Wisconsin, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington ( CREW ), a prominent legal watchdog group, expanded a federal
lawsuit that accuses Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the
Constitution, a provision that restricts officeholders from receiving gifts
and favors from foreign interests. The lawsuit cites the Trump International
Hotel, half a mile from the White House, which foreign dignitaries have
admitted frequenting as a way to curry favor with the President. ("Isn't it
rude to come to his city and say, 'I am staying at your competitor'? an
Asian diplomat told the Washington Post in November.) The suit, first filed
in January, in the Southern District of New York, is partly an effort to pry
open the President's business records. Two plaintiffs involved in the
hotel-and-restaurant industry joined the current case, arguing that Trump's
businesses enjoy unfair advantages. "This isn't about politics; I'm a
registered Republican," Jill Phaneuf, a plaintiff who books receptions and
events for hotels, has said. "I joined this lawsuit because the President is
taking business away from me. CREW is best known for its role in exposing
the ethics violations of Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, who,
in 2006, resigned under indictment; and of Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who
went to prison for corruption the same year. Richard Painter, the vice-chair
of CREW 's board, was formerly the chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush's
White House. He said that the Bush Administration maintained a policy of
forbidding senior officials from retaining business interests that
conflicted with their responsibilities, as some in Trump's White House have
done. "We never had controversies over divestment," Painter told me. "They'd
ask, 'What is Hank Paulson' "-who became Treasury Secretary in 2006-" 'going
to do? 'He's going to sell his Goldman Sachs stuff. It was pretty cut and
dried. Meanwhile, nine months after the F.B.I. started investigating Russian
interference in the campaign, it continues to examine potential links
between Trump's associates and the Kremlin. Michael Flynn, who resigned as
Trump's national-security adviser after acknowledging that he lied about his
contact with Russia's Ambassador, is seeking immunity in exchange for
speaking with federal investigators, raising the prospect that he could
reveal other undisclosed contacts, or a broader conspiracy. Robert Kelner,
Flynn's lawyer, wrote in a statement, "General Flynn certainly has a story
to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.
The F.B.I. is also investigating Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign
chairman, after it was reported that Manafort received millions of dollars
in cash payments from pro-Kremlin groups in Ukraine; and Carter Page, a
foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign until last September. The
F.B.I. has described Page, in court filings, as having connections to
Russian agents. The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links
to the Kremlin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But
select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access
to the findings. Recently, one of them, Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia,
the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, privately told friends
that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump completing a full term.
(Warner's spokesperson said that the Senator was "not referring specifically
to the Russia investigation, but rather the totality of challenges the
President is currently facing.") In a gesture intended to convey
transparency, Jared Kushner and Trump's outside adviser Roger Stone have
offered to speak to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Newt Gingrich, a
Trump campaign adviser who, when he was Speaker of the House, led the push
for Bill Clinton's impeachment, believes it is a risky maneuver. "Anybody
who goes in front of a congressional hearing for something that is being
investigated by the F.B.I. is in immediate danger of perjury in the most
innocent way, and I think that's really dangerous," Gingrich told me. "None
of these guys understand that this is a war, and, if the left can put them
in jail, they're going to put them in jail. It's not clear how fully Trump
apprehends the threats to his Presidency. Unlike previous Republican
Administrations, Fortress Trump contains no party elder with the stature to
check the President's decisions. "There is no one around him who has the
ability to restrain any of his impulses, on any issue ever, for any reason,"
Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican consultant, said, adding, "Where is the
'What the fuck' chorus? Trump's insulation from unwelcome information
appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend
Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at
Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. "He tends to not like a lot of negative
feedback," Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump's associates
are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. "I don't think he
realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he's such a
large guy and he's so powerful," Ruddy went on. "I already sense that a lot
of people don't want to give him bad news about things. I've already been
approached by several people that'll say, 'He's got to hear this. Could you
tell him? " There has been considerable speculation about Trump's physical
and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign,
his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two
hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese.
His personal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, issued brief, celebratory
statements-Trump's lab-test results were "astonishingly
excellent"-mentioning little more than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin.
Trump himself says that he is "not a big sleeper" ("I like three hours, four
hours") and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald's. Other than golf,
he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is
born with a finite amount of energy. Secrecy about a President's health has
a rich history. "No one in the White House wants to emphasize the fact that
the President might be too ill to carry out his responsibilities," Robert E.
Gilbert, a political scientist at Northeastern University who studies
Presidential health, told me. "They want everyone to think that the
President is able to surmount any problem, no matter how serious, because
they are thinking of reëlection, and they are thinking of the judgment of
history. Although John F. Kennedy's tan was often described as a sign of
vigor, it was caused by Addison's disease, an endocrine disorder, which
Kennedy and his aides hid for decades, and which left him dependent on
multiple medications. Yet it is impossible to conceal the sheer physical
strain of the Presidency. Studying the medical records of Presidents since
Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Roizen, the chairman of the Cleveland Clinic's
Wellness Institute, has concluded that "unrequited stress"-the absence of
peers and friends-takes the greatest toll. Kennedy, who liked to compare his
critics to hecklers at a bullfight, quoted a poem by the matador Domingo
Ortega: "Only one is there who knows / And he's the man who fights the bull.
A 2015 study, led by Anupam Jena, of Harvard Medical School, analyzed the
life expectancy of five hundred and forty politicians in seventeen
countries. Jena found that the lives of elected leaders are, on average, 2.7
years shorter than those of the runners-up. The Framers of the Constitution
planned ahead for the death of Presidents-hence, Vice-Presidents-but they
failed to address an unnerving prospect: a President who is alive and very
sick. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and been left comatose, there would
have been no legal way to allow others to assume his powers. To fend off
that possibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution
in February, 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is
judged to be "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. The
assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the
Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel
of medical experts. If the President objects-a theoretical crisis that
scholars call "contested removal"-Congress has three weeks to debate and
decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to
remove the President. There is no appeal. However, the definition of what
would constitute an inability to discharge the duties of office was left
deliberately vague. Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and others who drafted
the clause wanted to insure that the final decision was not left to doctors.
The fate of a President, Bayh wrote later, is "really a political question"
that should rest on the "professional judgment of the political
circumstances existing at the time. The Twenty-fifth Amendment could
therefore be employed in the case of a President who is not incapacitated
but is considered mentally impaired. A study by psychiatrists at Duke
University, published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease , in
2006, made a striking assertion: about half the Presidents they studied had
suffered a mental illness at one time or another. The researchers examined
biographies and medical histories of thirty-seven Presidents, from
Washington to Nixon, and found that forty-nine per cent met the criteria for
a psychiatric disorder-mostly depression, anxiety, and substance abuse-at
some point in their lives. Ten Presidents, or about one in four, had
symptoms "evident during presidential office, which in most cases probably
impaired job performance. Some of these illnesses had far-reaching
historical consequences. Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853,
his son died in a train accident, and Pierce's Presidency was marked by the
"dead weight of hopeless sorrow," according to his biographer Roy Franklin
Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions
that precipitated the Civil War. Years after the death of Lyndon B. Johnson,
it emerged that, as the war in Vietnam intensified, he exhibited symptoms of
profound paranoia, leading two of his assistants to secretly seek the advice
of psychiatrists. Johnson imagined conspiracies involving the Times or the
United Nations or élites whom he called "those Harvards. He took to
carrying, in his jacket pocket, faulty statistics that he recited about
"victory" and troop commitments in Vietnam. "For a long time, Johnson
succeeded," one of the assistants wrote, "not in changing reality, but in
deceiving much of the country and, perhaps, himself. Only one Administration
is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a
President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the
strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly
inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became
Reagan's chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in
disarray. "He seemed to be despondent but not depressed," Baker said later,
of the President. Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White
House officials about the Administration's dysfunction, and Cannon learned
that Reagan was not reading even short documents. "They said he wouldn't
come over to work-all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the
residence," Cannon recalled, in "Landslide," a 1988 account of Reagan's
second term, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Baker summoned a
small group of aides to his home. One of them, Thomas Griscom, told me
recently that Cannon, who died in 2011, "floats this idea that maybe we'd
invoke the Constitution. Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he proposed
a diagnostic process of sorts: they would observe the President's behavior
at lunch. In the event, Reagan was funny and alert, and Baker considered the
debate closed. "We finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, 'You know, boys,
I think we've all seen this President is fully capable of doing the job,' "
Griscom said. They never raised the issue again. In 1993, four years after
leaving office, Reagan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. His White House
physicians said that they saw no symptoms during his Presidency. In 2015,
researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of
Alzheimer's Disease , in which they examined transcripts of news conferences
in the course of Reagan's Presidency and discovered changes in his speech
that are linked to the onset of dementia. Reagan had taken to repeating
words and using "thing" in the place of specific nouns, but they could not
prove that, while he was in office, his judgment and decision-making were
affected. Mental-health professionals have largely kept out of politics
since 1964, when the magazine Fact asked psychiatrists if they thought Barry
Goldwater was psychologically fit to be President. More than a thousand said
that he wasn't, calling him "warped," "impulsive," and a "paranoid
schizophrenic. Goldwater sued for libel, successfully, and, in 1973, the
American Psychiatric Association added to its code of ethics the so-called
"Goldwater rule," which forbade making a diagnosis without an in-person
examination and without receiving permission to discuss the findings
publicly. Professional associations for psychologists, social workers, and
others followed suit. With regard to Trump, however, the rule has been
broken repeatedly. More than fifty thousand mental-health professionals have
signed a petition stating that Trump is "too seriously mentally ill to
perform the duties of president and should be removed" under the
Twenty-fifth Amendment. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor
of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes that, in this instance,
the Goldwater rule is outweighed by another ethical commitment: a "duty to
warn" others when he assesses that a person might harm them. Dodes told me,
"Trump is going to face challenges from people who are not going to bend to
his will. If you have a President who takes it as a personal attack on him,
which he does, and flies into a paranoid rage, that's how you start a war.
Like many of his colleagues, Dodes speculates that Trump fits the
description of someone with malignant narcissism, which is characterized by
grandiosity, a need for admiration, sadism, and a tendency toward
unrealistic fantasies. On February 13th, in a letter to the Times , Dodes
and thirty-four other mental-health professionals wrote, "We fear that too
much is at stake to be silent any longer. In response, Allen Frances, a
professor emeritus at Duke University Medical College, who wrote the section
on narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders-IV , sought to discourage the public diagnoses.
Frances wrote, "He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make
him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and
impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. . . . The antidote to a
dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological. To some
mental-health professionals, the debate over diagnoses and the Goldwater
rule distracts from a larger point. "This issue is not whether Donald Trump
is mentally ill but whether he's dangerous," James Gilligan, a professor of
psychiatry at New York University, told attendees at a recent public meeting
at Yale School of Medicine on the topic of Trump's mental health. "He
publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged
followers to beat up protesters. He approves of torture. He has boasted of
his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault," Gilligan said.
Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global
Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air
Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the
Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about
financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No.
28: Do you often lose your temper?) "There's no doubt in my mind that Trump
would never pass muster," Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control
officer in the Army, told me. "Any of us that had our hands anywhere near
nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or
were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on
the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything. In the
months since Trump took office, several members of Congress have cited
concern about his mental health as a reason to change the law. In early
April, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a professor of
constitutional law at American University, and twenty co-sponsors introduced
a bill that would expand the authority of medical personnel and former
senior officials to assess the mental fitness of a President. The bill has
no chance of coming up for a vote anytime soon, but its sponsors believe
that they have a constitutional duty to convene a body to assess Trump's
health. Representative Earl Blumenauer, of Oregon, introduced a similar
bill, which would also give former Presidents and Vice-Presidents a voice in
evaluating a President's mental stability. Of Trump, he said, "The serial
repetition of proven falsehoods-Is this an act? Is this a tactic? Is he just
wired weird? It raises the question in my mind about the nature of
Presidential disability. Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the
Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters,
but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has
described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental
health as a "liberal fantasy. Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a
professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, "I believe that
invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an
entirely plausible tool-not immediately, but well before 2020. In Tribe's
interpretation, the standard of the amendment is not "a medical or otherwise
technical one but is one resting on a commonsense understanding of what it
means for a President to be 'unable to discharge the powers and duties of
his office'-an inability that can obviously be manifested by gross and
pathological inattention or indifference to, or failure to understand, the
limits of those powers or the mandatory nature of those duties. As an
example of "pathological inattention," Tribe noted that, on April 11th, days
after North Korea launched a missile, Trump described an aircraft carrier,
the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, as part of an "armada" advancing on North Korea,
even though the ship was sailing away from North Korea at the time.
Moreover, Tribe said, Trump's language borders on incapacity. Asked recently
why he reversed a pledge to brand China a currency manipulator, Trump said,
of President Xi Jinping, "No. 1, he's not, since my time. You know, very
specific formula. You would think it's like generalities, it's not. They
have-they've actually-their currency's gone up. So it's a very, very
specific formula. Lawrence C. Mohr, who became a White House physician in
1987 and remained in the job until 1993, came to believe that Presidential
disability must be understood to encompass "very subtle manifestations" that
might impair the President's capacity to do the job. A President should be
evaluated for "alertness, cognitive function, judgment, appropriate
behavior, the ability to choose among options and the ability to communicate
clearly," Mohr told a researcher in 2010. "If any of these are impaired, it
is my opinion that the powers of the President should be transferred to the
Vice-President until the impairment resolves. In practice, however, unless
the President were unconscious, the public could see the use of the
amendment as a constitutional coup. Measuring deterioration over time would
be difficult in Trump's case, given that his "judgment" and "ability to
communicate clearly" were, in the view of many Americans, impaired before he
took office. For those reasons, Robert Gilbert, the Presidential-health
specialist, told me, "If the statements get too strange, then the
Vice-President might be able to do something. But if the President is just
being himself-talking in the same way that he talked during the
campaign-then the Vice-President and the Cabinet would find it very
difficult. The power of impeachment is a more promising tool for curtailing
a defective Presidency. The Framers considered the ability to eject an
executive so critical that they enshrined it in the Constitution even before
they had agreed on the details of the office itself. On June 2, 1787, while
the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, were still
arguing whether the Presidency should consist of a committee or a single
person, they adopted, without debate, the right to impeach for "malpractice
or neglect of duty. They gave the House of Representatives the power to
impeach a President for "treason, bribery or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors" by a simple majority vote, and they gave the Senate the power
to convict or dismiss the charges, setting a high bar for conviction, with a
two-thirds majority. But what would "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" mean in
practice? In 1970, during an unsuccessful effort to impeach the Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas, Representative Gerald Ford argued that an
impeachable offense was "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives
considers it to be at a given moment in history. That was an
overstatement-the President was never intended to serve at the pleasure of
Congress-but it contained an essential truth: impeachment is possible even
without a specific violation of the U.S. Criminal Code. When Alexander
Hamilton wrote of "high Crimes," he was referring to the violation of
"public trust," by abusing power, breaching ethics, or undermining the
Constitution. The first test came with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, in
1868. Johnson, who became President after Lincoln's assassination, was a
combative Tennessean, sympathetic to the Southern states, and was
uncomfortable in Washington, which he disparaged as "twelve square miles
bordered by reality. He mocked the legislative branch as "a body called, or
which assumes to be, the Congress," and vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of
1866, which was intended to confer citizenship on freed slaves. Congress was
incensed; Senator Carl Schurz, of Missouri, compared Johnson to "a wounded
and anger-crazed boar. Eventually, the President engineered a showdown with
Congress, by deliberately breaking a law against firing a Cabinet secretary
without Senate consent. As a result, the House moved to impeach him,
accusing him of "denying" the work of another branch of government and
"preventing the execution" of laws passed by Congress. Johnson was acquitted
in the Senate by one vote. David O. Stewart, the author of "Impeached," a
history of the case, told me that it established a crucial point:
impeachment is not a judicial proceeding but a tool of political
accountability. "Because of the unique powers of the executive, we are
depending on a single person to be wise and sane," Stewart said. "If, in
fact, there are enough people who no longer think those are both true,
impeachment is designed to deal with that. For this reason, actual evidence
of misconduct may not be the most important criterion in determining which
Presidents get impeached. "The most important thing is political
popularity," Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the
University of North Carolina, told me. "A popular President is unlikely to
be threatened with impeachment. Second is your relationship with your
party-how strongly are they connected to you? Third is your relationship
with Congress, and fourth is the nature of whatever the misconduct may be.
By far the most valuable lessons about impeachment come from Richard Nixon.
In 1974, Nixon resigned shortly before he could be impeached, but his
misjudgments-political, psychological, and legal-have illuminated the risks
to Presidents ever since. In 1972, Nixon's White House oversaw the bugging
of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex and
the ensuing coverup. That was illegal and unethical, but it did not
guarantee Nixon's downfall, which came about because of two critical
mistakes. First, when the scandal emerged, the President underestimated the
threat. "There were any number of steps that could have made it go away,"
Evan Thomas, the author of "Being Nixon," told me. "They could have cleaned
house and fired people. But Nixon assumed that his supporters would never
believe the accusations. "He was ahead by thirty-four points in the polls in
August, 1972," Thomas went on. "He could have taken his clothes off and run
around the White House front yard and he was going to win reëlection. As the
scandal ground on, Nixon made his second mistake: he flouted the authority
of a coequal branch of government. In October, 1973, Nixon refused to obey a
federal appellate-court ruling that ordered him to turn over tapes of
conversations in the Oval Office, and he forced out the investigation's
special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. For nine months, Nixon continued to
resist-in effect threatening the basic constitutional system-until, in July,
1974, the Supreme Court ruled that he had to comply. By then, the damage was
done, and the House Judiciary Committee launched impeachment hearings. By
thwarting other branches, Nixon weakened his support in Congress and
convinced the country that he had something to hide. Until that point, much
of the public had not focussed on the slow, complex investigation, but
interviews at the time show that Nixon's stonewalling made people pay
attention, and he never recovered. "Well, everything has added up to his
incompetence over the last few months, and I don't think the American people
should stand for it any longer," a woman interviewed in New York by the
Associated Press said. "In fact, I just signed an impeach petition. By
August, many of his top aides had been indicted, and polls showed that
fifty-seven per cent of the public believed that Nixon should be removed
from office. On August 6th, after a tape recording surfaced which captured
him orchestrating the coverup, he was abandoned by Republicans who had
previously derided the Watergate scandal as a witch hunt. Senator Barry
Goldwater, of Arizona, told colleagues, "Nixon should get his ass out of the
White House-today! On August 9th, Nixon sent a letter to Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger: "Dear Mr. Secretary, I hereby resign the Office of
President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon. A quarter century
later, the Bill Clinton impeachment yielded two related lessons-one about
the path into crisis, and one about the path out of it. The first lesson was
that investigations beget investigations. In January, 1994, when a special
prosecutor started looking into Bill and Hillary Clinton's investments in
Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real-estate deal, there was no way to
anticipate that it would conclude, nearly five years later, with Clinton's
impeachment for trying to cover up an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a
twenty-two-year-old White House intern. Many raged against the conduct of
that inquiry, accusing Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, of abusing
his powers, but the outcome demonstrated that a White House under
investigation is in danger of spiralling into crisis. The second lesson of
the Clinton impeachment comes from the strategy adopted by his legal team.
Learning from Nixon's fate, the lawyers realized that congressional
Democrats would abandon Clinton if they concluded that he had lost the trust
of the public. Gregory Craig, one of the lawyers who directed Clinton's
defense, told me recently, "The fundamental point is that it's a political
process. He and his team spent less energy on disputing the details of
evidence than on maintaining support from fellow-Democrats and from the
public. They painted Clinton as the victim of a partisan quest to exploit an
offense-covering up an affair-that was not on the scale of abuse that the
Framers had in mind. "To be honest, we pursued a strategy that embraced
polarization," Craig recalled. "I gave a statement to the press that said
this is the most unfair process since the Inquisition in Spain. Some arcane
historical reference came out of my mouth. I said, 'It's like they've tied
up President Clinton, put him in a closet in the middle of the night and
turned off the lights, and they're whipping him.' The strategy succeeded. By
the time the House impeached Clinton, on December 19, 1998, his approval
rating had risen to more than seventy per cent-his highest level ever. "It's
a vindictive party that just went out to get him," a man at an American
Legion post in San Diego told a reporter, in December, just before the House
voted to impeach. When the case reached the Senate, Clinton's lawyers
capitalized on his popularity and presented his misdeeds in the broader
context of his Presidency. In closing arguments, Charles Ruff, the White
House counsel, asked, "Would it put at risk the liberties of the people to
retain the President in office? The Senate acquitted Clinton on all charges.
Were Trump to face impeachment, his lawyers would likely try to present him
as a victim of a partisan feud, but his unpopularity would be a liability;
Republicans in Congress would have little reason to defend him. Nonetheless,
the Clinton impeachment may contain an even larger warning for Democrats in
pursuit of Trump. "It's pretty important to be seen in sorrow rather than
anger," Stewart, the historian of impeachment, said. "Don't emerge red in
tooth and claw. That's not merely tactical-it's good for the country,
because you should only pursue impeachment if you really have to. Not long
ago, the topic of impeaching Trump oc'cup'ied a spot on the fringe of
Democratic priorities somewhere around the California secessionist movement.
"If you'd have asked me around Election Day, I would have said it's not
realistic," Robert B. Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor, told me in April.
"But I'm frankly amazed at the degree of activism among Democrats and the
degree of resolution. I've not seen anything like this since the
anti-Vietnam movement. " In April, Reich, who is now a professor of public
policy at the University of California, Berkeley, released an animated
short, mapping out the path to impeachment, and it became an unlikely viral
hit, attracting 3.5 million views on YouTube in the first twenty-four hours.
Because the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will
almost certainly not initiate the ouster of a Republican President, the
first step in any realistic path to impeachment is for Democrats to gain
control of the House. The next opportunity is the 2018 midterm elections.
Republicans have been relatively confident, in part because their
redistricting in 2010 tilted the congressional map in their favor. But
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and the president of the
right-leaning American Action Forum, believes that the chances of control
shifting to the Democrats is greater than many people in either party
realize. "After a party takes the House, the Senate, and the White House,
they typically lose thirty-five seats in the House in the next midterm," he
told me. "Republicans now hold the House by twenty-three seats, so, as a
going proposition, they're in trouble. They need to do really, really well.
Unfortunately for the congressional G.O.P., unpopular Presidents sow midterm
fiascos. Since 1946, whenever a President has had an approval rating above
fifty per cent, his party has lost an average of fourteen seats in the
midterms, according to Gallup; whenever the rating has been below fifty per
cent, the average loss soars to thirty-six seats. Steve Schmidt, the
Republican consultant, is concerned that, in 2018, the Party faces a
convergence of vulnerabilities akin to those which pertained during the 2006
midterms, whose outcome George W. Bush characterized as "a thumping. Schmidt
told me, "The last time Republicans lost control of the House of
Representatives, it was on a mix of competency-Iraq and Katrina-and
corruption in government, with the Tom DeLay Congress. The Trump
Administration has a comparable "basic competency issue," he said. "The
constant lying, the lack of credible statements from the White House, from
the President on down to the spokesperson, the amateurishness of the threats
to the members of Congress, the ultimatums, the talk of 'enemy lists' and
retribution. Tom Davis, who twice led Republican congressional-election
efforts during fourteen years as a representative from Virginia, believes
that his former colleagues are overly complacent. "These guys need a wake-up
call. They're just living in la-la land," he said. He pointed out that
regardless of the final outcome of an attempt to impeach-the two-thirds
majority in the Senate remains a high bar to clear-Democratic control of the
House would immediately make Trump more vulnerable to investigations. "If
the gavels change hands, it's a different world. No. 1, all of his public
records, they will go through those with a fine-tooth comb-income taxes,
business dealings. At that point, it's not just talk-they subpoena it. It
gets ugly real fast. He has so far had a pass on all this business stuff,
and I don't know what's there, but I've got to imagine that it's not pretty
in this environment. If Democrats retake the House, the Judiciary Committee
could establish a subcommittee to investigate potential abuses and identify
specific grounds for impeachment. The various investigations of Trump
already in process will come into play. In addition to allegations of
business conflicts and potential Russian collusion, Trump is facing dozens
of civil proceedings. In a case in federal court, he is accused of urging
violence at a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, in March, 2016, where
he yelled, referring to a protester, "Get 'em out of here. In a New York
state court, he is facing a suit brought by Summer Zervos, a former
contestant on "The Apprentice," who alleges that he sexually assaulted her
in 2007. The constitutional question of whether a President could be
impeached for offenses committed before he took office is unsettled, but, as
Clinton's case showed, civil proceedings contain risks whenever a President
testifies under oath. Many scholars believe that the most plausible bases
for a Trump impeachment are corruption and abuse of power. Noah Feldman, a
Harvard Law School professor who specializes in constitutional studies,
argues that, even without evidence of an indictable crime, the
Administration's pattern of seemingly trivial uses of public office for
private gain "can add up to an impeachable offense. Last week, after the
State Department took down an official Web page that showcased Trump's
private, for-profit club, Mar-a-Lago, Feldman told me, "A systematic pattern
shown through data points would count as grounds for impeachment. He said
that economic analysis of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi's self-enrichment proves the concept. "Berlusconi is said to have
gained at most one per cent per business transaction from his Presidency,
but that added up to more than a billion euros," Feldman said. Allan J.
Lichtman is an American University historian who has correctly forecast
every Presidential election since 1984 (including Trump's victory). In
April, he published "The Case for Impeachment," in which he predicted that
Trump will not serve a full term, because of a "Nixonian" pattern of
trespassing beyond constitutional boundaries. He cited an incident in late
January, during the legal battle over Trump's first executive order on
immigration. James L. Robart, the U.S. district judge who blocked the order,
rejected the White House's claim that the court could not review the
President's decision, ruling that the executive must "comport with our
country's laws, and more importantly, our Constitution. Trump's response was
a further violation of democratic norms: he disparaged Robart as a
"so-called judge" and said that he should be held responsible for future
terrorist acts on Americans. "If something happens blame him and court
system. People pouring in. Bad! Trump tweeted. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a
Connecticut Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, believes that the
Administration's actions denigrating or denying the power of equal branches
of government portend a "constitutional crisis" akin to Nixon's refusal to
accept the appellate-court judgment regarding the White House tapes. Last
week, lawmakers from both parties announced that White House officials had
refused a request from an oversight committee to turn over internal
documents related to the hiring and resignation of Michael Flynn. In a
letter to the House oversight committee, Marc T. Short, the White House
director of legislative affairs, said that the Administration is withholding
documents because they "are likely to contain classified, sensitive and/or
confidential information. Blumenthal told me, "I foresee a point that there
will be subpoenas or some kind of compulsory disclosure issued against the
President or the Administration by one of the investigative bodies-the
F.B.I. or the Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, if there
is one-and, at that point, there may be the sort of confrontation that we
haven't really seen in the same way since United States versus Nixon. Trump
campaigned as a dealmaker who could woo disparate Republicans. Though there
was no natural Trumpist wing of the Party, he was expected to ally with the
three dozen conservative members of the Freedom Caucus, who tended to admire
his anti-establishment populism. But the relationship descended into
acrimony almost immediately. After the caucus objected to part of Trump's
effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to the collapse of the bill,
Trump publicly threatened to target its members in next year's elections.
"The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get
on the team, & fast," he tweeted. "We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018! He
went after individual members as well. At one point, he threatened to
support a primary challenger against Mark Sanford, the South Carolina
congressman. I asked Sanford if he regarded the threat as a bargaining
tactic. "I think it was genuine," he said. "It certainly wasn't said in a
way that suggested a bluff and then a wink and a nod. Sanford said, of the
level of support for Trump among Republicans in Congress, "In general, the
mood of the conference is that we're in the same boat together. But he added
a caveat: "This has to fundamentally be a game of addition, not just
subtraction. I'm not sure the Administration has fully grasped that concept
yet. You're probably not adding to the list of permanent allies and friends.
He went on, "I think that there's a degree of immunity that has come with
the way that he has broken all of the past molds. But I would also argue
that there's a half-life to that. Trump is not faring much better with
moderate Republicans. At a meeting in March, Charlie Dent, a seven-term
centrist congressman from Pennsylvania, expressed misgivings about the
health-care plan, and Trump lashed out. "He said something to the effect
that I was destroying the Republican Party," Dent told me. "And that the tax
reform is going to fail because of me, and I'd be blamed for it. In
targeting Dent, Trump found an unlikely antagonist. Dent co-chairs an
alliance of fifty-four moderate Republicans so resolutely undogmatic that
they call themselves simply "the Tuesday Group. Dent said that he remains
ready to back Trump "when the President is on the right track," but he left
no doubt that he would break when his conscience requires it. "We have to
serve as a check. I mean, that's kind of our one power. We should accept
that. William Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard , one of
the most prominent conservative critics of Trump, told me that the
Administration's failure to get any bills passed was stirring frustration.
"Most Republicans, I would say, wanted him to succeed and were bending over
backwards to give him a chance," Kristol said. "I think there was pretty
widespread disappointment. You kind of knew what you were getting in terms
of some of the wackiness and also some of the actual issues that people
might not agree with him on-trade, immigration-but I think that just the
level of chaos, the lack of discipline, was beginning to freak members of
Congress out a little bit. Trump has been meeting with congressional
Republicans in small groups. By and large, they have found him more
approachable than they expected, but much less informed. "Several have been
a little bit amazed by the lack of policy knowledge," Kristol said. "God
knows Presidents don't need to know the details of health-care bills and tax
bills, and I certainly don't, either-that's what you have aides for. But not
even having a basic level of understanding? I think that has rattled people
a little bit. He added, "Reagan may not have had a subtle grasp of
everything, but he read the briefing books and he knew the arguments,
basically. And Trump is not even at that level. When I asked Kristol about
the chances of impeachment, he paused to consider the odds. Then he said,
"It's somewhere in the big middle ground between a one-per-cent chance and
fifty. It's some per cent. It's not nothing. The history of besieged
Presidencies is, in the end, a history of hubris-of blindness to one's
faults, of deafness to the warnings, of seclusion from uncomfortable
realities. The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known.
"What is never said," Robert Caro writes, in "Master of the Senate," about
Lyndon Johnson, "is that power reveals. Trump, after a lifetime in a family
business, with no public obligations and no board of directors to please,
has found himself abruptly exposed to evaluation, and his reactions have
been volcanic. Setting a more successful course for the Presidency will
depend, in part, on whether he fully accepts that critics who identify his
shortcomings are capable of curtailing his power. When James P. Pfiffner, a
political scientist at George Mason University, compared the White House
crises that confronted Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, he identified a perilous
strain of confidence. In each case, Pfiffner found, the President could not
"admit to himself that he had done anything wrong. Nixon convinced himself
that his enemies were doing the same things he was; Reagan dismissed the
trading of arms for hostages as the cost of establishing relations with
Iran; Clinton insisted that he was technically telling the truth. In
Pfiffner's view, "Each of these sets of rationalizations allowed the
Presidents to choose the path that would end up damaging them more than an
initial admission would have. Law and history make clear that Trump's most
urgent risk is not getting ousted; it is getting hobbled by unpopularity and
distrust. He is only the fifth U.S. President who failed to win the popular
vote. Except George W. Bush, none of the others managed to win a second
term. Less dramatic than the possibility of impeachment or removal via the
Twenty-fifth Amendment is the distinct possibility that Trump will simply
limp through a single term, incapacitated by opposition. William Antholis, a
political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of
Virginia, told me that, thus far, the President that Trump most reminds him
of is not Nixon or Clinton but Jimmy Carter, another outsider who vowed to
remake Washington. Carter is Trump's moral and stylistic opposite, but,
Antholis said, "he couldn't find a way to work with his own party, and
Trump's whole message was pugnacious. It was 'I alone can fix this.' " Like
Trump, Carter had majorities in both chambers, but he alienated Congress,
and, after four years, he left the White House without achieving his
ambitions on welfare, tax reform, and energy independence. Oscillating
between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is
neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically
indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the
political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a "disjunctive" President, one
"who reigns over the end of his party's own orthodoxy. Trump knows that
Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create
a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all
he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once
more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he
understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate? When Trump's
speech in Kenosha was over, he walked across the stage to sign an executive
order. "Get ready, everybody," he said. "This is a big one. Since taking
office, he had issued twenty-four executive orders, and the signings had
become a favorite way of displaying his power. The scope of this order was
modest-it merely established studies of visas and imports-but he described
it as "historic. He uncapped a pen and, just before he signed the order, he
said, "Who should I give the pen to? The big question, right? There was
nervous laughter, and he called some local and visiting politicians up to
the stage to stand beside him while he signed. Then he said, "This is a
tremendous honor for me," and tried his joke again: "The only question is,
who gets the pen? He held up the signed order to the cameras, as always,
pivoting left, then right, and grinned broadly. He stepped down from the
stage and walked along the front row of the audience, shaking hands, before
his Secret Service detail escorted him toward Marine One. He was going
straight back to Washington. The audience, kept in place until he was safely
extricated, milled about awkwardly. The theatrical atmosphere dissipated,
leaving behind the remainder of an ordinary Tuesday at work. I approached a
woman who introduced herself as Donna Wollmuth. She was sixty-eight years
old, and she worked in Snap-on's warehouse, packing boxes for shipment. I
asked her what she thought of Trump's comments. "I believe in it," she said.
"And I believe in America. I want the jobs back here. At first, I wondered
if she was merely repeating Trump's slogans, but it became clear that she
had thought hard about his message. Her story was of the kind that has
become a stock explanation for Trump's rise. For twenty-three years, she
operated a sewing machine, making briefs and sportswear at Jockey. When the
plant closed, in 1993, and production moved offshore, she found a job at the
Chicago Lock factory ("Five years later, they closed") and then one at Air
Flow Technology, making industrial filters. After fourteen years there, she
was earning almost seventeen dollars an hour, but in 2015 she was laid off.
"I lost my job there because they hired somebody that they could pay seven
dollars less. It was a lot of immigrants there. Let's put it that way. I'm
sure you know what I mean. She didn't like the way it sounded, but she
wanted me to understand. "I'm just so stuck on this immigration thing. I
really am, because I've lived through it, giving benefits and everything to
people that aren't here legally. Wollmuth had almost always voted for
Democrats, but she had come to believe that her family-she has seven
grandchildren and stepgrandchildren-faced a dark future. When Trump entered
the race, Wollmuth was turned off by his antics. "He's gotta learn to keep
his mouth shut," she said, but his pledge to reënergize American
manufacturing was too specific and attractive to ignore. She took a chance
on Trump, as did many of her neighbors. After going for Obama by large
margins in the previous two elections, Kenosha County sided with Trump, by
just two hundred and fifty-five votes out of more than seventy-one thousand
cast. That is a fragile buffer. In late April, Trump promoted the results of
a Washington Post /ABC News poll showing that only two per cent of those who
voted for him regretted doing so. When I asked Wollmuth if she had any
regrets, she made it clear that it was the wrong question. "I don't want to
be disappointed, and I hope he's really trying," she said. "I'd like to
believe that. I'd like to see it happen. I've got mixed emotions with him so
far. Walking out of Snap-on's headquarters, through the chanting crowd, I
wondered whether Trump could see the protesters from his chopper. He knows
the unpredictable potential of a crowd. I remembered something that Sam
Nunberg, the Trump campaign adviser, had told me about Trump's fixation on
crowds. "I said to him once, 'I understand it's the biggest. Who gives a
shit? Who cares at this point? What we care about is votes,' " Nunberg said.
"And he says, 'No. It's got to be. Some of it was he was seriously concerned
about the country. He also wanted to see where this went and what it was.
The crowds and energy showed him it was a movement."
