President Trump’s constant, relentless, remorseless lying is a central feature of his presidency, an unprecedented threat to our democracy and — in my view — an impeachable offense.
.. I also realize it is not always possible to draw a bright line between untruths Trump knows are untrue and conspiratorial nonsense he might foolishly believe. But never before have we had a leader who so pollutes the national discourse with garbage that he at least ought to know is false — and I fear the consequences will be with us long after Trump is gone..
.. Other presidents have lied — Lyndon B. Johnson about Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon about Watergate, Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky. But never have we had a president who lies about everything , who invents his own fake facts, who continues to trumpet patent falsehoods even when confronted with the actual facts.
.. At a roundtable with a group of workers in Duluth, Minn., in June, Trump said, “The head of U.S. Steel called me the other day, and he said, ‘We’re opening up six major facilities and expanding facilities that have never been expanded.’ ” A few days later, at the White House, Trump said, “U.S. Steel just announced they’re expanding or building six new facilities.”
Reporters called the company for details and learned that U.S. Steel has not announced plans to open any new domestic steel mills, period. Not six new plants; not even one.
.. Wrong. More than a month later, at one of his campaign-style rallies, Trump declared that “U.S. Steel is opening up seven plants.” At another rally around the same time, he told supporters that “U.S. Steel just announced that they’re building six new steel mills.”
.. In June, Trump’s claim might have been called a “misstatement” or a “falsehood” or an “untruth.” A month later, after the truth had been clearly established, that same claim could only be called a bald-faced lie.
.. Trump clearly understands the benefit of flooding the zone. If, during the course of a rally or a news conference or an interview, he tells one glaring lie, that’s where all attention will be focused. But if he tells a dozen lies, or two dozen, it is all but impossible for critics to keep up. By the time all those lies have been called out, Trump will have spewed a few dozen more.
.. Lesley Stahl offered a valuable lesson in how to pin Trump down. At one point, he was trying to leave the false impression that there is serious scientific debate about whether human activity has contributed to climate change. “They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael,” Trump said.
“Who says that?” Stahl interjected. “ ‘They say?’ ”
.. “People say,” Trump responded. “People say . . .” Finally he claimed, without offering a shred of evidence, that “scientists . . . have a very big political agenda” — a dodge amounting to an admission that Trump had no factual basis for the claims he was making.
.. When Stahl turned to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and Trump said, “I think China meddled also,” Stahl again called him on it: “You are diverting the whole Russia thing. . . . You are, you are.”
.. Trump finally got so flustered that he said, “Lesley, it’s okay. In the meantime, I’m president — and you’re not.”
And that is the point.
.. When Trump insists on his own invented “facts,” he makes reality-based political dialogue impossible. His utter disregard for truth is a subversion of our democracy and a dereliction of his duty as president. The founders considered themselves men of honor whose word was their bond. They left us the vague, encompassing phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” for just such an emergency.
Is Trump on a Collision Course With Impeachment?
Democrats are largely ducking the topic on the campaign trail, but few people in Washington doubt that it will be on the table if they win the House.
Perhaps only in the Trump era would the prospect of being impeached become a punch line for the president of the United States.
.. If that happens, anyone who thought the battle over Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation was ugly and divisive should buckle up, because history suggests it would provide only a small taste of what lies ahead. The impeachment drives against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton tore at the nation’s fabric, but an effort to remove Mr. Trump could lead to an even more incendiary conflict, thanks to the advent of social media and Mr. Trump’s brand of blowtorch politics.
.. Rather than being apprehensive about the threat, Mr. Trump, who loves a good brawl, seems almost eager for Democrats to bring it on. He has begun making his case in recent months without waiting for the election. In August, he warned that if he is impeached, “the market would crash” and “everybody would be very poor.” In September, he told supporters it would be their fault if he is impeached because it would mean “you didn’t go out to vote.”
.. And in Iowa, he laid out what would undoubtedly be his public argument. “You get impeached for
- having created the greatest economy in the history of our country,” he said.
- “The best job numbers in the history of our country, just about, right?
- The greatest trade deals, which we’ve just finished, in the history of our country.”
.. the framers anticipated the possibility that a president might try to use his power to thwart investigations into his actions. During the Virginia ratification debate, Mason asked what would happen if a president chose to “pardon crimes which were advised by himself” or to “stop inquiry and prevent detection” of a crime he or an associate had committed? Madison responded that “the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”
A Post-Trump World?
Yet what might happen should Trump be removed from office, either by impeachment leading to conviction or resignation or by federal indictment from Robert Mueller?
Given the evidence so far, the results could be civil chaos, and for a variety of reasons:
.. we have never threatened any president with impeachment primarily for purported wrongdoing before he took office... Had we done so, every president from Dwight Eisenhower (who avoided $400,000 in taxes by finagling a one-time government ruling to declare the huge royalties on his memoir as “capital gains” rather than income) to Barack Obama (who, well aside from Tony Rezko’s “gift,” faced campaign violations involving nearly $1.8 million in improper 2008 contributions that earned a $375,000 fine) would have faced non-stop legal hounding while in office. Harry Truman would have been impeached his first year, had a special prosecutor reviewed his long relationships of years past with the criminal syndicate run by Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast. In 1963, a Mueller-like special counsel would still have been ferreting out all the election tampering during the 1960 election and its relationship to JFK... none of which justifies the allegations that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors while in office.
.. on social issues or religious agendas, they might find Pence more unpalatable — and yet far harder to defame.
.. Nonetheless, do not expect the Left to cease its hysteria should Trump disappear; it would simply recalibrate and refocus on Pence. The effort would be to repeat the Trump-demonization formula of trying to leverage some sort of legal infraction into a melodramatic felony to discredit an opposition president — perhaps in the manner the Left is now seeking to turn the upright Brett Kavanaugh into a veritable monster. Getting Trump would likely only whet the appetite to go after his successor.
.. The base not only has little allegiance to the Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce view of the world on trade, immigration, and manufacturing, but could either sit out or oppose any election that returns the party to the orthodox ideology of the recent past.
The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”
.. The base not only has little allegiance to the Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce view of the world on trade, immigration, and manufacturing, but could either sit out or oppose any election that returns the party to the orthodox ideology of the recent past.
The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”
.. A Trump abdication of some sort would alienate current Trump voters from the Republican party for a generation.
The ‘Deplorables’ Called Into Battle Again
Steve Bannon doesn’t do subtle. So it’s no surprise that there’s nothing subtle about the new movie President Trump’s onetime political guru has produced to energize the Trump base for this year’s midterm elections.
It’s entitled “Trump at War,” and it’s an hour and 15 minutes of pure Trumpian adrenaline. It opens with a series of shots of Trump supporters being attacked by angry opponents, shifts to outtakes of Trump supporters proudly accepting the “deplorables” label bestowed by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, runs through a long series of angry ripostes at Trump detractors and praise of administration policy moves, and closes with dire warnings of the need to vote for Republicans in 2018 to head off efforts by liberals to impeach the president.
Mr. Bannon previewed the film for some Republican supporters in Dallas recently, but the big premiere is scheduled for Sept. 9—chosen because it is the second anniversary of the speech in which Mrs. Clinton used the “basket of deplorables” phrase. The location? The very club in Manhattan where Mrs. Clinton made the speech, which has been rented for the occasion.
.. Republicans face a Democratic party whose activists appear exceptionally motivated—to campaign, donate money and turn out in November.
Republicans need something to match that fervor. That something is the Trump base—and the best motivating tools are anger and fear.
.. In this case, that means specifically the fear that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, New York prosecutors and a Democratic Congress will conspire to kick Mr. Trump out of office. That’s why Republicans are talking about the specter of impeachment, not Democrats. Democrats know impeachment talk is a surefire way to motivate the other side.
.. Right now, independent voters are hard to read. Their sentiments have been shifting around a lot in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling in recent months. As a general rule, they have a low regard for Mr. Trump personally and appear weary of the atmosphere of constant crisis around him. But the polling also indicates they increasingly like how Republicans are handling the economy, appreciate the GOP tax cut and think the party is changing the way things work in Washington.
That leaves moderate Republicans, of whom Mr. Bannon says simply: “We need RINOs.”
.. More conventional Republicans may be disdainful of Mr. Trump personally, but they also think the tax cuts, deregulatory policies and judicial nominations they like are imperiled if he goes down.
.. For the Trump base, impeachment talk is a source of outrage. Soft Republicans dislike it for less emotional, more practical reasons.