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Trump guarantees protection for those with preexisting medical conditions — but it’s unclear how
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james b. comey - Google News: 5 Takeaways From James Comey's Hearing - New York Times
“Everybody who disagrees with me has to come back to Oct. 28 with me and stare at this and tell me what you would do,” he said. “Would you speak or would you conceal? And I could be wrong, but we honestly made a decision between those two choices.”
Mr. Comey acknowledged the toll that decision had taken.
“Even in hindsight — and this has been one of the world’s most painful experiences — I would make the same decision,” he said.
2. Trump’s Twitter Complaint
Mr. Comey pushed back against President Trump’s contention on Twitter that he “was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”
Mr. Comey said that was not his intention.
“I believe what I said: There was not a prosecutable case there,” he said.
Mr. Trump made the assertion late Tuesday. Hours earlier, Mrs. Clinton said at a Women for Women International event in New York that if the election had been held before Mr. Comey sent his letter to Congress, “I would be your president.”
3. Silence on Russia Investigation
Mr. Comey repeatedly refused to answer questions about the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government.
But he said that the Russian government was still trying to influence American politics. Russia is “the greatest threat of any nation on Earth given their intention and capability,” he said.
4. Rudolph Giuliani and F.B.I. Leaks
Lawmakers also asked Mr. Comey about leaks to journalists and others about the investigation of Mrs. Clinton. As part of that back-and-forth, he tacitly acknowledged that the F.B.I. was looking into what former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who was a close adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, knew in the days before the election.
In October, Mr. Giuliani said on Fox News that the Trump campaign had “a couple of surprises left” about Mrs. Clinton. Three days later, Mr. Comey revealed the reopened investigation. Mr. Giuliani later acknowledged that he had known about the new materials the F.B.I. had seized that prompted Mr. Comey to notify Congress.
On Wednesday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, asked Mr. Comey whether anyone at the F.B.I. had been in contact with Mr. Giuliani during the campaign and discussed the investigation with him.
“I don’t know yet,” Mr. Comey said. “But if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations, whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences.”
Investigating Mr. Giuliani — who was sharply critical of Mr. Comey’s decision to recommend that Mrs. Clinton not be charged with a crime for how she handled classified materials — puts Mr. Comey in an awkward position. When he was a young prosecutor in New York, Mr. Giuliani was his boss.
5. A Push to Renew a Surveillance Law
In both his prepared testimony and his answers to questions, Mr. Comey repeatedly returned to another hotly debated topic, but one separate from the election: the government’s warrantless surveillance program.
Its authorizing law, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, is set to expire at the end of 2017 unless Congress extends it, and Mr. Comey urged lawmakers to act.
Section 702 permits the government to collect, without a warrant, phone calls and emails of noncitizens abroad from American telecommunications and internet companies. Congress enacted it in 2008 to legalize the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, created after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the F.B.I. has played a growing role in using and administering it.
“We can’t lose 702,” Mr. Comey said.
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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Thursday that authorities in Russia were stopping him going abroad to seek urgent medical treatment after an attack that left him mostly blind in one eye.
Reuters: World News
Donald Trump’s election collusion scandal with Russia is back firmly in the spotlight this week, thanks to the quickening pace this week of witness testimony in Congress – but it’s far from the only major scandal which Trump is facing. In fact things are now so stacked against Trump that a leader of the influential Senate Intelligence Committee is saying that Trump will probably be ousted.
That’s the word coming from Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic ranking member on the Senate Intel Committee, according to a fascinating new expose from the New Yorker. It quotes the mild mannered Warner as having privately told friends that the odds are “two to one against” Donald Trump completing his full term (link). In other words, he believes Trump will probably be ousted.
As the ranking member, Senator Warner has access to a level of classified information that no one else on the committee beyond Republican chairman Richard Burr has gotten to see – and my own expectation is that he’s basing his prediction on what he’s seen but can’t yet reveal. On some level this echoes the reaction from Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who seemed stunned nearly speechless after she received a classified briefing on Trump-Russia several weeks ago (link). In other words, the people who have learned the most about the depth of Trump’s actions seem the most convinced that he’s a goner.
That process, of course, is not advancing nearly as swiftly as many among the anti-Trump general public would like to see. But investigations into a sitting President, and in particular the impeachment and ouster of a President, are meant to be a slow process by design – in order to prevent a corrupt Congress from using a phony scandal to swiftly oust a legitimate President. But while the process of ousting Donald Trump is a long one, the people in the know – such as Mark Warner – are predicting that it’ll happen. And the further the investigation and scandal progress, the less able Trump will be to carry out his political agenda in real world terms. Help fund Palmer Report
The post Senate Intel leader says Donald Trump will probably be ousted appeared first on Palmer Report.
Hillary Clinton decried the forces that cost her the presidency. So did Andrew Jackson
<a href="http://Philly.com" rel="nofollow">Philly.com</a> - 3 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance" this week, blaming her stinging presidential election loss on FBI Director James B. Comey, WikiLeaks and Russian meddling. At a women's conference in New York, she also tweaked ...
House Russia investigators get second crack at Comey
CNN - 6 hours ago
Washington (CNN) Members of the House intelligence committee will get a second round of questioning in with FBI Director James Comey on Thursday -- this time behind closed doors -- after weeks of wrangling that almost knocked the House Russia ...
Nausea watch: Comey defends Clinton probe, Hillary blames FBI chief
Fox News - 7 hours ago
James Comey was “mildly nauseous” over the notion that his last-minute disclosure of a renewed Hillary Clinton investigation might have affected the election. And Clinton's insistence on blaming Comey (and other outside factors) for her loss is making ...
Faux Outrage and Melodrama over Comey's Pre-Election Letter
National Review - 7 hours ago
If Director Comey had not conducted his July 5 press conference clearing Hillary Clinton, there would have been no cause to issue the October 28 letter to Congress. Even absent Hillary Clinton's latest bleat about how he cost her the election, FBI ...
Comey defends Clinton choice; says he had limited options
KRQE News 13 - 4 hours ago
FBI Director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, May 3, 2017, before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: "Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster). WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director ...
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New York Times |
5 Takeaways From James Comey's Hearing
New York Times WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, provided his first public explanation Wednesday of why he revealed days before the election that he had reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, saying he could not risk concealing ... FBI director says he feels 'mildly nauseous' about possibility he affected election, but has no regretsWashington Post Comey makes his case, and scores some pointsLos Angeles Times James Comey 'mildly nauseous' over thought Clinton disclosure affected electionWashington Times Boston Herald -Breitbart News all 1,416 news articles » |
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New York Times |
'The Daily': On Comey's Mild Nausea - The New York Times
New York Times Our reporter was in the room as James Comey, the F.B.I. director, gave his first public remarks about his handling of Hillary Clinton's emails. and more » |
Breitbart News |
Comey Refuses To Publicly Address FBI Ties To 'Peeing Russian Prostitutes' Dossier
Breitbart News During yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight, FBI Director James B.Comey repeatedly refused to answer questions about his agency's ties to the controversial, partially discredited 35-page dossier alleging collusion between ... and more » |
Christian Science Monitor |
Trump and Abbas hopeful, but little to show from first meeting
Christian Science Monitor The US president believes an Israeli-Palestinian deal can be reached, but he and Abbas moved the needle little toward that goal on Wednesday. Monitor's Best: Top 5. US missile defense: Getting to 'ready' on North Korea threat · Moqtada al-Sadr: In Iraq ... Trump cannot be serious about the peace process, can he?Washington Post (blog) Senior Palestinian Official Tells Donor Nations that Paying Terrorists' Salaries Helps Bring PeaceBreitbart News all 243 news articles » |
ASTANA (Reuters) - Syria's armed opposition on Thursday rejected a Russian plan to create safe zones in Syria, calling it a threat to the country's territorial integrity, and said it would also not recognise Iran as a guarantor of any ceasefire plan.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Thursday that authorities in Russia were stopping him going abroad to seek urgent medical treatment after an attack that left him mostly blind in one eye.
Author Mark Steyn gives his take as Marine Le Pen gains on Emmanuel Macron
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James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, described his decision to reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails in October during questioning by Senator Dianne Feinstein at a hearing on Wednesday.
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More than half of the 82 individuals inspired by a foreign terrorist group to perpetrate or attempt a terrorist attack in the U.S. were American citizens born in the States.
In Homeland Security
A well being dug in a small village in Yemen was nearing completion last September when it was bombed by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition. The bomb hit the workers’ shelter, killing six men and wounding five others. When village residents went to help, the aircraft struck again. In all, at least 31 civilians, including 3 boys, were killed and 42 wounded. The well, which villagers had pooled their money to drill, was destroyed.
I went to the bombing site with friends and family members of the victims. In the wreckage, we found a piece of a U.S.-made munition with markings indicating it was manufactured by Raytheon in October 2015. It was the 23rd time Human Rights Watch had identified remnants of U.S.-supplied weapons at the site of an apparently unlawful coalition attack, the fourth time we identified a weapon made by Raytheon.
Now, the Trump administration appears poised to approve the sale of more weapons to Saudi Arabia, including Raytheon-made bombs, to the tune of $400 million.
Since March 26, 2015, the Saudi-led coalition has carried out military operations in Yemen in an effort to restore Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power. In the process, they’ve bombed schools, homes, markets and hospitals. The parties they are fighting—the Houthis and forces loyal to the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was deposed in 2011 following popular uprisings—have also repeatedly violated the laws of war.
At least 4,773 civilians have been killed and 8,272 wounded since the start of the conflict, the majority by coalition airstrikes, according to the United Nations human rights office. The war has driven Yemen to the humanitarian “brink,” with 7 million people facing starvation and more than two-thirds of the population in need of humanitarian aid. Both parties have blocked or restricted critical relief supplies from reaching civilians.
The United States, which became a party to the Yemen conflict during the first months of fighting by providing direct support to the coalition, including refueling planes during bombing raids, has provided substantial assistance to Saudi Arabia, including “intelligence, airborne fuel tankers and thousands of advanced munitions.” International legal scholars and U.S. lawmakers have warned that continued U.S. support—including through weapons sales—to Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen may not only make the U.S. government complicit in coalition violations of the laws of war, but also expose U.S. officials to legal liability for war crimes.
The Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal, in a decision the U.S. military commissions prosecutor endorsed in 2013, ruled that for an individual to aid and abet a war crime, they must provide practical assistance that has a “substantial effect” on the commission of a crime; and know or be aware the assistance has a “substantial likelihood” of aiding that crime.
The U.S. has for many years sold arms to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition has used these weapons in its Yemen attacks, including two of the war’s deadliest for civilians—on a crowded market and a funeral hall full of people—both of which appear to have been war crimes.
For U.S. officials providing assistance to be guilty of aiding and abetting coalition war crimes, they must be “aware” of the “substantial likelihood” their aid would be used to assist unlawful attacks, and that the forces they were assisting intended to commit war crimes. A U.S. State Department lawyer, writing in his personal capacity, has made the same point, using assistance to the Syrian government as an example.
Last month, an apparent coalition helicopter attacked a boat filled with Somali refugees and migrants who were fleeing Yemen in search of safety. Instead they found themselves at sea, at night, attacked from above. At least 33 died and 27 were injured. While it is still not clear which coalition member attacked the boat, the State Department has approved licenses for the sale or servicing of military helicopters to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Jordan, all coalition members. The day before the attack, the Defense Department announced Boeing had been awarded a $3.2 billion contract to sell Saudi Arabia more military helicopters.
While many of the weapons in Saudi Arabia’s arsenal were obtained long before the coalition began its military operations in Yemen in March 2015, U.S. officials should have been aware by late 2015 of the coalition’s numerous attacks that violate the laws of war. Many were reported by the United Nations, as well as human rights organizations. U.S. officials debated internally whether U.S. support to the coalition could make U.S. personnel criminally liable, and the State Department’s top human rights officer under President Barack Obama conceded a “possibility of legal jeopardy for U.S. officials if sales continue despite continuing evidence of violations of the laws of war.”
As the armed conflict in Yemen continues and evidence of war crimes mounts, legal risk for U.S. officials will only increase.
By October 2015, when the weapon used in the strike on the well was manufactured, Human Rights Watch and others had reported on a number of unlawful coalition airstrikes. More than two years into the war, we’ve documented 81 apparently unlawful coalition attacks and almost two dozen in which U.S. weapons were used. For weapons produced later and shipped now, pleading ignorance is no longer plausible.
Some U.S. lawmakers are pushing the Trump administration to curb weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and demand more transparency about how US munitions are used. On April 6, several senators introduced a bipartisan bill to limit U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, requiring the White House to certify that Saudi Arabia was taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties and to brief Congress on whether Saudi Arabia had used U.S. weapons in unlawful Yemen attacks. The same day, a letter signed by 31 members of Congress called on the Pentagon to release more details about Saudi-led coalition violations.
There is no mystery here: The Saudi-led coalition has committed scores of unlawful attacks, many amounting to war crimes. Continued arms sales not only send a clear message to the coalition that it can kill civilians with impunity, but they increasingly put U.S. officials at legal risk for aiding those crimes.
Images: Kristine Beckerle/ Human Rights Watch
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May 4, 2017, 5:49 PM (IDT)
DEBKAFile
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held talks Thursday with Romanian Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu, who arrived for a visit at the head of a large delegation, including defense and economy ministers. They signed accords for economic cooperation and a reciprocal reduction in the costs of roaming services. They also discussed cooperation between the two armed forces. Their air forces already hold military drills in both countries.
Defense One - All Content: Rex Tillerson Spells Out U.S. Foreign Policy by Aria Bendix, The Atlantic
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks to State Department employees, Wednesday, May 3, 2017, at the State Department in Washington.
Defense One - All Content
The president will finish his trip with stops at NATO and G7 meetings in Brussels and Sicily.
National Security
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United States Marines run through dust kicked up by a Blackhawk helicopter as they rush a colleague wounded in an IED strike for evacuation near Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on May 10, 2011.
Defense One - All Content
CNN |
US Congressman talks Russian money laundering with alleged ex-spy in Berlin
CNN "We have a huge double standard with Russia when it comes to prisoners and other things," Rohrabacher told CNN, adding that the Russian intelligence services' interference in the U.S. election was no different from the NSA's "bugging [German Chancellor ... and more » |
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 occupies 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 occupied 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.” ♦
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Raw Story |
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