AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
President Donald Trump, with pen in hand, speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, January 30, 2017, before signing an executive order requiring government agencies requesting a new regulations to identify two regulations they will cut from their own departments.
Despite the Republican leadership's intransigence on all matters Donald Trump, the firing of FBI Director James Comey increases the odds that the 45th president will be removed from office. Trump's unfitness to lead the country has been apparent since he stepped into the political spotlight, and this latest turn of events underscores the observations that Co-Editor Robert Kuttner offered up one week after Trump's inauguration. We reprise his column here. Join The American Prospect's conversation about Trump, Comey, and what the future holds on Facebook.
-The Editors
There are two constitutional ways to remove a president. One is the process of impeachment. The other is the lesser-known 25th Amendment, which provides a way for an impaired president to be removed from office by a two-thirds vote of Congress.
Should Trump be considered impaired? Or should he be brought up on charges of violating the Constitution? Pick your poison.
Trump has been trying to govern by impulse, on whim, for personal retribution, for profit, by decree-as if he had been elected dictator. It doesn't work, and the wheels are coming off the bus. After a week!
Impeachment is gaining ground, because Republicans are already deserting this president in droves, and because the man is psychiatrically incapable of checking whether something is legal before he does it. The dossier of impeachable offenses will only grow.
The grown-ups around Trump, even the most slavishly loyal ones, spend half their time trying to rein him in, but it can't be done. They spend the other half fielding frantic calls from Republican chieftains, business elites, and foreign leaders. Trump did what? Poor Reince Priebus has finally attained the pinnacle of power, and it can't be fun.
It is one thing to live in your own reality when you are a candidate and it's just words. You can fool enough of the people enough of the time maybe even to get elected. But when you try to govern that way, there is a reality to reality-and reality pushes back.
One by one, Trump has decreed impulsive orders, un-vetted by legal, policy, or political staff, much less by serious planning. Almost immediately he is forced to walk them back by a combination of political and legal pressure-and by reality.
Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding-just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump's behavior, the stronger become the checks.
Only with his lunatic effort to selectively ban refugees (but not from terrorist-sending countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt where Trump has business interests) has Trump discovered that the American system has courts. It has courts. Imagine that.
The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will roll over for Trump's illegalities?
In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting Trump's view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud.
They are running for cover on how to kill Obamacare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. This is actually complicated, and nuance is not Trump's strong suit. Representative Tom McClintock of California spoke for many when he warned: "We'd better be sure that we're prepared to live with the market we've created [with repeal]. That's going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock, and barrel, and we'll be judged in the election less than two years away."
Senator Lindsey Graham, mocking Trump's own nutty tweeting habits, sent out a tweet calling a trade war with Mexico "mucho sad."
Trump's own senior staff has had to pull him back from his ludicrous crusade against Mexico and Mexicans, where Trump forces the Mexican president to cancel an official visit one day, and spends an hour on the phone kissing up the next day.
Trump proposed reinstating torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate's third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump's own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers.
Meanwhile, corporate America is in high gear to defeat his plan for a 20 percent general increase in tariffs. And other world leaders have expressed outrage at his order banning Muslims.
All this in just a week!-now capped by federal judges starting to rein him in.
After his order on immigrants, several more senior Republicans expressed dismay at their president.
Lindsey Graham and John McCain issued a joint statement warning that "it sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country." And: "we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security."
Two weeks ago, in this space, just based on what we witnessed during the transition, I wrote a piece calling for a citizens impeachment panel, as a shadow House Judiciary Committee, to assemble a dossier for a Trump impeachment, and a citizens' campaign to create a public impeachment movement.
In the two weeks since then, Free Speech for People has launched a citizens' campaign to impeach Trump. About 400,000 people have already signed the impeachment petition.
The bipartisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has been conducting a detailed investigation. Senior legal scholars associated with CREW have filed a detailed legal brief in their lawsuit, documenting the several ways Trump is in violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a president from profiting from the actions of foreign governments.
There are already plenty of other grounds for impeachment
, including Trump's putting his own business interests ahead of the country's and his weird and opportunistic alliance with Vladimir Putin bordering on treason. A lesser-known law that goes beyond the Emoluments Clause is the STOCK Act of 2012, which explicitly prohibits the president and other officials from profiting from non-public knowledge.
Impeachment, of course, is a political as well as a legal process. The Founders designed it that way deliberately. But after just a week in office, not only has Trump been deserting the Constitution; his partisan allies are deserting him.
For impeachment to move forward, one or more prominent Republicans would have to publicly break with Trump-to go beyond criticisms of individual policies and to challenge the fitness of the man for the office. This will take a little longer, but it will happen. And it's only been a week!
In 1984, the psychiatrist Otto Kernberg described a sickness known as Malignant Narcissism. Unlike ordinary narcissism, malignant narcissism was a severe pathology. It was characterized by an absence of conscience, a pathological grandiosity and quest for power, and a sadistic joy in cruelty.
Despite his creepy weirdness, Republicans at first thought they could use Trump for Republican ends. But from his embrace of Putin to his sponsorship of a general trade war, this is no Republican. One can only imagine the alarm and horror being expressed by Republicans privately.
Given the sheer danger to the Republic as well as to the Republicans, Trump's impeachment will happen. The only question is how grave a catastrophe America faces first.
