By Steve Coll
Pelosi did become one of Trump’s most unflinching adversaries, in part because she grasped early on that invitations to his White House are often just call sheets for unscripted television; her finger-jabbing readiness to get in Trump’s face has made her a recurring meme of the Democratic resistance. She offered her most vivid performance yet on February 4th, during the President’s third State of the Union address. As Trump spoke, Pelosi, wearing suffragist white, sat behind him in the high-backed chair reserved for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and conspicuously shuffled and reshuffled a printed copy of the President’s speech. After he finished, she tore the text in half. Twitter blew up, as the Speaker had clearly intended; she explained that she had abandoned decorum because Trump’s speech “was a manifesto of mistruths.”
Hashtag wars are the President’s terrain, however; the conflict between Pelosi and Trump matters most for what it says about the questionable health of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. After the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the House but not the Senate, Pelosi, who will turn eighty in March, was elected House Speaker, overcoming opposition from progressive and younger representatives by promising to relinquish her post by 2022. Last year, as the Mueller investigation wound down, Pelosi resisted calls from many Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry. She argued that the idea lacked public support, even as the Mueller report turned out to be damning, particularly in its litany of examples of likely obstruction of justice. Pelosi’s judgment seemed to be grounded in political realism: even if the President were impeached, the chances remained slim to vanishing that the Republican-controlled Senate—cowed by Trump’s base and by allied demagogues on the airwaves—would convict and remove him from office by the necessary two-thirds vote. Why impeach Trump if he could describe an acquittal as vindication, using it to denounce his enemies and to rally his following?
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Last September, after the Ukraine matter broke, Pelosi concluded—at the urging of both progressives and centrists in her House caucus—that this time the evidence was different. Trump’s abuse of U.S. military aid and economic power to coerce Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, she said, had crossed a line from “bad behavior” to presenting “a challenge to our Constitution.” The House hearings that followed, despite a hurried schedule and White House obstruction, created a convincing record of Trump’s blithe disregard of a President’s duty to place the national interest before his own. For all its political risks, Pelosi told the Times early this month, the impeachment investigation succeeded, because it “pulled back a veil of behavior totally unacceptable to our founders. . . . The public will see this with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye.” She implied that such clarity would shape the judgment of voters in November, but she also seemed to acknowledge uncertainty about the coming election: “Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever.”
When the Senate exonerated Trump, this week, following his brief and witness-free impeachment trial, the most striking reminder of the constitutional issues at stake was provided by Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential nominee in 2012, as he joined a united Democratic caucus to vote for Trump’s conviction on the article charging abuse of power. In eloquent remarks, he described the President’s conduct as “a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security, and our fundamental values.” He went on, “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
Whether Trump will nonetheless become the first President in U.S. history to be impeached and then reëlected remains a matter of mortal dread among many Democrats. For a President presiding over a growing economy and low unemployment, Trump’s disapproval ratings remain high, but incumbents with not much better numbers have gone on to win a second term. His followers still camp out overnight to gain admission to his rallies. Given the widespread animus toward the President in big blue states like California and New York, it seems doubtful that he can win the popular vote in November, yet recent state polls show that he has a plausible path to an Electoral College victory, similar to the one he constructed in 2016. Democratic voters seem motivated to defeat Trump above all other goals, yet they must first navigate a Presidential nominating contest in which there is no decisive front-runner and plenty of potential for divisiveness.
In “A Very Stable Genius,” Rucker and Leonnig provide an arresting narrative of how Trump has come to operate with far fewer constraints and much greater conviction about the soundness of his own instincts. The President’s ignorance can be staggering. (On a tour of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, he made clear to his chief of staff at the time, John Kelly, that he did not know what had happened at Pearl Harbor.) But the book’s most frightening scenes document Trump’s indifference to the rule of law, compounded, in some cases, by his reliance on right-wing television personalities for ideas. In 2018, he grew deeply frustrated with then Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, because she ignored border-security proposals floated by the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs; she had concluded that the proposals were infeasible or illegal. When Trump insisted that Nielsen act as he wanted, she told him, “Federal law enforcement doesn’t work like that. . . . These people have taken an oath to uphold the law. Do you really want to tell them to do the opposite?” According to Rucker and Leonnig, Trump answered, “Then we’ll pardon them.” By now, any dispassionate reading of the Mueller report, the impeachment investigation, and the accumulating record of journalism can lead to but one conclusion: we have been warned. ♦
Published in the print edition of the February 17 & 24, 2020, issue, with the headline “After Impeachment.”
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