of the courts and protected the separation of powers: “Thus, although proceedings in response to out-of-court contempts are sufficiently criminal in nature to warrant the imposition of many procedural protections, this does not mean that their prosecution can be undertaken only by the Executive Branch, and it should not obscure the fact that the limited purpose of such proceedings is to vindicate judicial authority.”35 Since assuming office, Trump has exploited his presidential power in flagrant disregard for this concern. Recall the contentious case of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty by a federal judge of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order to cease targeting and detaining suspected undocumented immigrants based on racial profiling—a violation of the constitutional rights of Hispanics. Trump asked his Justice Department to dismiss the case and then pardoned Arpaio, prior to sentencing and without the standard Justice Department review. In the history of our nation, no other president has ever fully pardoned someone convicted of criminal contempt prior to sentencing.36
Trump has continued his assault on the free press, even retweeting and then deleting a violent image of a train smashing into a man with the CNN logo covering his face. At a campaign rally, he abused the power of the presidency to call on NFL owners to fire any players who exercised their right of peaceful protest by kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem. Bluntly put, President Trump had shattered precedent by using the power of his office to say that “those people,” whom he called “son[s] of bitch[es],” oblivious or maybe not to the slur on their mothers, should lose their livelihood for a nonviolent, principled protest.37
To date, Republican indifference to revelations of President Trump’s transgressions have blocked prospects for an impeachment investigation. Yet there remain so many real possibilities for a change of direction that the odds still favor an impeachment investigation no later than the beginning of 2019, but likely sooner than that. Early January 2019 marks the seating of a new Congress. An impeachment investigation would quickly follow if Democrats recapture the U.S. House of Representative in the 2018 midterm elections. To date that remains a long-shot result, but political calculations are rapidly changing in the era of Trump, and the party holding the White House typically loses dozens of seats in midterm contests. Midterm voters usually turn out to register their opposition to an incumbent president, especially one with the dismal approval ratings of Donald Trump. It would take only a net gain of some two dozen seats for Democrats to regain the House majority they held until the 2010 elections.
Even barring such a political turnabout, the Mueller investigation, although not directly targeting impeachment, could issue findings damning enough to jolt the two dozen House Republicans into joining with Democrats for a majority vote on an impeachment investigation. Prosecutors use such pressure on underlings to cut immunity deals for testimony against the person at the top of the chain, in this case President Donald Trump. If Mueller flips high Trump officials, and their testimonies against Trump are damning enough, it could inspire public demands for an impeachment investigation and shock Republicans into action.
The president could pardon anyone subject to federal prosecution. However, such pardons pose the risk of making the obstruction of justice case against him compelling enough for many Republicans. “Unlike the pardon of Arpaio, which is a despicable blow to the rule of law,” said law professor Peter Shane of Ohio State University, “pardoning anyone who might have been a co-conspirator in misconduct involving Trump himself would much more plausibly be impeachable.”38
Similarly, Mueller may uncover direct “smoking gun” evidence of collusion through intercepted conversations between members of the Trump team and the Russians. We know that American intelligence agents have wiretapped Manafort’s phones pursuant to a warrant from the U.S. Federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which requires probable cause that he was acting as a hostile foreign agent. Such evidence, like the Nixon tapes, could prove collusion from the mouths of the conspirators themselves and create unstoppable momentum for an impeachment investigation.39
Lastly, Mueller could uncover proof of other felonies committed directly by Donald Trump. If he finds, for example, that the evidence supports allegations of obstruction of justice, money laundering, or tax evasion, even House Republicans would be hard-pressed to oppose an impeachment investigation. Mueller has been investigating obstruction and CNN has reported that “the IRS is now sharing information with special counsel Robert Mueller about key Trump campaign officials,” although it is unclear whether he has yet sought to obtain the president’s tax returns. The mills of special counsel investigations typically grind slowly, but Mueller seems intent on moving quickly. Bombshell revelations could occur by early 2018 or even sooner.40
The final scenario turns on the self-interest of House Republicans. The first rule of politics for an incumbent officeholder is survival. If, by the summer of 2018, vulnerable Republicans come to believe that Trump threatens their reelection and see that the American people are demanding impeachment, enough of them could turn against the president and join with Democrats in support of an impeachment investigation.
Americans can only hope that, as in Watergate, patriotic Republicans will grasp the dire consequences of failing at least to investigate the impeachment of Donald Trump. Inaction would nullify constitutional safeguards against the corruption of presidential service through the pursuit of private profit. It would leave our democracy vulnerable to destruction by the undeterred foreign manipulation of elections abetted by the collusion of unscrupulous campaigns. Inaction would normalize the Orwellian doublethink of the Trump regime, in which reality no longer exists and lies become truth. It would validate the divisive politics that threaten America’s national unity by inflaming ethnic, racial, and religious prejudice.41
There are yet deeper issues raised by Donald Trump’s impeachment. In his first speech to the United Nations, on September 19, 2017, Trump mentioned the words “sovereignty” or “sovereign” no less than twenty-one times. “President delivered a speech to his alt-right, anti-globalist base from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly,” warned David Rothkopf, a visiting professor of international relations at Columbia University. What Trump failed to deliver was any remark whatsoever on the gravest external threat of all to American sovereignty: Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.42
But if Russia’s interference in the election poses the gravest external threat to our nation and all it stands for, then it’s Trump who poses the gravest threat domestically and existentially—though even many of Trump’s critics miss the deepest menace of his presidency. Trump is neither a modern liberal nor a conservative, but that is not to say he’s a blank slate ideologically. Rather, he is a true reactionary who would turn back the clock to an era of xenophobic nationalism, a vision shared by the most backward-looking of Americans, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists. Like Trump, these reactionaries yearn for a return to an America dominated by white men and guided by a narrow conception of traditional culture, an America insulated from the world by tariff walls, restrictive immigration quotas, and isolationist policies. “We are determined to take our country back,” announced David Duke from the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”43
At one point in time, extreme nationalism functioned as a foundation for building strong nation states across the world, but it cannot represent the future of the United States—not in our modern day. By the early twentieth century, unchecked insular nationalism had culminated in a worldwide depression, two catastrophic world wars, the collapse of multiple democracies, and the rise of dictatorships around the globe. In recognition of these tragedies, much of the world has moved toward the only viable future: one of gender and racial equality, global cooperation, free trade, common democratic values, and a united approach to fighting the catastrophic climate change that threatens human civilization. The number of worldwide democracies has soared—from just twelve in 1942 to more than one hundred by the end of the twentieth century—but democracy remains imperiled across the globe, endangered
