President Donald Trump faces a significant challenge over the next few months to hang on to office and survive the gravest of charges that, as it now seems inevitable, will lead to some sort of censure, even impeachment, or at least the threat of it. That he can make it to the end of his full four-year term without further drama or accusations of impropriety which could ultimately culminate in his undoing must have the Las Vegas bet takers agog.
It will likely be an epic, tortuous struggle the like of which America and the world has rarely witnessed. If nothing else, Trump has been good business for everyone in the commentating media, driving web traffic, social media hits, TV viewing figures and newspaper and magazine sales alike on a scale that is almost nauseating for its omnipresence. From Washington to Singapore, to Ouadadogu he dominates, for good or ill, every news cycle.
If the past is truly prologue than the next chapter in the Trump (melo)drama will be still more enthralling, it appears. But is all this excitement good for the world’s remaining (sorry China or Russia) superpower, much less for the world?
Much will depend on how he responds over the next year. Here’s how it could all pan out.
1) Impeachment
Some sort of proceeding now look inevitable, with the unexpected announcement of the appointment of a special prosecutor and former FBI director, Robert Mueller. The next few months will see likely see Trump publicly embarrassed, starting with the evidence that will be given by the FBI boss(and Mueller’s successor) he fired, James Comey, supposedly after having attempted to persuade him to obstruct justice and abandon his investigations into links between Trump and his campaign and the Russians. Then there is the matter of the President’s threatening Comey, on Twitter no less, with (possibly non-existent) recordings of their conversations. This tweet alone, could serve to further damage Trump’s credibility if no tapes exist, and more significantly, if they do exist, prove to be the silver bullet that finally brings down the Teflon Don.
Mueller, who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is generally widely respected across both aisles of Congress and seen as a largely nonpartisan player of the Washington power game. He was given the job by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, because the Attorney General himself, Jeff Sessions, had to recuse himself because he is compromised by his own contact with the Russians during Trump’s run for office in 2016.
Sooner rather than later, Comey will tell curious members of Congress and the Special prosecutor precisely what passed between himself and Trump on the subject of the Russians. Very possibly, it won’t be nice.
Special prosecutors are procedural and political headaches for administrations because of their wide purview to literally investigate anything and everything, wherever it leads, however tenuously connected to the original purpose of the inquiry. Furthermore they have unlimited financial resources and have virtual cartre blanche to subpoena. History suggests, such efforts usually turn up something.
Thus, once Mueller gets going, who knows where he’ll end up? With his extensive business interests, Trump may need to show definitively that these too have not influenced him as a candidate, and that he has maintained proper distance between himself and his relations, notably son-in-law Jared Kushner (whose sister has already shown in her Chinese real estate promotions that she has no qualms in name-dropping both her brother and the President). Sessions, Vice-President Mike Pence and General Mike Flynn would likely face more questions. So might those closest to Trump, such as friends and family members. More resignations and scandals could follow. The tide could rise closer and closer to the Oval Office.
All of this would demonstrate the power of the “permanent government”, the checks and balances built into the American system by independent or semi-independent agencies, bureaucratic norms, public accountability, the attentions of the media (especially the Washington Post, an odd echo of Watergate), and judicial and legislative oversight.
To what extent Trump or any campaign aides violated the law remains to be seen. As liberals cry for impeachment and attack Trump as a puppet of the nefarious, world-historical-James Bond villain-level genius Vladimir Putin has become in Democratic mythology, they should remember that the same systemic checks and balances that have stymied GOP overreach has made it so that presidential criminal activity isn’t so easy to prove.
If Comey was fired because he was getting to close to exposing the President’s (or his campaign’s, or his business’s) ties to Russia, this could mean Trump obstructed justice, though it’s a complex constitutional issue potentially subject to wide interpretation. At least one prominent legal scholar, Alan Dershowitz, argued the obstruction of justice case against Trump is “not strong”. Impeachment proceedings, still unlikely to be initiated by a Republican-controlled Congress, also hinge much more on politics than the rule of law. If Democrats take control of the House after the midterm elections next year, Trump is in far more trouble.
2) The Streetfighter
Against that may be placed The Donald -- and he is a man not to be underestimated, as all his GOP primary opponents and Hillary Clinton have found out to their great chagrin.
His first tactical weapon of choice is the tweet. Every time Comey says something that Trump disagrees with -- and that will be frequently -- he will be straight out of the trap on social media, denouncing it as “fake news”, flatly denying the FBI boss’s version of events (“his word against mine”) and throwing all manner of chaff around to confuse anyone still inclined to follow the labyrinthine twists and turns of the story.
That very complexity may also serve Trump well if the story becomes much more about process than politics and begins to look like an “Inside the Beltway” obsession, of little interest to the people in “Middle America” who want Trump to get on with the job he was elected to do and for congressman and bureaucrats to just get out of the way.
In other words, Trump, by going off every weekend to some vast rally of supporters, will remind his persecutors and prosecutors that he has that most valuable of assets -- the faith and confidence of at least 45% of the American people.
Second, he can use the prerogatives of the presidency to distract and trivialise the allegations he faces. One dramatic move, might well be a visit to North Korea. The appearance of Donald Trump with Melania, Ivanka and the rest lined up alongside Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang would certainly stop the traffic.
The biggest ever display of synchronised dancing in front of the globe’s two largest most volatile egos would be the greatest show on earth. It would make Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 look like a photo-op at a mid-west school. I suspect neither Kim nor Trump, each facing troubles of very different kinds at home and hungering for attention, could resist the temptation. It would certainly make Mueller look very small indeed and instantly transform Trump into a foreign policy daredevil of Nixonian proportions (will the comparisons never stop?).
Third, Trump can simply deploy the established Trump defence: “Sure, it’s true. So what?” In other words, he can quite easily say that asking the FBI Director to go easy on the Russian thing was a routine bit of business that all Americans will recognise from their daily lives.
To get all prissy about it is to be naïve about what really happens in the corridors of power, and every president has these sorts of conversations with the people who run their agencies every day, he will suggest. Indeed, in the good old days of FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, it was the FBI guy who abused his position to subtly blackmail presidents whenever they tried to curb his power or get him to retire.
Politics, like business, can be a rough old game; surely, Mr Trump will ask, folk get that? Nope, nothing to see here. Move along.
Last November America elected a man who set out to be an unconventional leader, a man they voted for to get things done and “make America great again”. Like others before him – such as liberal hero Franklin Roosevelt’s struggles with the Supreme Court in the 1930s, which he ended up “packing” and undermining, –Trump has to cut though some of the niceties to get on with the job of saving the United States from industrial decline at home and threats abroad.
Who cares what he said to Comey, because Comey didn’t have to take any notice anyhow. OK, he sacked him – but indisputably he has every right to do so.
Timing is also on Trump’s side. To see him impeached, a motion would have to gain approval from a majority in the House of Representatives, plus a two-thirds majority in the Senate. It is a deliberately difficult process to remove America’s head of state and there are plenty of ways to frustrate and delay it for many years.
This is the aim of Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East.
Meantime, the Congressional mid-term elections are due to take place in November 2018. Politicians will be looking carefully at how public opinion is treating “Trumpgate” or whatever they’ll call it. Chances are the voters won’t care much if President Trump has brought the jobs back home, kept the stock markets happy and their savings safe, crushed Isis, and built his promised wall on the Mexican border.
One must never forget that Bill Clinton, loathed as he was by the conservative political establishment and in the end duly impeached after the relentless pursuit of the truth by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, still was acquitted because he enjoyed the support of his party in Congress and the country at large. What’s more, Clinton would have easily won a third term in 2000 had the Constitution permitted it, just as Reagan would have in 1988 even after the scandalous Iran-contra affair.
Like Lincoln (who put it best: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute”, Clinton (and Trump) understood that with the public behind you in a free democracy there is a lot you can get away with. Yet Trump cannot automatically assume he will always have that backing.
On the other hand, if the economy is starting to show signs of wear, and, in reality, America is no more secure against its foes and the terrorists than it is today -- both perfectly plausible outcomes -- then Trump will be in much more trouble. A relatively narrow issue about a past campaign will turn into a broader one on his presidency and the “betrayed” hopes of all those who turned to him last year. As George W. Bush demonstrated, it can sometimes take a single event like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina to make, or break, a presidency.