It’s all coming together, fellow liberals and never-Trumpers: President Donald Trump this week said he wouldn’t have tapped Jeff Sessions as attorney general had he known that the Alabama senator was going to do the blindingly obvious right thing and recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Demonstrating yet again his ignorance of how the rule of law works, Trump told The New York Times that Sessions was “extremely unfair – and that’s a mild word – to the president.”
And last week Donald Trump Jr. confirmed for the world that his father's campaign was positively giddy about the prospect of colluding with Russia in 2016; also last week a pair of House Democrats introduced the first official articles of impeachment against Trump; it seems like I can hardly check Twitter without seeing a #25thAmendmentNow hashtag. With Robert Mueller hard at work and each week seeming to bring a new twist to the Trump scandals can removal from office be far behind?
Well yes, actually. It can be very far behind. For those of you itching to start a Trump-out-of-office countdown, I suggest setting it to 1,285 days – the amount of time before his term ends, on January 20, 2021. It is true that for a variety of reasons having to do with his behavior, his popularity, his lifestyle and his age, Trump seems less likely than any of his predecessors to serve a full four years (possibly excepting William Henry Harrison, whose never-ending, rain-drenched inaugural address is said to have left him with an eventually-fatal case of pneumonia); but that does not make a foreshortened term likely.
There are a five ways Trump can leave office, but the one that is most overwhelmingly likely is that he departs as have most of his predecessors, in an orderly transition of power at the end of his term(s).
The caveat of course is that changing circumstances can change circumstances. A smoking gun – whether a recording of Trump promising to return Alaska to Russia, his boasting on Twitter about grabbing someone's pussy (he's president so they let him do it) or an actual pistol with smoke billowing forth after he uses it to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue – could dramatically shift the odds.
Even that sort of normal circumstances game-changer may not however: His GOP rank-and-file support shows little sign of dissipating despite his stunningly low national approval rating. And every time a Republican lawmaker expresses grave concern about some startling, new Trump transgression, they push the envelope of what would constitute going too far a bit further out; Richard Nixon had to resign after trying to get the FBI to quash an investigation, after all, while Trump just got a stern talking-to over the same. But I suspect a nontrivial number of GOP lawmakers, asked about such a scenario back in January, would have declared it a presidency-ending event for Trump.)
With those caveats, here are the five ways Donald Trump can leave office, in roughly ascending order of likelihood.
The 25th Amendment. Ratified in 1967, this addition to the Constitution provides a mechanism for at least temporarily removing an incapacitated president from office. Think post-stroke Woodrow Wilson or worse. According to its fourth section, if the vice-president and a majority of the Cabinet declare to Congress that the president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," the veep becomes the acting president. That's simple enough but quickly becomes more complicated. As Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in May, "Section 4 is a great solution if the president is missing or comatose, but a terrible one when he is conscious and in full control of his Twitter account." You see the president can appeal to Congress his declaration of incapacity; it gets complicated but Congress then has three weeks to decide whether the president is fit for duty. Two-thirds of each chamber must agree with the incapacity decision to keep the president on the sidelines; and oh yeah there's no limit on how often he can appeal.
This has the makings of a political circus the likes of which would make people yearn for the relative normalcy of the Trump presidency. It would also be a cure potentially as toxic as the disease. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote in May, "the real chief complaint against Donald Trump is that he threatens U.S. democracy not (chiefly) by breaking laws, but by undermining the norms which are just as important to democratic governance as the laws and constitutional provisions." Given that, he went on, those norms must be observed and something like the 25th Amendment must be reserved for "Wilson-like cases where the president is really, truly incapacitated. While mental illness could qualify, the many armchair diagnoses we've seen of Trump simply do not clear the constitutional bar."
But there's a more practical reason this is a total nonstarter: Does anyone really believe that a majority of the Cabinet (this Cabinet) is likely to turn on him? Or that enough Republican lawmakers would defect that Congress would sustain the removal? If Trump's political situation deteriorated to that extent they'd just impeach him, which would be easier (because, for one thing, it has no appeals process).
(Continued)
And last week Donald Trump Jr. confirmed for the world that his father's campaign was positively giddy about the prospect of colluding with Russia in 2016; also last week a pair of House Democrats introduced the first official articles of impeachment against Trump; it seems like I can hardly check Twitter without seeing a #25thAmendmentNow hashtag. With Robert Mueller hard at work and each week seeming to bring a new twist to the Trump scandals can removal from office be far behind?
Well yes, actually. It can be very far behind. For those of you itching to start a Trump-out-of-office countdown, I suggest setting it to 1,285 days – the amount of time before his term ends, on January 20, 2021. It is true that for a variety of reasons having to do with his behavior, his popularity, his lifestyle and his age, Trump seems less likely than any of his predecessors to serve a full four years (possibly excepting William Henry Harrison, whose never-ending, rain-drenched inaugural address is said to have left him with an eventually-fatal case of pneumonia); but that does not make a foreshortened term likely.
There are a five ways Trump can leave office, but the one that is most overwhelmingly likely is that he departs as have most of his predecessors, in an orderly transition of power at the end of his term(s).
The caveat of course is that changing circumstances can change circumstances. A smoking gun – whether a recording of Trump promising to return Alaska to Russia, his boasting on Twitter about grabbing someone's pussy (he's president so they let him do it) or an actual pistol with smoke billowing forth after he uses it to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue – could dramatically shift the odds.
Even that sort of normal circumstances game-changer may not however: His GOP rank-and-file support shows little sign of dissipating despite his stunningly low national approval rating. And every time a Republican lawmaker expresses grave concern about some startling, new Trump transgression, they push the envelope of what would constitute going too far a bit further out; Richard Nixon had to resign after trying to get the FBI to quash an investigation, after all, while Trump just got a stern talking-to over the same. But I suspect a nontrivial number of GOP lawmakers, asked about such a scenario back in January, would have declared it a presidency-ending event for Trump.)
With those caveats, here are the five ways Donald Trump can leave office, in roughly ascending order of likelihood.
The 25th Amendment. Ratified in 1967, this addition to the Constitution provides a mechanism for at least temporarily removing an incapacitated president from office. Think post-stroke Woodrow Wilson or worse. According to its fourth section, if the vice-president and a majority of the Cabinet declare to Congress that the president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," the veep becomes the acting president. That's simple enough but quickly becomes more complicated. As Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in May, "Section 4 is a great solution if the president is missing or comatose, but a terrible one when he is conscious and in full control of his Twitter account." You see the president can appeal to Congress his declaration of incapacity; it gets complicated but Congress then has three weeks to decide whether the president is fit for duty. Two-thirds of each chamber must agree with the incapacity decision to keep the president on the sidelines; and oh yeah there's no limit on how often he can appeal.
This has the makings of a political circus the likes of which would make people yearn for the relative normalcy of the Trump presidency. It would also be a cure potentially as toxic as the disease. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote in May, "the real chief complaint against Donald Trump is that he threatens U.S. democracy not (chiefly) by breaking laws, but by undermining the norms which are just as important to democratic governance as the laws and constitutional provisions." Given that, he went on, those norms must be observed and something like the 25th Amendment must be reserved for "Wilson-like cases where the president is really, truly incapacitated. While mental illness could qualify, the many armchair diagnoses we've seen of Trump simply do not clear the constitutional bar."
But there's a more practical reason this is a total nonstarter: Does anyone really believe that a majority of the Cabinet (this Cabinet) is likely to turn on him? Or that enough Republican lawmakers would defect that Congress would sustain the removal? If Trump's political situation deteriorated to that extent they'd just impeach him, which would be easier (because, for one thing, it has no appeals process).
(Continued)
