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Andy Craig: Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Andy Craig. Over the past week or so, there’s been a lot of chatter about removing our floridly insane president from office. Between the Iran war and his threats and his ever crazier rants, it’s getting more discussion than it has at any point so far in the second term.
To discuss that, we’re joined by William Kristol, a man who needs no introduction but who is best known, no doubt, as the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. These days, he’s the editor at large at The Bulwark.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Craig: So, it’s been a bit of a wild week, even by Donald Trump standards. One thing I wanted to talk with you about—you wrote about it on Monday and a lot of us have been talking about it more this past week—is: How are we going to get this guy out of office? Because we cannot realistically stand to wait and just ignore that question until January 2029. Aside from all the crimes and bad things he’s doing, he’s just manifestly insane. What are your thoughts on broaching that conversation and really putting it front and center going forward?
Bill Kristol: Good to be with you, Andy, and good to be with The UnPopulist team.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, people have underestimated how dangerous the [full] four years [would be]. That includes, obviously, the public in general, but it also includes a lot of our friends and allies who assumed, “Well, the worst part is the early part. He’s going to start with a bang—DOGE, mass deportations—but he’ll retreat from a lot of this, and we’ll get back to something vaguely resembling normalcy.” I think a lot of people have had that implicit assumption, even if they wouldn’t quite put it that way. Or maybe I’m overstating it a little bit—not quite “normalcy,” but a manageable situation. If Democrats win the House, or both houses of Congress, they can check him some. I just thought that four years of this is terrifying and genuinely dangerous.
So I waited to see, as we all did. And I think 15 months in, we can say that while he adjusts a little bit to political and economic reality on tariffs or to some degree on mass deportation, he’s also gotten more unhinged—certainly in foreign policy, in his willingness to take risks and be reckless, in his rhetoric about genocide of an entire civilization, and in his actual policies. He’ll probably stay at the current level of recklessness, at minimum. Generally, authoritarian movements get more radicalized, not less, as they move forward. And someone like Trump gets more unhinged, not less, as it all goes to his head—either as he feels success and the rush of excitement that comes from that conquest (like in Venezuela, blowing up fishing boats) or as he feels cornered and that he’s not succeeding and has to be more desperate in what he does.
Either way, I think there’s a reasonably good chance things get worse, not better. And it’s foolish to sit around and accept the notion that we’re stuck with him for four years. That’s the American system, that’s the downside of not having a parliamentary system, and we may end up having to manage around that.
It’s worth giving a lot of thought, as you have, to what Congress can do, what others in the executive branch can quietly do to slow things down, what the courts can do, what citizens can do. All that is very important. But for me it was the genocidal comments about the Iranian civilization, and the general conduct of the war, that really made me think we should open up a conversation—which you’ve actually been opening up a little before me.
It’s silly that we’re all looking at workarounds because we were told, not unreasonably, that another impeachment would be impossible in the current situation with Republicans controlling Congress; [that another impeachment would be] unwise to talk about, because the first two didn’t work out so well, and Democrats want to run on other issues, and no one wants to just put Democrats in power so they can start impeaching again, allegedly. So people have been shying away from talking about it.
But it’s kind of crazy not to put it front and center and to say: “We’re not fated to this. We do have a whole provision of the Constitution set up for this, basically.” It won’t, unfortunately, put someone we like in office. It’ll put JD Vance in office. It’s not as if we’re cleverly replacing Trump with an anti-Trump Republican. It’s just to get a guy who’s increasingly unhinged and dangerous out of office. So I think it’s very much worth pushing for impeachment.
Craig: Yeah, and on that note, I was writing about it last year, and I also talked to some members of Congress—backbenchers, essentially—wanting to file impeachment resolutions, and I discussed with them the procedural rules and how to draft them. But it was very striking—this was about a year ago now, last spring—Al Green did an attempt, Shri Thanedar did an attempt. There’ve been a few others who’ve talked about it here and there. But the House Democratic leadership came down pretty hard against that. There was very much this conventional wisdom that we don’t want to talk about it, for all those reasons you were going through.
“He was impeached on Ukraine, but actually the internal guardrails were strong enough that he was stopped from doing what he wanted to do with Ukraine. He had to use Giuliani, who was outside the government. John Bolton and [other] people objected. Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, all these people we’ve come to know since—everyone forgets they were actually in the White House. There’s no one like that in the White House now. There’s no Bolton, no Pence, no Vindman, no Fiona Hill. They’re all going along, and Trump is much crazier. So the combination is very, very dangerous.” — Bill Kristol
This idea that the past two impeachments had backfired in particular, I think, is part of it. But there’s just not really any good evidence of that. Both times—particularly the second one, but it’s true the first one as well—majorities wanted him convicted. Impeaching was never unpopular. It didn’t get to two-thirds, obviously, in the Senate. But I don’t think there are a lot of voters out there who are parsing their disapproval of Trump but think impeachment would be going too far. I think that’s a very inside-the-bubble D.C. way of overthinking it.
Kristol: I think that’s right. And also, even if the first one backfired—I don’t know, there’s no evidence of that—Trump lost the 2020 election after he’d been impeached at the very end of 2019, beginning of 2020. He was set back by the impeachment. Unfortunately, there was a failure to convict in 2021, but it took him a while to reestablish his control of the party. It’s a tragedy for the country that he succeeded in doing so, but it wasn’t really the fault of impeaching him. So I agree with that. But even if those had backfired, it doesn’t prove the next one would.
Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying that every Democrat running in 2026 has to spend all their time talking about impeachment. I don’t think that. And if some of them are in districts where they think they don’t need to focus on that, but just out of more common-sense, modest—“We’re going to check Trump, we’re going to stop the mass deportations, we’re going to stop the stupid and unauthorized wars, we’re going to stop all kinds of other things. We’re not going to confirm his judges or some of his Cabinet officials (so we don’t have the Hegseth, Bondi, Noem type insanity anymore)”—[type considerations], that’s fine.
We’re in the business at The Bulwark, and you’re in the business at The UnPopulist, of saying what we think. Some politicians can’t quite say what they fully think, and that’s okay with me. We’ll have to have a real debate in January if Democrats have the House, which I expect they will, about whether to move ahead or not. But for now, it’s more of a rhetorical thing, I suppose. And therefore, as I say, I’m not insisting that everyone politically emphasize it as much as I would right now. But I think it’s important to lay the groundwork for why it really is the right thing to do.
Craig: Yeah. There has been a bit of the dam breaking. I think the Iran genocidal threat was definitely a big part of it. [He just] posted a snuff video of that woman getting murdered. His rants every day are unhinged. To what degree should we think about this as—yeah, he’s malign, he wants to do bad things, he commits crimes, and that’s not entirely new, but it does seem like his mental and physical health are in decline in a way that’s maybe accelerating. He’s becoming even more unhinged in a detached-from-reality sort of way. Is that to some degree maybe an easier case to make, or is it just true on the merits that he’s getting crazier?
Kristol: I think it’s true on the merits. I’m curious about your thoughts on this because you’ve been laboring in these vineyards maybe a little longer than I have, or more actively, on the impeachment side of things. I think if he were malign but stable, people would say, “Well, people voted for him and he’s doing what he said he would do, and majorities in Congress are going along with it, so you don’t like it but you can’t really impeach someone for that.” And if he were simply wacky and rhetorically crazy but it wasn’t resulting in real policies, one might also say, “It’s unfortunate that we elected someone who’s a little unstable, but the system is kind of constraining him.” But I do think it’s the combination that’s really, really dangerous, right? The malignity plus the unhinged character of not just his personality, not just what he says, but his actual behavior in office.
We’re now watching him in real time becoming obsessed both about both silly things and the grandiosity, the megalomania you see—the Kennedy Center, the Arc de Triomphe, all that. It’s not as important as going to war, one could say, but it matters.
And again, none of this excuses Congress for not stopping him from doing certain things, but they didn’t, and he’s done them, and they should stop him in the future. But they should also remove him from office. I do think the unhinged and chaotic character of it might be a little easier to bring home, at least to some people, or at least worth stressing in addition to the malignity. What do you think?
Craig: I think that’s right. He’s not just bad, he’s crazy. And I think this is one of those things that’s part of the surreal moment of this whole era. To a degree, people can say he’s always been nuts. But I do think it’s undeniable that he has been getting worse in a way that’s accelerating.
It’s also obvious that they’re not being honest about his health. The deal with him disappearing for a few days every month and coming back with his hand bruised—he’s obviously getting some kind of IV medical treatment, and we have no idea what that might be. It could be something relatively mundane, but there are other possibilities. You’ve been in the White House before—usually the president’s health is something there’s a lot of transparency about (previous president excepted). There’s a lot of being at pains to say the president had his physical, and this is what they found, and these are what meds he’s on, and all that. And now we’re going on a decade with presidents either in or pushing their 80s, and all of a sudden that kind of information is not out there. I think it hits a certain narrative. It offers a permission structure for people to say, “You know, I voted for him three times, but now he’s in his 80s and he’s got health issues.” So maybe that is a bit of a door opening.
Kristol: Yeah, and I think [it’s] also [worth] reminding people that he [would] be succeeded by JD Vance. It’s not something I [would] particularly relish doing, but it’s a true statement. We’re not talking about a coup. We’re not keeping a party in power in the way Trump tried to stay in power when the other party had won the presidency. We’re not proposing he be replaced by whoever the Democratic nominee might be in 2027 or 2028. We’re actually acting against our electoral interests in the sense that an incumbent President JD Vance could well be a stronger candidate in 2028 than a VP who’s been loyal but also has been somewhat deferential.
That’s always a tough thing to pull off, succeeding a president. So it’s not even in the Democrats’ short-term interest really to move ahead on removing Trump, you might say. Let it just get worse and worse under him and let it drag Vance further and further down. But it is really too risky for the country.
“The executive is just powerful. It’s gotten much more powerful than it should have in the last 30, 40 years. And [Donald Trump has] expanded its powers hugely and without much opposition. Congress needs to rein that back in and start imposing some checks and guardrails if possible. But having someone that reckless with the power the American president has—even if it were somewhat more constrained than it is today, God knows how with such a compliant Congress—that’s too risky. You can’t assume that all these other guardrails you can put in place will work with this guy as president. In that respect, I think the impeachment is actually the easier argument to make.” — Bill Kristol
And I read something this morning—maybe it was a little bit of wishful thinking—interpreting Melania’s bizarre appearance [in which she threw] Trump under the bus. It’s all about how she’s not guilty of anything with respect to Epstein, she’s being unfairly maligned, she didn’t ride on the plane, she didn’t know him well at all. She never defends her husband. It’s really striking. She’s literally speaking in the White House, in the Cross Hall, which is where presidents often speak and where they often deliver quite important addresses. It’s where Trump spoke a week ago on Iran. She has the seal of the president of the United States up on the lectern. And she’s just defending herself. She didn’t just put out a statement, she didn’t give an interview to a friendly reporter. She gives this formal address and goes out of her way to defend herself, and never defends Trump, her husband. She mentions him two or three times really in passing, as in we went to parties that everyone went to in Palm Beach, and that’s how she met Donald. It wasn’t through Epstein. But she never says, “By the way, he’s also being slandered here, he’s innocent, he didn’t do anything wrong.” Literally not a word. It really does invite people to think, “Well, I guess she’s defending herself. She doesn’t feel confident or comfortable defending her husband.” Maybe she knows too much to do that.
Craig: It was really bizarre. And it could be that she was trying to get in front of something—that’s the reasonable implication. It could also be ... these people just do stuff that doesn’t make sense all the time. She’s been threatening lawsuits and that kind of thing. But it was definitely notable that she did that kind of weirdly formal, almost presidential address-style thing, and then flat zero defending him directly.
One thing that’s come up and been a little bit frustrating this past week is that there’s been a lot of members of Congress calling for removal, but a lot of them are talking about the 25th Amendment. That makes sense—if you’re going to focus on the “he’s crazy” angle, then in theory that’s what the 25th Amendment is for. But it’s also a little frustrating. We saw this after Jan. 6, too, when the House passed a resolution asking Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment before they moved to impeachment. Congress has its own responsibility and its own power with impeachment. And for those who don’t have their pocket Constitution memorized: the 25th Amendment is harder—it takes the vice president, a majority of the Cabinet, and then two-thirds in both houses to keep the president out. As opposed to impeachment, which is a simple majority of the House and two-thirds in the Senate.
Am I being a little too pedantic about this? Are they getting at the gist of the right idea? Or does it feel like a bit of a dodge, because calling for the 25th Amendment doesn’t put the onus on them to actually do something, to initiate it in the House?
Kristol: I agree that in that respect it is a dodge, and that’s why they like to call on other people to do it rather than necessarily stepping up to the plate themselves. Having said that, it’s also kind of useful for them to do it, in a way, because it does put removal on the table and it lets us say, “Well, wait a second, don’t you have the constitutional power to do it yourself?” The 25th Amendment was really put into the Constitution because of presumably presidential illness or debility. I think it came up after there were a couple of days when Reagan had operations and was sort of out of it, and there was this awkward question of who was in charge exactly. And I think it tried to routinize that, and then also address the question of what if the president is just not up to it anymore, which the Cabinet and vice president would see much more closely and clearly than members of Congress. You could imagine something like President Woodrow Wilson’s situation being hidden away. So I’m not against invoking it, but it’s less appropriate here.
Impeachment is broad. I mean, it’s been a little misunderstood. “High crimes and misdemeanors” sounds kind of legalistic, but as I understand it—and you may have looked at this much more recently and closely than I have—the original understanding was that “high crimes” just meant crimes in the broad sense against the state. That’s what made them “high,” as opposed to pickpocketing or something. And “misdemeanors” is even broader—in the legal system, misdemeanors are less important than felonies, but using that term in this context conveys all kinds of actions against the public interest.
Now, the Founders didn’t want it to be used cavalierly. It hasn’t been in the U.S. system. Quite the contrary, it’s been rarely invoked. So it’s perfectly appropriate to use it here. And the Federalist Papers have quite a long defense of why the House would do the impeaching and the Senate would do the convicting. Two-thirds of the Senate, to make it not just an easy thing to do. I think it’s absolutely the right thing. We should call for it now and push for it now. Maybe four House Republicans will join the Democrats to call for it. There’s a crew of House Republicans who love getting on TV to be somewhat critical of the president but are very unwilling to pull the trigger on the War Powers Act, on impeachment, or on most other things. I guess the Epstein vote was one of the rare exceptions. But the rubber will really hit the road, I think, in January, when Democrats win the House. I can see that they won’t want to begin with impeachment—they have their own agenda—and there are ways to do it where it doesn’t take up the entire legislative calendar. Other legislation can move simultaneously and probably should. But I just think it will be irresponsible not to move on it early in 2027, don’t you think?
Craig: Absolutely. “Misdemeanor” actually really illustrates it here, because that was not necessarily the petty crime sense of it. It’s a more literal sense of misbehavior. He’s not acting appropriately in a public trust, even if it’s not in a strict sense a legal violation you can point to. I think all you have to do is put up his Truth Social feed on the projector and the case kind of makes itself.
The thing is that, when we get there next year, I don’t think there’s much of a realistic possibility that they won’t impeach him. I don’t think they will be able to resist the pressure, the demand, the base. The situation is going to keep getting worse. His approval ratings are going to continue to tank. They’re already generally well below where they were during the first term. And so, if he’s got an approval rating of 30% or something like that, and the outrages just keep continuing, the almost more interesting question is: Impeach him for what? Because there’s such a litany.
When I helped with the draft, we had seven articles in it, and that was like three months into when he was back in office. A lot’s happened since then. So what do you think? If Hakeem Jeffries is getting dragged into this against his will, and you’ve got to pick something—and, of course, who knows what crazy new thing could happen between now and then—but from what’s on the table now, should they throw the kitchen sink at him? Should they try to pick some really specific thing they can hammer home?
Kristol: Well, one thing to say is that this would be 10 months from now, so things will happen and this has to be adjusted to see what the actual truth of the situation is then. Also, what has been highlighted in the election campaign, we’re all assuming the Democrats will have won the House, and I’m assuming that if they go ahead with this, they will have won it in a pretty big victory. So a lot of the impeachment would be shaped by what they ran on, so to speak. I mean, it’d be a little weird if no Democrat running for the House against Trump ever mentioned issue X and suddenly issue X is front and center in an impeachment. There’s a bit of an electoral reality that kicks in, what is it that people have been voting on?
“One thing to think about—and I haven’t quite figured out what to make of this—is that the corruption is so insane and on such a scale that we’ve never seen before ... that [it] does seem like a classic thing people get impeached for, even just at the state level (judges and so forth). The bribery over pardons, but also the incredible corruption of the executive branch ... that can’t be the whole thing, but it should certainly be part of it.” — Bill Kristol
You’re also not running against the will of the voters then. You’re carrying out their most recently expressed will. Not that that’s everything, there may be issues voters aren’t quite as alert to but that are very important. And the opposite: there are issues they are alert to, like gas prices, that he shouldn’t be impeached about. So I don’t think that should be dispositive, but I think it’ll color the way people think about it.
I really am not sure. I wasn’t sure back in 2019 and 2021 how to frame the impeachment resolutions, and I’m not sure now. I think this is one reason this should be broadly discussed, and we should talk more about it, actually. What would different things look like, and what precedents are there for more general rather than more particular articles? I think people can get a little legalistic in this, and think we have to have this and that particular charge. That was the case with Nixon and Clinton. There were particular things that people thought crossed the line and were therefore listed. The Nixon one also has broader statements about abuse of power. But I can make the case that a broad statement of abuses of power, of violations of the rule of law, of the politicization of everything in the executive branch in inappropriate ways would make more sense—with some supporting evidence as subtitles, perhaps—than going excessively narrow.
One thing to think about—and I haven’t quite figured out what to make of this—is that the corruption is so insane and on such a scale that we’ve never seen before ... that [it] does seem like a classic thing people get impeached for, even just at the state level (judges and so forth). The bribery over pardons, but also the incredible corruption of the executive branch ... that can’t be the whole thing, but it should certainly be part of it. That’s something we should think about. And again, they’re not going to think a whole lot about it on the Hill—maybe a couple of staffers and some senators. Some people like Jamie Raskin will be thinking about it, and we can talk to them. But it probably is worth doing some thinking on their behalf beforehand about what would be the best way to do it. And by best I mean not just politically, but in a serious constitutional way, really laying out for the history books why this exceptional remedy had to be pursued at this time.
Craig: And we just ran a piece by Matt Johnson making the case that even if we don’t get to two-thirds in the Senate, it’s exactly that point—it’s making the statement for history that all this stuff did not pass unremarked and unopposed and quietly accepted. The corruption is part of it. There’s lots of bona fide crimes. We’ve talked about the War Powers violations, the ICE stuff, which I think would probably be in the mix. All sorts of things—the boat strikes in the Caribbean.
But it matters. One thing I think of—there was a point in Son of the Century, about Mussolini’s rise to power, which is really good—and this is a real thing that happened. They show the scene where he shows up in Parliament and challenges them to impeach him. This was after there’d been a political murder that he was implicated in. He was in office, but it wasn’t quite yet a total dictatorship. And he showed up and challenged them to impeach him, and they didn’t. And that was kind of the tipping point, when it became a fully entrenched authoritarian dictatorship. That kind of thing matters for history’s sake.
The impeachment process also unlocks investigative tools, legally, that the courts have allowed broader scope on than in other cases. But also—realistically, what else do you do for these two years that you have Democrats controlling the House, with pretty good chances of taking the Senate too? Even if you take as your working assumption that we’re not going to get to 67 votes—which I don’t think we should completely write off—impeachment is like having hearings on steroids. It’s a way to make a big public show centered on his wrongdoing and his abuse and say: “We are doing the thing we can do about it.” Whereas, what else are you going to do? You can’t override a veto—that’s harder than impeachment, it takes two-thirds of both houses. You’ll have some back-and-forth over funding bills and probably shutdown standoffs, but you’re not going to pass big substantive legislation to rein him in as long as he’s there, because he’ll just veto it.
Kristol: Also the executive is just powerful. It’s gotten much more powerful than it should have in the last 30, 40 years. And he’s expanded its powers hugely and without much opposition. Congress needs to rein that back in and start imposing some checks and guardrails if possible. But having someone that reckless with the power the American president has—even if it were somewhat more constrained than it is today, God knows how with such a compliant Congress—that’s too risky. You can’t assume that all these other guardrails you can put in place will work with this guy as president. In that respect, I think the impeachment is actually the easier argument to make. The other stuff’s more in the realm of policy questions. It kind of gets back to our earlier conversation—just the craziness and the recklessness is pretty good ground for it. I’ll have to look up that Mussolini thing. Should I watch Son of the Century?
Craig: Yes, it’s Italian language, but it’s subtitled. It’s good.
Kristol: I wasn’t aware that he actually dared the Parliament to do it. That’s very interesting.
Craig: And of course, they were all threatened and knew they would have been dragged out. It wasn’t a free vote in that sense by that point. But he did make a show of it, and that was kind of his claim to legitimacy, that they refused to impeach him.
Kristol: Yeah, I think this is a problem. You and I can go and talk about executive abuses of power and executive authority, and there is another branch, the Congress, that could stop a lot of this. They could defund things. They could limit things. They can make Trump much more visibly ignore the law instead of ignoring some previous statutes that he’s now redefining, while Congress does nothing to uphold them. The courts are doing a little, but if Congress doesn’t act, it makes it much harder to explain to people that what he’s doing really is outrageous. Because, hey, if it’s so outrageous, there’s this other branch that could be stopping a lot of it. Right now it’s a Republican Congress. Even that begs the question of why they’re all such utter party loyalists and Trump slaves that they just go along with everything—and the answer, unfortunately, is yes. I’m just saying, it’d be crazy if Democrats won one or both branches and then let him go on doing this. I mean, what are you there for?
Craig: Then you can put pressure on the Republicans. They should be denounced for it. We shouldn’t just take it for granted that they’ll never do it. It might be that they’ll never do it, but that should be something—they have agency, they are in a position of responsibility, too. If you’re going to go out there and condemn them for enabling all this insanity, you really have to put them on the spot. You can’t condemn them for something you’re not willing to advocate and vote for yourself.
“[If we remove Trump, he would] be succeeded by JD Vance. It’s not something I [would] particularly relish doing, but it’s a true statement. We’re not talking about a coup. We’re not keeping a party in power in the way Trump tried to stay in power when the other party had won the presidency. We’re not proposing he be replaced by whoever the Democratic nominee might be in 2027 or 2028. We’re actually acting against our electoral interests in the sense that an incumbent President JD Vance could well be a stronger candidate in 2028 than a VP who’s been loyal but also has been somewhat deferential.” — Bill Kristol
One thing I’ve heard, as a bit of pushback from folks more on the left is—we touched on this [earlier]—how it would be Vance who succeeds. There are people who say Vance is worse. He’s deep in the weeds, an ideologue on all this postliberal right-wing nationalist ideology in a way that Trump only has a kind of inchoate mood-ring affiliation with. In a sense, Vance is smarter than Trump, he knows this stuff in a way Trump doesn’t. But I think that hits exactly the right point. I would take Vance over Trump. And it’s because, as much as I disagree with him on pretty much everything, Vance is not day-to-day erratic. He’s not chaotic in the way that Trump’s insanity is.
Kristol: Yeah, look, he’s very bad in my opinion, but in a couple of ways. And this is why it’s so obvious that the recklessness is really important, both the recklessness and the megalomania. Vance might have decided—I don’t think he would have, in fact—to bomb Iran, but he wouldn’t have done it in the way Trump did, as recklessly. It’s revealing that Vance’s guy at the Pentagon is [Secretary of the Army] Driscoll. I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with him and he’s probably not a trustworthy character either, but he’s not Hegseth. The recklessness that Trump encourages in subordinates, and in the party in Congress to some degree, and therefore permeates out to the public, is so dangerous. Dangerous at home with ICE in particular, but really abroad. Here we are talking about life and death, nuclear weapons, war and peace. It was striking when Vance was defending Trump, I guess after Trump’s genocidal comments—Vance was abroad, in Hungary actually, helping another authoritarian who hopefully is going to lose this Sunday.
Craig: He was in Hungary of all places. Speaking of wildly improper things to do.
Kristol: Having said that, if you actually watched Vance defend it, he didn’t quite want to go where Trump went. He didn’t repeat what Trump said about wiping out a civilization. He said it was an effective bargaining technique. I’m not sure the whole system would survive Vance either, don’t get me wrong, but the risks with Trump, the risks of the megalomania and the craziness, are just too great to tolerate.
Craig: It’s the narcissistic personality disorder. Vance would not be having his name chiseled on the Kennedy Center. And for all his issues, it does seem clear Vance was on the more reluctant side of not wanting to do the Iran war, or at least not do it in the way they went about it.
One thing about going forward is that I do think there are a lot of Democrats who are going to have to get over that conventional wisdom narrative that [impeachment] will backfire, or that if it fails—if he’s not convicted—it was a waste of time and we look bad and weak. A lot of that is overlearning the lesson of Clinton, because that was an impeachment that did backfire. Clinton’s behavior certainly didn’t age well in retrospect, but that was a case where it was at the time unpopular and Republicans had a bit of a backlash over it.
But that seems like a totally different universe than where we are now. Trump does not have 60%-plus approval ratings the way Clinton did. And whatever you think of these things, these are not small charges in the way that was able to be shrugged off. That he was just covering up an affair, and that’s seedy, and he did commit perjury, but these are core offenses. He’s destroying the constitutional system. He is endangering national security and all the rest of it. It’s hard to shrug that off as no big deal.
Kristol: No, I very much agree with that. And I actually haven’t heard the Clinton comparison that much, maybe for that reason. At the end of the day, there are things a president could do personally that don’t really endanger the system but are so reprehensible that he should be impeached. With Clinton, it wasn’t just the sexual conduct—it was the lying and the perjury—but whatever, without relitigating that, maybe it was unwise or a closer call. It’s nothing like what Trump has done.
With Trump, it’s more like the first term Trump situation, but much, much worse. He was impeached on Ukraine, but actually the internal guardrails were strong enough that he was stopped from doing what he wanted to do with Ukraine. He had to use Giuliani, who was outside the government. John Bolton and [other] people objected. Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, all these people we’ve come to know since—everyone forgets they were actually in the White House. There’s no one like that in the White House now. There’s no Bolton, no Pence, no Vindman, no Fiona Hill. They’re all going along, and Trump is much crazier. So the combination is very, very dangerous.
That’s again where Congress has to step up, because you can’t assume Jim Mattis and John Kelly and John Bolton and Mark Esper are going to at least slow it down enough. Now it’s as risky as Trump wants to be, and Trump wants to be riskier and more unhinged than he was five or six years ago.
I totally agree: The substantive case needs to be made. But I think people are seeing it. The public is clearly seeing it. That’s why his numbers are changing. But it’s worth making the case robustly over the next several months, so that Democrats don’t come in and suddenly seem like they’re springing a surprise on people. As I say, that doesn’t mean every Democratic candidate has to talk about it that much, but those of us who believe this need to make this case pretty robustly over the next six, eight, 10 months.
Craig: Having it out there in the discourse is going to be part of what moves them, because they are people who operate in their social media feed like everybody else. They see what people are talking about, and it makes a difference if they see people talking about this. The other thing that would probably be useful—I don’t run a polling firm, but there have been a few polls on this, very sporadic, over the past year. The question of, “Do you support impeachment?” was already over 50% last year. I think being able to show them how closely that tracks with disapproval could matter.
“Generally, authoritarian movements get more radicalized, not less, as they move forward. And someone like Trump gets more unhinged, not less, as it all goes to his head—either as he feels success and the rush of excitement that comes from that conquest (like in Venezuela, blowing up fishing boats) or as he feels cornered and that he’s not succeeding and has to be more desperate in what he does. Either way, I think there’s a reasonably good chance things get worse, not better. And it’s foolish to sit around and accept the notion that we’re stuck with him for four years.” — Bill Kristol
Now, on the constitutional merits, it’s not the case that Congress should impeach the president any time he’s underwater on approval ratings. That’s where Congress is supposed to be the representative government and a check on popular passions. But it does kind of disprove this notion that there would be some backlash against us. Being able to show them: “No, this is actually what the voters want” [matters].
The swings we’re seeing in the special elections are just insane—we’re talking about 20-point swings in some of these races. It won’t quite be that much in November, but it’s going to be a healthy Democratic landslide almost certainly. And midterms are, as we hear constantly, a referendum on the incumbent president. So when the incumbent party not just loses but kind of gets dramatically wiped out—when they flip the Senate even though it’s a very unfavorable map for them this year, it’s a steep climb in terms of which states they have to win—I do think that’s going to have momentum to it. And so, exactly that: there needs to be the groundwork laid that this is not something coming out of nowhere come January.
Kristol: I think that’s the key, to lay the substantive groundwork as we’ve been trying to do in what we’ve written. Because obviously there were massive landslides in ‘94 and 2010, and no one thought the guy should be impeached the next month—not in 1995 with Clinton, not in 2011 with Obama. They were just policy referenda on healthcare and other issues, and a little bit on the personal behavior of the president in some cases. So I think it’s important. The election needs to be a big Democratic victory, but that’s necessary and not sufficient, and shouldn’t be sufficient really. The job some of us have in the outside world is making the substantive case for why it’s so important that it be done.
Craig: One question to wrap up on is: we’ve talked about all the reasons we should do it anyway, even if they won’t convict him. But is there a path actually, particularly if events take a dramatic turn or if there’s some particular scandal that comes out, or because he’s a lame duck? There were—I forget how many, it was like seven or so—Republican senators who voted to convict him last time. You’ve got to get to the ballpark of 15 or 20, depending on the election results. But it’s actually not that huge a leap from the high watermark of the last impeachment. Is there a conceivable scenario where you flip not just Murkowski but some of the more center-of-the-caucus Senate Republicans?
Kristol: Yeah, I think so. Maybe. It’s one of those things where either the dam will break or it won’t. Either it’ll be the Democrats plus one or two or three Republicans—in the Senate, because the party’s gotten so Trumpy, everyone’s been elected as a Trump loyalist these days—or there’ll be a mass defection in the sense that this can’t be tolerated. So much depends on what happens in the next six, eight months. I don’t think it’s out of the question that people in the administration would even speak up. Cabinet members might resign in protest if Trump’s asking them to do illegal things, generals might resign if he tries to follow through on some of those kinds of threats he made last week with respect to the war in Iran. What if he tries to invade Greenland? There are a lot of things that could make it much more mainstream. And a lot of the stuff therefore becomes: Does the Republican Party liberate itself from its total self-enslavement to Trump and act differently?
So yeah, I don’t think ... I mean, it could be a case where it gets to 64. I kind of think it’s more likely to be either, I don’t know, 53 votes for conviction or else it’s 88. We’re so used to—and right to be used to, and assume it’s the default setting—that the party is utterly and totally in Trump’s control. But it’s utterly and totally in Trump’s control until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, we don’t quite know what that looks like because we haven’t gone through this experiment. So that’s where I do think it could be quite dramatic.
Craig: That was exactly how the Epstein bill went. Once they tipped over into having a majority to pass it, it was everybody, let’s rush it through unanimously. So yeah, that could entirely be it. I think Greenland is actually a good thing to flag as a possibility, because there are still enough Republicans who seem to care about NATO more than maybe some of these other issues.
Kristol: You just can’t literally invade a country with which we have zero issues. I mean, with Iran there were some. There’s a huge stretch to say this war didn’t need to be authorized, but we had been in conflicts with Iran in the past, obviously. With Venezuela, Maduro had been indicted. There were things you could sort of tell yourself, not accurately, but it’s enough. With Greenland, there’s just no cover at all. And I don’t think the military would obey that order—at least large parts of it wouldn’t, and some of the senior officers would resign. If you get that kind of sense that he’s genuinely now beyond all the normal deference to the president as the commander in chief, that would be a situation where it might really happen. But who knows? We’ll know much more as we go forward. But I’m glad you’ve been emphasizing this.
Craig: And the military is another example of when the dam breaks, it goes hard. They won’t be refusing orders quietly, but when it happens, it will be a big break. That’s a whole other discussion about if and when that will happen. But I think there are a lot of things where it’s that dynamic … it’s brittle, and when it goes, it goes.
Well, thank you very much for joining us. It’s good to chat with you, as always, and looking forward to seeing all the good stuff at The Bulwark going forward. And we’ll of course continue to cover all this here at The UnPopulist.
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