The Inevitability Of Impeachment

The Inevitability Of Impeachment
After just one week.

AUTHOR - Robert Kuttner Co-founder and co-editor, ‘The American Prospect’

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 it is the only way to get him out, and 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.

Impeachment is gaining ground because it’s so horribly clear that Trump is unfit for office. The grownups 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 be Trump’s whore?

In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his 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. Rep 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, said Rep. Tom McClintock. (R-Calif.)

“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.”

Sen. 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 to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), 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.

All this in just a week! Now capped by federal judges starting to rein him in.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook: http://facebook.com/RobertKuttner

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Unlike Obama who famously said he had a pen and a phone, so he could bypass Congress if they did not do what Caesar wanted.

First off, I did not vote for Trump or Hillary. This article is “precious snowflake” propaganda, which has escalated to Hollywood stars calling for his assassination with full cooperation from the mainstream media. Trump called out the media for their lies, in particular CNN which had vigorously promoted Hillary. They needed a good wake up call to get them back to real investigative journalism. He has told the pharmaceutical companies that their US price gouging and FDA fast tracking unsafe drugs was coming to an end. He has replaced many of the more rabid neo-con/liberals from high government and military positions. These chicken hawks have kept the US in a continuous state of war since the Clinton break up of the Balkan States. The TPP was a globalist friendly disaster … good riddance.

Granted Trump is not the most charismatic president, but he touched on topics that resonated with the voters. He will need to endure a steep learning curve, if possible. When the DNC ran Bernie Sanders’ campaign into a ditch for Hillary, an avowed warmonger threatening Russia with tactical nukes in Syria, they shot themselves in the foot. A great many old-school, anti-war democrats who loathed Hillary held their noses and voted for Trump. The Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for nominating such a flawed candidate, but they thought the fix was in. Wishful thinking will get you every time. Rapprochement with Russia certainly beats a nuclear exchange.

George Soros is now funding the numerous left groups more prone to disruptive violence. He is working their emotions with great skill. He too took a hit when his carefully groomed and lavishly funded candidate went down in flames. He is not accustomed to losing gracefully.

We’ll have to wait and see if Trump winds up the savior of the republic that his voters hoped for, or whether he will live up to the hysterical predictions of the left. The calls for impeachment are ridiculous and groundless at this point. One thing is certain, his opponents are legion and very powerful. Pray for the best, prepare for the worst.

Trump needs to learn that unintended consequences in world government are far greater for many more people than buying land for an unwelcome new hotel!
It will be a steep learning curve.

I think most politicians today need that lesson.

trump needs to keep his paws to himself…lesson one.

Speaking of which, Barbara, here is a photo from several years ago with Trump and the creator of the bloody decapitation photo which has the left all atwitter and rallying to her defence. Is the little ginger on his right recognizable? She seems rather amenable to a grope from a billionaire.