5

IMPEACHMENT TALK

On January 25, 1809, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts rose with solemn business for the House of Representatives. President Thomas Jefferson, he declared, had committed “a high misdemeanor… against this nation.”¹ As his startled colleagues listened intently, Quincy made his case. General Benjamin Lincoln had served as Collector of the Port of Boston since the Washington administration. Hobbled by age, General Lincoln had repeatedly asked Jefferson for leave to resign the post. But Jefferson had ignored these requests. He didn’t want the position to become vacant until his ally, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, could be appointed to occupy it. As a result of Jefferson’s deliberate inaction, General Lincoln—a hero of the Revolutionary War—was forced against his will to keep the position and endure brutal criticism from local papers. This misuse of the appointment power, Quincy reasoned, constituted an impeachable offense. The House had a moral and legal duty to investigate Jefferson’s misconduct.

Quincy’s peers knew that the Massachusetts Federalist was no fan of Jefferson’s. Just months earlier, he had written to John Adams that Jefferson was a “dish of skim milk curdling at the head of our nation.”² Elsewhere, Quincy dismissed Jefferson as a “snake in the grass”³ and a “transparent fraud,” supported only by “dupes or ruffians.”⁴ Even still, Quincy’s call for impeachment hearings caused an immediate scandal in the House. Eighteen legislators took turns denouncing him. Representative James Gholson urged that the resolutions not be printed; they “had excited his astonishment more than anything which had occurred during the session.”⁵ Representative William Burwell remarked that he “knew of but one parallel to it, in the history of impeachments, and that would be found in Gulliver’s Travels.”⁶ After a general pummeling, Quincy’s proposal failed. The vote was 171 to 1.⁷

In Congress, though, success and failure are often more complex than they appear. Before the Senate adjourned that same day, Dearborn’s nomination to serve as Collector of the Port of Boston was submitted to the Senate. Thanks to Quincy’s aggressive maneuver, General Lincoln was soon relieved of his unwanted and tiresome duty. Further, as a biographer writes, Quincy’s “political friends in Congress… approved of what he had done, and those in Boston were unanimous in their approbation.” Decades later, after serving as president of Harvard University, Quincy fondly recalled his resolution to impeach Jefferson. “No public exertion of mine,” he said, “has been more fully justified by the reflections of a long life.”⁸

Until now, we’ve largely focused on credible attempts to end presidencies through impeachment. We’ve evaluated the reasoning, judgment calls, and decision makers involved in that process. We’ve also discussed the most important cases: John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. These stories anchor any history of the subject.

But the tale of impeachment is broader and more complex than is often appreciated. The vast majority of impeachment talk in US history hasn’t ended with—or even sought to achieve—a House vote and Senate trial. To fully comprehend this constitutional power, we must therefore look beyond a single endgame. Impeachment has been invoked by many players, for many purposes, since the founding era. Exploring their tactics allows for a more sophisticated grasp of the use and abuse of impeachment talk—both historically and in our own time.

Taking the long view also confirms that we live in a strange new world. The culture of impeachment in the United States has ebbed and flowed over the years. For the most part, however, a study of our nation’s past discloses a near-total absence of calls for impeachment. To be sure, there have always been radicals or outliers who favored expelling whoever happened to be president. But if we focus on mainstream opinion—even taking an expansive view of the term mainstream—the record is clear. Throughout most of US history, impeachment wasn’t on anybody’s agenda. As historian David Kyvig observed, “impeachment remained in the constitutional shadows.” It was “occasionally called for by isolated voices but little remembered by the general public and seldom given serious consideration by public officials, journalists, or scholars.”⁹

That world is over. Compared to the first two hundred years of the nation’s history, impeachment now plays a drastically more important and disruptive role in US politics. Modern Americans live in the post-Clinton age of a permanent impeachment campaign.

We suspect this point will be intuitive. Who among us isn’t frequently bombarded with tweets, Facebook messages, fund-raising e-mails, newspaper editorials, and blog posts demanding (or opposing) impeachment? Although it’s easy to take that background noise for granted, or to dismiss it as ordinary political rhetoric, that’s a mistake. To borrow a phrase in widespread circulation under President Donald Trump, “this is not normal.” In no other period has impeachment played the role it now occupies in the ordinary conduct of US politics. Here we’re referring not only to the Trump administration but also to the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Efforts to end a presidency do not occur in a vacuum. They take place in a society with received norms and expectations about the use of this dangerous power. Understanding that culture is essential to any analysis of whether (and how best) to end a presidency. Without that context in mind, advocates of impeachment may discover that their plans tragically backfire.

George Washington was sworn in as president on April 30, 1789. As everyone knew, he was a living legend—an embodiment of republican virtue. Washington had led American forces to victory in the Revolutionary War. He had presided with dignity over the Constitutional Convention. He had been chosen unanimously by the Electoral College to serve as the nation’s first president. And he was admirably self-conscious about making proper use of his powers: “I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”¹⁰

Washington enjoyed a prolonged grace period. But leading a new nation is no easy task. Inevitably, forces of party and faction appeared on the scene. Criticism of Washington emerged. Then, in 1795, word leaked that Chief Justice John Jay—acting on Washington’s orders—had secretly negotiated a treaty with Britain whose terms left most Americans aghast. Although the Jay Treaty passed the Senate by exactly two-thirds, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson whipped up a frenzied opposition. At the height of the political struggle, Jay bitterly remarked that he could travel the nation guided solely by the light of his own burning effigies.

As the tempest grew, calls to impeach Washington echoed in a few corners of the nation. In Virginia’s Petersburg Intelligencer, for instance, an anonymous citizen wrote: “The constitution has given the mild punishment of impeachment for the greatest abuses. The people are not sanguinary—they only demand that those should be removed from the office who abuse power.”¹¹ Even some who saw impeachment as futile still thought it worth the effort. As one commentator remarked in Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser: “There are important purposes to be gained by even a vote of impeachment… It would convince the world that we are free and that we are determined to remain so. It would be a solemn and awful lesson to future Presidents.”¹²

In the 1790s, the idea of impeaching Washington amounted to political heresy and was never taken seriously. These editorials, however, suggest some early popular uncertainty about what exactly impeachment was for. This was a new power at the federal level, meant to limit a new kind of leader in a new form of government. The American people, having just fought a war against King George III of England, were excitable when they sensed tyranny. It wasn’t clear at the very beginning what role impeachment would play in restraining the president. That instability in views of impeachment may explain why John Adams experienced such fear when his handling of the Hermione incident led opposition leaders to call for his ouster (as we saw in Chapter 4).

By the early 1800s, though, many Americans had come to see impeachment as a stillborn power. In 1820, for instance, Jefferson concluded that “impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scarecrow.”¹³ Although he made this remark in reference to judges, it was soon applied to presidents. Fourteen years later, expressing despair about President Andrew Jackson’s many abuses of power, one senator wrote that impeachment had “ceased to be any effective protection to the purity of the Constitution.” He added, “it has become but little better than a tale to amuse, like Utopia, or Swift’s flying island.”¹⁴ In 1848, this understanding was treated as common sense. During the fight to censure James Polk for invading Mexico, a congressional Whig readily observed that “impeachment is almost a dead letter in the Constitution.”¹⁵

The only serious impeachment effort in the antebellum period, which we discussed in Chapter 1, was the failed campaign against John Tyler. In that case, the outgoing House Whig majority was so infuriated by Tyler’s aggressive use of vetoes that its political judgment temporarily short-circuited. Although we have not found evidence either way, we suspect that the Whigs’ crushing defeat in the midterm elections in 1842 only encouraged perceptions that impeachment was virtually impossible.

On the heels of the Civil War, the House impeached a president for the very first time. But the Johnson proceedings hardly invited a more open attitude toward ending presidencies. To the contrary, the failure of this impeachment—and the widespread perception over the following decades that it was unjustified—encouraged skepticism about any use of the impeachment power. Rather than make impeachment seem more plausible, the Johnson acquittal durably tarnished this constitutional check on the presidency.

From 1868 through 1951, politicians and public intellectuals almost never raised the threat of impeachment. When they did so, it was usually to inflict political damage on the president and his party rather than to force actual removal from office. Moreover, those efforts at strategic use of impeachment talk usually fell flat. It wasn’t until Harry Truman’s administration that impeachment suddenly—albeit temporarily—roared back to life in US national politics.

Before jumping to the 1950s, we’ll consider a handful of impeachment efforts in the long gap between Johnson and Truman. These examples offer a useful sense of impeachment’s comparatively minor role in this period. They also show different purposes to which the impeachment power was put during a time when it was practically unavailable.

Let’s begin with the presidential election of 1876. Eight months before Election Day, Democrats sensed opportunity. Republicans had held the White House since Abraham Lincoln replaced James Buchanan in 1861. But now Ulysses S. Grant was about to conclude his second term, and the nation had soured on Republicans and their Reconstruction program. In a foreboding twist, Democrats had scored crushing midterm victories two years earlier, bolstered by a weak economy and corruption in the executive branch. To Democrats’ delight, the air of scandal around Grant had only intensified since then, ensnaring key cabinet members—including the secretary of war, who resigned in disgrace after the House opened impeachment proceedings against him. As biographer Ron Chernow notes, “a perfect torrent of scandal had swept over the administration and Grant seemed powerless to stem the rushing, foaming tide.”¹⁶ By April 1876, the president was widely perceived as a solitary beacon of innocence in the White House.

To build momentum before the election, Democrats wanted to change that perception. At first, they pursued charges that Grant had broken the law by using public funds for his campaign in 1872. This claim broke down, however, when a key witness was revealed as certifiably insane. Undeterred, Democrats stumbled toward charges that Grant had spent too much time away from the capital. Seeking to substantiate this theory, they demanded that Grant account for his whereabouts since March 1869. Commentators treated this step as laden with overtones of impeachment, and political cartoonists mocked Democrats for their flimsy accusations. Grant’s response was suitably dismissive. The Constitution, he pointed out, nowhere empowers the House to make such a demand. Aware of the subtext, he added: “If this information be sought… in aid of the power of impeachment,” then it violated his own right not to be “made a witness against himself.”¹⁷

In fact, it isn’t clear whether the right against self-incrimination applies to the president in an impeachment proceeding. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 2, a president who unjustifiably decides to absent himself for lengthy periods might well be guilty of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Nonetheless, Grant’s terse answer did the trick. Congressional Democrats’ halfhearted effort to precipitate an impeachment ended almost immediately. They ultimately let the question die when Congress reconvened in December 1876. By then, legislators had more pressing business: breaking a tie vote in the Electoral College that had unleashed political bedlam. (This was resolved by the infamous Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for a promise to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction.)

In Grant’s case, Democrats took barely a step in the direction of impeachment and gave up as soon as they hit resistance. They never had any serious intention of impeaching the president; they knew it, and Grant knew it. Their only goal was to make Grant look bad. They failed at that, too. All said and done, this was not an especially effective use of the impeachment power.

Yet the Democrats’ efforts to embarrass Grant were still far more productive than Congressman Milford Howard’s quixotic bid to impeach Grover Cleveland twenty years later. As a dedicated Alabama Populist, Howard vehemently disdained Cleveland, an establishment Democrat serving his second (nonconsecutive) term. Indeed, Howard disdained most American politicians, whom he saw as mere servants of the wealthy: “All the plutocrats have a perfect understanding among themselves… they care not whether the Democratic or Republican party wins, so long as both parties favor the money power.”¹⁸ On June 6, 1896, with only a few months left in Cleveland’s tenure, Howard filed an impeachment resolution. True to his populist roots, Howard charged Cleveland with mishandling federal bonds and funds, failing to enforce antitrust laws, corrupting politics, and deploying troops to crush the infamous Pullman Strike.

Howard’s colleagues had no patience for these political antics. His populist cri de coeur flashed, then fizzled, on the House floor. The Illustrated American remarked that “under many conditions [Howard’s call] would create a sensation in Congress,” but in this case “it seemed grotesque.”¹⁹ As soon as Howard finished reading his resolution, Representative Nelson Dingley Jr.—a Republican—raised a procedural objection. On a full vote, and without discussion, the House refused to consider the resolution on the merits. It was never seen again, and there is no evidence that Howard’s impeachment call had any notable effect.

In late 1919, Republicans took their turn at bat. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had just seen the nation through World War I. Determined to reshape the international order, Wilson personally headed the US delegation to a peace conference in Paris. This gathering redrew the world map, breaking empires and devising countries. Throughout the negotiations, Wilson pushed hard to form a League of Nations. He accurately foresaw that “there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”²⁰ In his view, the League of Nations was that method. It would resolve disputes, nurture cooperation, and avert conflict. While the Paris Peace Conference produced a deeply flawed treaty, it established a version of the League of Nations. Wilson therefore signed the agreement at Versailles on June 28, 1919.

In early July, Wilson returned home to a divided nation. Many Democrats supported him, but Republicans controlled the Senate. Fourteen members of that majority were especially hostile to the treaty and called themselves “Irreconcilables.” As historian George Herring recounts, they “launched a nationwide campaign, sending out thousands of pamphlets denouncing the ‘Evil Thing with a Holy Name’ and making hundreds of speeches, many of them appealing to the racial and nationalist prejudices of Americans.”²¹ The Irreconcilables were led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who once confided that he “never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson.”²²

To press his case with the public, Wilson embarked on a ten thousand–mile PR campaign. Not to be outdone, the Irreconcilables launched their own tour—which soon became a movable feast of impeachment talk. On September 11, 1919, Senator William Borah took the stage in Chicago and denounced Wilson’s plan to “hand American destiny over to the secret councils of Europe.” A furious crowd responded, “Impeach him!” and “Take the power out of his hands!”²³ That scene repeated itself days later in Kansas City. When Senator Hiram Johnson warned that Wilson could not guarantee “secret treaties” with “the blood of American boys,” hundreds cried out, “Impeach Wilson!”²⁴ These rallies weren’t isolated instances. The Congressional Record from 1919 and 1920 reveals a spike in citizen petitions urging the president’s impeachment.

These accounts of the anti-treaty movement reveal a rare display of mass, popular impeachment talk before the 1950s. If newspaper accounts are to be trusted, it was the crowds—not only the senators—who called for Wilson’s removal. According to press reports, they feared America would “give back to George V what it took away from George III.”²⁵

Although impeachment never seriously jeopardized Wilson’s presidency, that didn’t stop him from threatening those who supported it. This was wholly in character for Wilson, who had little respect for civil liberty. Citizens who called for impeachment at Republican rallies were generally safe. Promoting impeachment elsewhere, however, was risky—especially for political outliers. After Wilson returned from Versailles, the New York Times reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into a six-page petition urging Wilson’s impeachment. According to the Times, “these charges are so worded as to give comfort to the Bolsheviki, the pro-Germans, the Sinn Feiners, and to other elements that oppose… the League of Nations.” The FBI had already detained the pamphlet’s publisher and was now seeking its author “to determine whether or not the petition is a part of the enemy propaganda which has since the armistice gained new life in this country.” As part of that effort, “the names of the persons signed to such petitions as reach Washington will be investigated.”²⁶ Looking back, Wilson’s conflation of impeachment with disloyalty was disgraceful. If a modern president tried to persecute citizens for supporting his removal, that position would constitute powerful evidence that he probably should be ousted.

As far as we can tell, the FBI investigation of Wilson’s critics ultimately came to naught. Ultimately, so did the president’s crusade for the League of Nations. In November 1919, after Wilson suffered a crippling stroke, his treaty was put to a vote. Wilson’s dream died that day on the Senate floor. Impeachment, though, had played only a bit part in its demise.

This isn’t to say impeachment never destroyed a political agenda. In December 1932, after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected but before his inauguration, Representative Louis McFadden sought the impeachment of Herbert Hoover. McFadden was a repulsive anti-Semite. He was also a conspiracy theorist and radical foe of the Federal Reserve. Most of his colleagues found him entirely unbearable. In calling for Hoover’s removal, McFadden offered a bizarre grab bag of accusations, ranging from bad personnel decisions and mistreating protesters to increasing unemployment and usurping Congress’s role in treaty negotiation.

As the Washington Post reported, McFadden’s baseless resolution was “promptly and emphatically smothered… by a startled House of Representatives.” With no debate, the chamber voted to table McFadden’s motion by a vote of 361 to 8. House Republican leader Bertrand Snell deemed this “as hard a spanking as a grown man could get.” The eight votes in McFadden’s favor were met with loud hisses.²⁷

McFadden suffered lasting consequences for submitting this baseless impeachment resolution. The Pennsylvania Republican delegation requested his resignation as its chair.²⁸ Senator David Reed, a fellow Pennsylvania Republican, stated that “we intend to act [for] all practical purposes as though McFadden had died.”²⁹ And back home, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked whether McFadden “belongs not in the House of Representatives but in some other institution.”³⁰ McFadden never recovered from this blunder. In the 1934 election, he was defeated by a Democrat—the only time between 1912 and 1950 that his district didn’t vote Republican. He then tried to run for president on an avowedly anti-Jewish platform, but that effort went nowhere. In 1936, exiled from national politics, McFadden died at the age of 60.

The stories recounted in this section are fairly representative of the limited role that impeachment played from 1868 to 1951. If anything, they overstate it, since we sought out those unusual cases where the word impeachment was mentioned in national political disputes. This period thus marked the long slumber of the impeachment power in American life and politics.

In 1951, after a century of near-total inactivity, the nation experienced a wave of impeachment fever exponentially more intense than anything since Johnson. A second wave followed one year later, this time accompanied by impeachment resolutions in the House. Each bout of impeachment talk lasted only a couple of months, and neither produced durable public interest in presidential impeachment. In fact, that subject largely disappeared from public discourse from 1952 until 1974. Nonetheless, it’s under Truman—a Democrat—that we can first locate a harbinger of the popular, partisan impeachment dynamic that now shapes our politics.

The first round of impeachment talk occurred in April 1951, after Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command during the Korean War. MacArthur was flamboyant, egotistical, and mercurial. He was also a national hero and occasional genius. The combination of these traits led him to defy the rule that civilians, not generals, control our military and foreign policy. Although hugely unpopular at the time, Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur is now recognized as a vindication of the Constitution. In a fine display of irony, his contemporaries rewarded him not with praise, but with impassioned calls for his removal.

This chain of events began in September 1950. After US troops were deployed to South Korea, they struggled to establish and hold a position. When all seemed lost, MacArthur saved the day by launching an amphibious assault at Inchon, deep behind enemy lines. MacArthur recaptured Seoul and then advanced past the 38th Parallel, which divided Korea as part of the settlement of World War II. Assuring Truman that he would “get the boys home by Christmas,” MacArthur split his forces in late November and pushed to the Yalu River, which borders China.³¹ That’s when things fell apart. MacArthur had severely underestimated the strength and motivation of Chinese forces. On November 25, several hundred thousand Chinese troops attacked the US army, inflicting heavy casualties. MacArthur was forced to undertake a chaotic and embarrassing retreat to South Korea in subzero weather. It wasn’t until General Matthew Ridgway arrived weeks later that US soldiers rallied.

At this fateful juncture, Truman and MacArthur reached a breaking point. The president wanted a limited war to stabilize the 38th Parallel and avoid a broader conflagration. MacArthur had grown obsessed with expanding the battlefield into China. Over time, their positions drifted further apart. Truman had no interest in starting World War III, while MacArthur fantasized about a grand struggle in the Far East that would forever obliterate communism.

Unwilling to limit his martial ambition, MacArthur railed against Truman and his advisors at the State Department. In public interviews, he accused them of appeasement, incompetence, and stupidity. MacArthur kept up his criticism even after Truman ordered all military commanders to use “extreme caution in public statements.”³² Then, in March 1951, MacArthur deliberately sabotaged Truman’s effort to negotiate a cease-fire with China and North Korea. As Truman later concluded, his general had acted “in open defiance of my orders as President and as Commander in Chief.”³³ Yet Truman responded only with a stronger gag order. This was his final effort to restrain MacArthur.

Secure in his own hubris and shielded by a wall of public support, MacArthur refused to stand down. People loved his message of American power and were dazzled by his military demeanor. His famous triumphs in World War II reminded them of total victory. Truman, in contrast, seemed weak and ineffectual. With his approval ratings barely clearing 25 percent, the president held a precarious position.

But at last the general went too far. On April 5, 1951, House Republican leader Joseph Martin took the floor and read a private letter in which MacArthur excoriated Truman’s oversight of the Korean War. MacArthur’s meddling in politics was inexcusable. Further, Truman’s advisors believed that MacArthur’s strategy “would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”³⁴ After consulting with the secretaries of state and defense, and with support from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command. That way, he publicly explained, “there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy.”³⁵

Truman’s announcement went off like a grenade. As historian David McCullough writes, “Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming.”³⁶ Within forty-eight hours, more than two hundred thousand telegrams flooded the White House and Congress—many of them calling for impeachment. “IMPEACH THE IMBECILE” and “IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN FROM KANSAS CITY” were typical. Cars were plastered with signs and stickers reading, “Oust President Truman.” The president was burned in effigy and damned as a traitor. Several state legislatures formally condemned him. Across the nation, flags were flown upside down and at half-mast. Petitions demanding Truman’s removal circulated widely. The Chicago Tribune even ran a front-page editorial entitled “Impeach Truman.” Blasting the president, it concluded: “The American nation has never been in greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves. Impeachment is the only remedy.”³⁷

Meanwhile, the full Republican leadership in Congress met to discuss impeachment. House Minority Leader Joseph Martin made clear that he didn’t plan to stop with Truman: “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.”³⁸ In the Senate, Republican William E. Jenner thundered that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” “Our only choice,” he implored, “is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction.”³⁹

National outrage burned even brighter when MacArthur arrived home the next week. He was met at the airport by a crowd of ten thousand. More than 30 million Americans then watched his spellbinding address to a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951. Millions turned out in New York City for a parade in his honor, and MacArthur was overwhelmed with invitations from every corner of the country. All the while, the general’s adoring fans seethed at Truman and urged impeachment.

Within a few months, however, the uproar faded. From the outset, Democrats controlled Congress and refused to consider the idea of impeachment. As one Democratic senator noted, “there is nothing whatever to do in this instance except to stand with Truman. It is simply a question of whether civil government is to be maintained.”⁴⁰ Calls for impeachment also faced another obstacle: opposition from influential newspapers, which blamed MacArthur for insubordination and grasped his threat to civilian control of the military. That feeling was fortified by seven weeks of Senate hearings, which revealed MacArthur as an extremist and let Pentagon leaders dissect his faulty reasoning. By late May 1951, popular support for MacArthur had plummeted. But there wasn’t a corresponding boost for Truman. His handling of the situation, and his failure to make an effective case to the public, took a heavy toll on the president. Repeated calls for impeachment had reflected and reinforced a perception that Truman was fundamentally inadequate to the task.

One year later, Truman sparked another constitutional crisis. After labor disputes threatened to shut down many of the nation’s steel mills, he decided to seize the mills as federal property. Truman justified his decision as necessary to preserve the war effort and the national economy. Since no statute authorized this massive taking of private property, Truman purported to rely on his inherent authority as president and commander in chief. When pushed to defend his position, Truman reasoned that “the President has the power to keep the country from going to hell.”⁴¹ This was a remarkable and limitless claim, but Truman had been privately reassured by Chief Justice Fred Vinson that the law was on his side.

Truman announced the seizure on April 8, 1952. His position was met with a furious, unrelenting outcry. The president’s asserted power to seize private property in the name of national security reeked of tyranny. Congressional Democrats saw little reason to defend Truman, whose term in office was nearly over. Meanwhile, Republicans came out swinging.

Unlike a year earlier, impeachment was not the principal goal of their criticism. Republicans recognized that Democrats in Congress would shut down any removal proceedings. Still, they laced their public remarks with impeachment talk. Echoing his Republican colleagues, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper opined that Truman’s action “constitutes prima facie grounds for impeachment proceedings.”⁴² In the House, many Republicans argued that Truman “should be impeached today.”⁴³ Impeachment resolutions were introduced on April 22, 23, and 28. In addition, several congressional Republicans formally urged the House to create a bipartisan committee to investigate Truman’s impeachable offenses.

Truman was untroubled. The New York Times reported on the president’s casually dismissive attitude when he was asked about impeachment: “Oh, Mr. Truman replied, that is a political proposition. They have a right to do that if they want to. He said he had a pretty good defense. (Laughter).”⁴⁴

Truman had little to fear in Congress, where his party controlled both houses and buried the impeachment resolutions. But in court, his own lawyers invoked impeachment to disastrous effect. On April 24, US District Judge David Pine held argument on a motion to block the president’s order. There, defending Truman, Assistant Attorney General Holmes Baldridge cast his client’s position in an extremely unnerving light:

THE COURT: So you contend the Executive has unlimited power in time of an emergency?

MR. BALDRIDGE: He has the power to take such action as is necessary to meet the emergency.

THE COURT: If the emergency is great, it is unlimited, is it?

MR. BALDRIDGE: I suppose if you carry it to its logical conclusion, that is true. But I do want to point out that there are two limitations on the Executive power. One is the ballot box and the other is impeachment.⁴⁵

Judge Pine was incredulous. He asked Baldridge, “Is it your concept of Government that the Constitution limits Congress and it limits the Judiciary but does not limit the Executive?” When Baldridge stated “that’s our conception,” Judge Pine bluntly responded, “I have never heard that expressed in any authoritative case before.”⁴⁶

This wasn’t the first time—and it wouldn’t be the last—that impeachment was invoked in court to favor the president. In cases about the pardon power, the interpretation of treaties, and the president’s legal immunity for his official acts, the Supreme Court has relied on the possibility of impeachment to reject the need for other constraints.⁴⁷ Most of the time, however, such arguments are wrong and dangerous. Impeachment is not meant to function as an all-purpose tool for enforcing the Constitution. Accepting that position would create perverse effects. On the one hand, given how hard it is to remove a president, this rule would allow an extraordinary amount of unconstitutional conduct. At the same time, it would warp the role of impeachment, which is meant exclusively for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Accordingly, when the president violates individual rights, there’s an overwhelming presumption in favor of judicial review—not impeachment—as the appropriate response. If the president follows a court order directing him to cease an unlawful act, only in a rare case would impeachment also be justified. It gets things entirely backward to rely on the theoretical availability of impeachment as a reason for courts not to protect personal liberty. That is the core judicial role.

Baldridge’s contrary argument was slammed in the court of public opinion. One of the president’s aides described it as the “legal blunder of the century.”⁴⁸ Truman himself disavowed that position, as did the Department of Justice. But the damage was done. In suggesting that the president had unlimited power—bounded only by elections and impeachment—Truman’s lawyer confirmed the public’s worst fears. Judge Pine blocked the seizure order, and the Supreme Court later affirmed by a vote of six to three. In a famous concurring opinion, Justice Robert Jackson reminded Truman that “the purpose of the Constitution was not only to grant power, but to keep it from getting out of hand.”⁴⁹ Reassured by the Court’s decisive repudiation of Truman’s unlawful order—and by Truman’s prompt compliance with the Court’s decision—Republicans in Congress dropped their calls for impeachment.

At this point, the nation had seen two surges of impeachment talk in a single year. Both of them shared three notable characteristics. First, they ran hot and burned out fast. Neither emerged from—or turned into—an extended opposition campaign to remove the president from office. Indeed, given Democratic control of Congress, the odds of an actual removal always hovered near zero. The impeachment rhetoric instead reflected a high level of frustration with the Truman presidency and the Korean War. Viewed this way, impeachment talk was used primarily as an intensity booster to convey just how strongly some parts of the public disagreed with Truman.

Second, both impeachment fights of the early 1950s broke down along partisan lines. Despite Truman’s deep unpopularity, Democrats in Congress stood by him. Nearly all calls for impeachment came from Republicans, though with some division in the ranks. Impeachment politics were thus continuous with preexisting partisan differences.

Finally, these developments were extraordinary. No president since Johnson had faced such prominent calls for his impeachment. While the Gilded Age and Progressive Era saw plenty of political turmoil, impeachment talk had been confined to socialists, extremists, and partisan outliers. Under Truman, it briefly returned to the heartland of national debates and took on renewed importance. In that respect, it offered a glimpse into the future of American politics.

After the tempests of the early 1950s, presidential impeachment returned to the political hinterlands. There were no substantial calls to impeach Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, or Lyndon B. Johnson. The nation’s experiences under Truman didn’t generalize into a more robust conception of the role that impeachment should play. That held true even amid the pitched social battles of the 1960s.

Rather, impeachment talk in this period focused squarely on the Supreme Court. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It then spent decades expanding and creating rules to safeguard civil rights. Southern backlash led to a flurry of “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards. Richard Nixon capitalized on that anger in his law-and-order presidential campaign, and then set out to impeach Justice William O. Douglas in 1970 (as we saw in Chapter 2). Although that particular effort failed, Nixon later succeeded beyond his wildest dreams—or nightmares—in reinvigorating the impeachment power.

In fact, some scholars have suggested that Watergate and its aftermath inaugurated an “age of impeachment” that continues to the present day.⁵⁰ There’s no denying that the Nixon administration produced a new awareness of impeachment in American thought and politics. It also magnified and entrenched cynicism about our democratic institutions—especially the presidency. After 1974, to speak of impeachment was to speak of Nixon.

But Watergate was exceptionally traumatic. Nothing about the experience left Americans eager to reprise it. For that reason, among others, credible presidential impeachment talk almost completely abated for several decades after Nixon resigned from office in August 1974. This historical perspective cuts against heavy reliance on Watergate as the fountainhead of modern impeachment politics. The story is much more convoluted than that.

During Gerald Ford’s tenure, talk of presidential impeachment emerged only once: after he decided to pardon Nixon. But this discussion was short lived. Although many Americans viewed the pardon as outrageous—and Ford paid a steep political price for it—there was no proof that he had entered into a corrupt bargain with Nixon. Instead, Ford consistently maintained that he had pardoned his predecessor to help the country move on, which would have been impossible during a drawn-out criminal trial. When challenged by skeptical Democrats, Ford effectively preempted impeachment talk by agreeing to testify before the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice. This gave Ford a perfect opportunity to address and defuse accusations that the pardon was part of a quid pro quo arrangement. After his testimony, the issue quickly drifted away. The nation was exhausted. It had no interest in prosecuting yet another president without clear proof of grievous offenses.

Jimmy Carter succeeded Ford in January 1977. There was no serious impeachment talk on his watch. For all his many failings, Carter was neither corrupt nor abusive. To the contrary, Carter’s modest view of the presidency led him to devalue and diminish rather than aggrandize the powers at his disposal. Torn by indecision and unable to lift the national mood, the main threat Carter posed was weakness.

Responding to Carter’s perceived inadequacy, the nation overwhelmingly chose Ronald Reagan in 1980 as a leader who would restore strength to the White House. Too much strength, it turned out. At home and abroad, Reagan took a stunningly expansive view of his executive authority. This led to a minor uptick in impeachment talk during his first term. Then, on November 10, 1983, Representative Ted Weiss introduced a resolution in the House urging that Reagan be impeached for abuse of power.⁵¹

Weiss’s resolution wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Weeks earlier, and without consulting Congress, Reagan had invaded the Caribbean nation of Grenada. He justified the invasion by referring to a leftist coup on the island, which supposedly endangered US students and risked further chaos in the region. More fundamentally, though, Reagan aimed to intimidate Soviet-aligned forces in Latin America. He also hoped to break the post-Vietnam paralysis that made Americans wary of military intervention. While Reagan’s covert invasion of Grenada drew international sanction, most Americans viewed it as a justified and successful operation.

But Ted Weiss was a die-hard Manhattan Democrat and he saw things differently. Reagan had violated the Constitution by deploying troops for combat in a foreign nation without congressional approval. That was the end of the matter. As Mayor Edward Koch later said about Weiss, “Whatever room he entered, a living room or the halls of Congress, he was the conscience of that room. There were times I thought he would impeach God, but the fact is, even then you knew he would be intellectually honest. You knew he thought God should be impeached.”⁵²

Weiss never got around to impeaching God; instead, he had to settle for Reagan. As Weiss explained, “by his actions in Grenada, the President has usurped the warmaking powers of Congress, contrary to the very constitutional framework of our Government.” Weiss knew that his proposal did “not fit the current mood of most Americans.” Nevertheless, he insisted on it because “the Constitution of the United States was not meant to apply only when its provisions enjoy majority support.”⁵³

Weiss didn’t stand alone. His resolution attracted seven cosponsors. But it was still sent to the House Judiciary Committee for a slow, invisible death. Even if Reagan had exceeded his powers—and that’s a murky legal issue—there was no political appetite for an impeachment. Consequently, Weiss and his allies were isolated. Even most Democrats looked away. Reagan thereby established an important precedent supporting executive control over the use of force abroad.

In Reagan’s second term, impeachment talk swirled around the Iran-Contra Affair, which we explored in Chapter 3. Here was a case where impeachment might well have been justified, yet the president’s opponents foreswore it. They did so for many reasons, including the absence of a smoking gun, Reagan’s cooperation with investigators, and their fear of destabilizing the nation. Reagan emerged from Iran-Contra bruised and bloody but not beaten. His relatively gentle treatment suggested that Watergate had left Congress temporarily trigger-shy on impeachments.

Apart from Iran-Contra, Reagan had little reason to worry about serving out his full term in office. Four years later, however, George H. W. Bush couldn’t stop thinking about impeachment. By November 1990, he already had decided on invading Iraq and Kuwait to thwart Saddam Hussein. Although many leaders in Congress favored more time for diplomacy and sanctions, Bush was confident that he possessed the raw constitutional authority to strike without requesting congressional approval (or to proceed even if Congress rejected his plan). But he also knew that he could suffer massive blowback if he invaded the Persian Gulf and his strategy went awry. Bush’s biographer reports that the president wrote about impeachment in his diary five times during this period. That fear wasn’t entirely of his own creation. “If you’re wrong about this,” Hawaii Senator Dan Inouye warned Bush, “you are going to be impeached by the Congress.”⁵⁴

That wasn’t enough to stop him. “If I don’t get the votes,” Bush told Robert Gates, “I’m going to do it anyway. And if I get impeached, so be it.”⁵⁵ Fortunately for Bush, he never had to cross that particular bridge. After days of eloquent debate in Congress, he won a resolution authorizing the deployment of troops. Between that victory and effective presidential diplomacy at the United Nations, the whole world now supported his plan. Bush was relieved. He wrote in his journal, “The big burden, lifted from my shoulders, is this Constitutional burden—the threat of impeachment.”⁵⁶

As if he had read Bush’s mind (or diary), Representative Henry B. Gonzalez filed an impeachment resolution three days later, on January 16, 1991. Gonzalez was a famously combative, independent, and populist legislator. In 1961, he had become the first Mexican American elected from Texas to the House of Representatives. Since then, he had established himself as ferocious defender of the poor and powerless. He was also known as an iconoclast, especially on matters of impeachment. He joined Weiss’s call to impeach Reagan over Grenada, and then pushed to impeach Reagan again for Iran-Contra. Most legislators never draft or support a call for impeachment; when Gonzalez moved to impeach Bush in 1991, he reached a hat trick within a single decade.⁵⁷

The main obstacle for Gonzalez was that Congress had squarely authorized Bush’s use of force. Undeterred, he based his January 16 resolution on three alleged abuses: planning for war; intimidating the UN Security Council to support the war; and committing to war without legislative approval.⁵⁸ Five weeks later, on February 21, 1991, Gonzalez introduced another call for impeachment. It was similar to the first one, but added a new charge: that Bush had violated equal protection “by putting U.S. soldiers in the Middle East who are overwhelmingly poor white, black, and Mexican-American, as well as basing their military service on the coercion of a system that denies viable economic opportunities to these classes of citizens.”⁵⁹

Gonzalez’s resolutions rested on general objections to the Persian Gulf War—and to structures of racial and economic injustice. Although framed as accusations against Bush, they went far past his presidency and his particular use of military force. Gonzalez drew no support for this societal critique. Both of his resolutions were quietly entombed in the Judiciary Committee. Thereafter, Bush didn’t face any noteworthy impeachment chatter.

Before continuing, let’s pause and review the story from 1950 to 1992. In this period, mainstream interest in presidential impeachment spiked four times: Truman (1951 and 1952), Nixon (1974), and Reagan (1986). There were also two minor calls to impeach, both meant to protest military action: Reagan (1983) and Bush (1991).

Compared with US history until 1951, this represented a marked increase in formal impeachment activity. Four presidents faced impeachment resolutions in the House across this forty-one-year period, as compared with five presidents in the preceding one hundred sixty-two years. And apart from those raw numbers, impeachment talk played a comparatively more substantial role in US politics in the late twentieth century. Indeed, if one were to compile a list of high-salience political disputes involving credible calls for impeachment, the lead examples before 1992 would be Jackson, Tyler, Johnson, Truman, Nixon, and Reagan. It’s striking that half these examples come from before 1868 and the other half occurred after 1950.

This isn’t to say that post–World War II America went on an impeachment bender. Demands to impeach the president remained extraordinary and intermittent before 1992. Most presidents to serve in this period never faced a mainstream impeachment threat (Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ford, Carter, and Bush). While three did, two of them deserved it (Nixon for Watergate and Reagan for Iran-Contra). Truman didn’t deserve it—at least not for firing MacArthur—but in that regard the wave of impeachment mania in 1951 was unusual and is best seen as a reflection of Truman’s severe unpopularity.

More fundamentally, impeachment talk did not become an ordinary, recurring aspect of political disagreement across these decades. With only a few exceptions, Americans with strong objections to the president’s conduct or temperament criticized him on those grounds. It was not seen as normal to demand impeachment every time the president made a bad decision. By and large, politicians and public intellectuals appreciated that calls to end a presidency should be reserved for truly extraordinary circumstances. While an undercurrent of impeachment talk persisted in popular discussion of politics, it played a minor role. That was partly because political elites usually avoided strategies built around inflaming their base to demand the president’s forced exit.

In that spirit, the House generally acted responsibly in handling matters of impeachment. This was certainly true of Watergate, where the House Judiciary Committee did a first-rate job. To a lesser extent, it was also true of Iran-Contra. Equally revealing is how Congress handled meritless cases. When Weiss and Gonzalez submitted antiwar impeachment resolutions, the House shunted them aside with little fanfare. For the most part, other legislators didn’t use them as a chance to grandstand, fund-raise, or debate the president’s policy. The press, in turn, gave them relatively little attention. Impeachment was recognized as serious business, not as an opportunity to score points or engage in partisan gamesmanship.

Of course, we don’t mean to overromanticize these tumultuous decades or to suggest that they offered a study in civility. With the fate of the world at stake, Cold War politics were not for the faint of heart. The 1960s birthed a radical and revolutionary ethos—and a conservative counterrevolution—that bolstered partisan differences. The noble struggles of the civil rights movement shook and reordered the foundations of our society. Presidents in this period faced no shortage of tough critics and motivated opponents, who at times resorted to extreme and bloody measures.

In some respects, that makes the limited role of impeachment talk even more noteworthy. Considering this period as a whole, and focusing only on the question of presidential impeachment, it was a time of comparative moderation. Even as impeachment talk achieved a new prominence in American life, it largely stood apart from the daily grind of partisan politics. Surveying the scene in 1992, one could say that most of the time, on most issues, presidential impeachment had little to do with the conduct and rhetoric of national politics. By the end of the decade, that would no longer be true.

Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992. He won, but never stopped running. Even after he was inaugurated, Clinton stuck to scripts and tactics from the campaign trail. Relying on polls to decide seemingly banal questions, like where to vacation, he sought an electoral edge at every turn. While this approach wasn’t new, Clinton pursued it on a different level. So did the Republican majority that rose to power in Congress on his watch. Thus began the age of the permanent campaign, which has since expanded to dominate American politics. That context is crucial to understanding impeachment in the post-Clinton era.

Let’s start with an uncontroversial claim: when US voters elect leaders, we hope that they will appreciate and fulfill their duty to govern the nation. In most cases, that requires a measure of deliberation, collaboration, and bipartisanship. Responsible officials should take a long view of the challenges facing the country and strive to improve the national welfare. They should also respect norms that facilitate workable government. In our diverse society, effective administration often depends on cooperation with political opponents and openness to compromise.

Accordingly, governing requires a different mentality than campaigning for office. Campaigns are built around winning and retaining power. Officials focused on campaigning are therefore more likely to adopt an adversarial and short-sighted approach. They may aim for quick, high-profile victories even at the expense of norms such as civility and comity. Further, many campaigns seek to build support by condemning opponents and issuing bold statements of principle. Although voters claim to prefer bipartisanship, they often reward officials who thwart compromise and make flashy statements of commitment to the right causes. Aware of that, campaigners frequently care less about concrete achievements than about symbolically pandering to a defined set of donors and demographics. If necessary, outrage and victimization can always be manufactured to fire up the base. As Professor Hugh Heclo wrote, the consultants, pollsters, and politicos who comprise the permanent campaign seek to “transform[] politics and public affairs into a twenty-four-hour campaign cycle of pseudoevents for citizen consumption.”⁶⁰

Politicians have always blurred governing and campaigning. But it’s now conventional wisdom that American politics have veered sharply toward permanent campaign footing, at the near-total expense of actual governance. It’s also generally accepted that this is a bad thing. The permanent campaign is blamed for exacerbating cynicism, paralysis, partisanship, obsessive fund-raising, and many other democratic dysfunctions that we’ll explore in far greater detail in Chapter 6. As political scientist Norm Ornstein has remarked, “when politics is driven by the need to turn out your base and policy is dominated by the desire to cater to that base, our baser instincts come to the fore.”⁶¹

Impeachment hasn’t escaped that dynamic. Starting in the mid-1990s and continuing through the present, we’ve seen the creeping emergence of a permanent impeachment campaign. While demands to impeach the president were once extraordinary, they’ve become increasingly common in the nation’s partisan civil war, where nothing is sacred and everything can be weaponized. The result has been a degradation of presidential impeachment—with potentially troubling consequences.

There are many causes for that development. But none looms larger than the Clinton proceedings. Born of partisan spite and rejected on partisan lines, they energized many of the most pernicious trends in our political system. At the same time, they dragged impeachment down into the mud. A whole generation came of age with Clinton’s as the only impeachment they had ever seen. Even though many Americans rejected the Republicans’ anti-Clinton campaign, it was too late. The same broken politics that led Republicans to impeach in the first place also guaranteed that the shockwaves would ripple far and wide.

To this day, Clinton’s case is still cited as precedent to support aggressive deployments of impeachment. For an especially clear example, consider this argument by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times: “Some commentators fear ‘normalizing’ impeachment as a tool of routine political warfare. But Bill Clinton’s impeachment already normalized its use against Democrats on the flimsiest of pretexts… Democrats may wish to return to a less destructive brand of politics, but that’s not an option while Trump sits in the White House.”⁶²

Goldberg’s column makes a move that’s currently popular in impeachment talk: jumping straight from Republican attacks on Clinton to a case against Trump. This eye-for-an-eye reasoning is part of a cycle that impels the permanent impeachment campaign forward. As related by Goldberg, though, the story is incomplete. Nearly twenty years elapsed between Clinton and Trump. During that period, Republicans and Democrats alike contributed to the normalization of impeachment talk.

After Clinton came George W. Bush. During Bush’s first term, which was defined largely by his response to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, there was little discussion of impeachment. That changed shortly after his reelection in 2004. Americans soured on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, especially when it became clear that Bush had built his case for war on faulty intelligence. Bush’s popularity also declined amid revelations of torture, black sites, extraordinary rendition, and illegal surveillance. His gross mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath inflicted further political damage. While Bush began his second term with roughly 50 percent approval ratings, that figure dropped to the mid-30 percent range in 2006 and fell below 30 percent in 2008.

As early as December 2005, impeachment talk picked up. That month, Democratic Representative John Conyers urged the creation of a select committee to make recommendations on possible grounds for Bush’s impeachment. According to a contemporary Rasmussen poll, 32 percent of Americans agreed that Bush should be impeached and removed from office.⁶³ Impeachment sentiment held steady through the rest of Bush’s second term, with polls noting support at 33 percent in April 2006 and 36 percent in July 2007. Predictably, the 2007 poll disclosed a stark partisan divide on impeaching Bush: Republicans were 9 percent in favor and 91 percent opposed, while Democrats were 58 percent in favor, 39 percent opposed (3 percent didn’t answer).⁶⁴

Those figures revealed that impeachment was a classic wedge issue: it split Democrats but unified Republicans. This may explain why many conservatives were thrilled in March 2006 when Democratic Senator Russell Feingold proposed censuring Bush for warrantless domestic surveillance. At that point, the president’s public approval ratings had collapsed. With midterm elections on the horizon, Republicans feared losing control of Congress. What better way to fire up the base than to warn that Democrats would impeach Bush if they prevailed? “This is such a gift,” Rush Limbaugh told listeners.⁶⁵ The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed entitled “The Impeachment Agenda,” which the Republican National Committee shared with 15 million supporters.⁶⁶ Other Republican operatives spread the word: “Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House.”⁶⁷ This theme permeated Republican messaging throughout the midterm campaign.

As reporter David Kirkpatrick observed at the time, “in playing up the impeachment threat, conservatives have forged an alliance of sorts with the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”⁶⁸ Indeed, the “liberal wing” had been hard at work building support for removing Bush immediately. Reflecting a majority view among Democrats, liberal stalwarts had already championed Bush’s impeachment in Harper’s and The Nation. Their cause received support from movie stars, some local governments and state legislatures, and a coalition of activists organized through ImpeachPAC.

By May 2006, Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was sick of it. At a party meeting, she made clear that “impeachment is off the table”—a commitment she had to repeat many times over the next six months.⁶⁹ This decision triggered heated debates within the political left, but she stood by it as sound electoral strategy. One day after Democrats won control of Congress, Pelosi confirmed that impeachment remained out of bounds.⁷⁰ As she later explained, impeachment would have divided the county and allowed Republicans to portray Democrats as obstructionists. Further, an impeachment would almost certainly have failed in the Senate, unlike some of the domestic policy legislation that Pelosi hoped to pass with her new House majority.

From 2006 through 2008, liberal Democrats pushed Pelosi to impeach and she refused. This tension peaked on June 12, 2008, when Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced thirty-five articles of impeachment against Bush. These accusations covered the waterfront: abuses relating to the Iraq War, torture, rendition, unlawful surveillance, corrupting elections, an inadequate response to Katrina, and much more. The House voted 251 to 166 to send this resolution to the Judiciary Committee, where it would never see the light of day. In a stark departure from historical practice, the 166 “no” votes came from Republicans who hoped to embarrass Democrats by forcing a public debate on whether to impeach Bush. Speaking for Democrats, Howard Dean responded that “the American people sent us [to Congress] to get things done… [not] to impeach the President.”⁷¹

Even then, the issue didn’t die. When Pelosi launched a book tour two months later, reporter Carl Hulse described it in the New York Times as “The Why-Haven’t-You-Impeached-the-President Tour.”⁷² According to Hulse, “Pelosi found herself under siege by people unhappy that she has not been motivated to try to throw President Bush out of office.” Pelosi had to explain that “the proceedings would be too divisive and be a distraction from advancing the policy agenda of the new Democratic majority.”

This response did not assuage her critics—including Donald J. Trump. In October 2008, Trump told Wolf Blitzer, “I was surprised that [Pelosi] didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It just seemed like she was really going to look to impeach Bush and get him out of office. Which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.” Blizter asked, “To impeach him?” And Trump replied, “For the war. For the war! Well, he lied! He got us into the war with lies!”⁷³

In some ways, George W. Bush’s experience with impeachment was ordinary. Impeachment talk peaked as his popularity plummeted. It was confined largely to margins of the opposition political party. And it formally manifested only in a single resolution, introduced by a single representative, which was buried in the Judiciary Committee.

The underlying dynamics, however, were very different from those of any prior case. It’s not unusual for the president’s most zealous opponents to focus attention on impeachment. It was unprecedented, however, for the president’s own allies to rely so heavily on impeachment threats to turn out their own base. It was also unprecedented for the president’s party in the House to vote against killing an impeachment resolution just so that they could embarrass their opponents. This unholy alliance of interest between Rush Limbaugh and Dennis Kucinich reflected a deeply cynical calculus by Republican operatives about the political benefits of anti-Bush impeachment talk.

That calculus, in turn, rested on assumptions that wouldn’t have held true in an earlier era. Here we see a post-Clinton shift in awareness of impeachment and expectations regarding its use. Republican voters could be incited by impeachment talk because they actually feared an impeachment effort and didn’t see it as an unthinkable possibility. Democrats largely supported impeachment, though polls showed wide variation in their reasons for doing so. Most important, to both groups impeachment was salient in a way that it simply hadn’t been to previous generations. Indeed, never before had a Speaker of the House traveled the country explaining why she didn’t impeach the president. By 2006, however, many Americans viewed impeachment less as a last resort and more as a standard feature of partisan warfare. Political strategists on both sides of the aisle were more than happy to encourage this view, at least when doing so suited a short-term need for their latest campaign.

The normalization of impeachment in our politics proceeded apace under Barack Obama. Immediately after his election, millions of Americans—including Trump—seemed unwilling or unable to accept the idea that Barack Hussein Obama was a legitimate president. Many others didn’t feel that way but simply had strong disagreements with Obama’s vision for the country. The Republican Party offered both groups a home, branding itself as the scorched-earth opposition. Throughout Obama’s eight years in office, Republicans stuck to that script, working at every turn to stymie the president and paralyze government. Obama eventually responded by making expanded and adventurous use of his executive powers to address immigration, the environment, LGBT rights, gun regulation, health care, and many other issues. These actions provoked more Republican hostility—as well as charges that Obama was a lawless tyrant with no respect for the Constitution. The Tea Party, a right-wing social movement, took the lead in attacking him. Eventually it urged impeachment with overpass protests across the nation.

Like Bush, Obama enjoyed a lull in impeachment talk during his first term. The idea was floated by a few congressional Republicans, including Darrell Issa, Michael Burgess, and John Kyl, but it never took off. That changed in Obama’s second term. By 2013, impeachment was a common refrain in conservative circles. Senator Tom Coburn told constituents that Obama was “perilously close.”⁷⁴ Representative Blake Farenthold believed that “the whole birth certificate issue” justified removal.⁷⁵ Representative Jason Chaffetz declined to rule out impeachment over Benghazi,⁷⁶ and Representative Dana Rohrabacher would have impeached for “unconstitutional approaches” to immigration reform.⁷⁷ After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Representative Steve Stockman threatened to impeach Obama for any new gun regulations.⁷⁸ In Michigan, Representative Kerry Bentivolio admitted that impeaching Obama “would be a dream come true.”⁷⁹ And when asked by conservative broadcaster Rusty Humphries, Representative Michele Bachmann said that Obama should be impeached for unspecified “thuggery.”⁸⁰

Through 2013 and 2014, these calls were echoed by prominent ring-wing figures. On Fox News, for instance, Jeanine Pirro demanded Obama’s impeachment for “not protecting and defending Americans in the bloodbath known as Benghazi.”⁸¹ Sarah Palin later piled on, declaring that “the many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored.”⁸² By June 2014, National Review writer Andrew McCarthy had published Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. In a sweeping indictment, he concluded that Obama could be impeached for nearly everything he had said or done since taking office. The only question, in McCarthy’s view, was whether we wish to remain a “self-determining people.”⁸³

According to pollsters, a majority of the public didn’t share McCarthy’s view—though support for impeaching Obama was still relatively high. In July 2014, 35 percent of Americans favored impeachment; roughly 44 percent opposed it and 21 percent weren’t sure. Much like under Bush, these divisions reflected partisan affiliation. Depending on which poll you believed, 57–68 percent of Republicans supported impeaching Obama, compared to 8–13 percent of Democrats and 35 percent of self-described “independents.”⁸⁴

In July 2014, with midterm elections months away, the events of 2006 repeated themselves—this time with the political parties flipped. On July 29, Nick Corasaniti reported that “Democrats cannot get enough of Republicans talking about impeaching President Obama.” Those impeachment threats, he noted, had a “catalytic effect on [their] fund-raising.”⁸⁵ Over the following months, Dan Pfeiffer—a senior advisor to Obama—highlighted the impeachment narrative. He was joined by Senator Harry Reid, who wrote a fund-raising letter claiming that a “Republican House and Senate could go beyond shutting down the government—they could waste months of our lives on impeachment.”⁸⁶

All the while, Republican leaders in Congress strenuously denied that there was a secret plot to impeach Obama. In frustration, Speaker of the House John Boehner responded: “This whole talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Why? Because they’re trying to rally their people to give money and to show up in this year’s elections. We have no plans to impeach the president.”⁸⁷ Boehner stuck to this position all year long, even as members of his own party gravitated in a more radical direction.

By August 2014, New York Times reporter Neil Irwin had picked up on an “odd symbiosis” in the midterm campaign. As he observed, “unelected voices on the right and elected Democrats both want to keep impeachment buzz going, while Republicans who actually hold power dismiss the idea out of hand and grumble about the Democrats’ use of the ‘threat’ for fund-raising purposes.”⁸⁸

Republicans ultimately retained control of the House. True to their word, they never sought to impeach Obama. In fact, nobody did. Instead, as was true under Bush, impeachment talk under Obama was little more than a manifestation of the permanent campaign. Democrats used it to scare their base into voting. Right-wing Republicans used it to agitate supporters while signaling loyalty to the anti-Obama movement. Both groups used it to fundraise and add new supporters. Meanwhile, Republican leaders worked hard to avoid the issue—which risked alienating independents—even as their attacks on “King Obama” were riddled with impeachment-caliber language. Throughout Obama’s second term, impeachment was unavoidable everywhere except in the halls of Congress, where no one dared propose it.

By early 2016, the architecture of a permanent impeachment campaign was in place. Through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, impeachment had become an accepted, predictable tool of partisan combat. This was true for liberals and conservatives. To their credit, most legislators still acted responsibly and avoided promiscuous use of the “i-word.” But on both sides of the political aisle, a coterie of journalists, operatives, and officials had spent decades mastering the strategy and rhetoric of impeachment talk. In that same period, the American people had grown accustomed to it. Calls for impeachment—and denouncements of those calls—were now firmly established in the political dialogue. When the president did something outrageous or controversial, an angry public knew how to respond.

And then along came Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (to whom we’ll refer as Hillary). We suppose it’s possible that a talented fiction writer could imagine two candidates better calculated to trigger impeachment alarms. We doubt it, though. Hillary was weighted down by decades of Republican animus, a horde of conspiracy theories, questions about her “missing e-mails,” and a weakness for sketchy dealings. Trump, in turn, had a web of disturbing entanglements with Russia, open disdain for democratic norms, decades of racist and sexist conduct, a history of fraudulent business practices, and a temperament that many viewed as disqualifying. From the very outset, commentators warned that this would be an exceptionally ugly campaign.

They were right. And it only got uglier as 2016 wore on. Presented with escalating charges of criminality and corruption, the American public swiftly defaulted to impeachment talk. This was now a conditioned response. It had become so natural that many Americans barely hesitated before debating the impeachment of people who didn’t yet hold office. When impeachment talk is inevitable, why wait?

To our knowledge, 2016 was the first campaign between two non-incumbents marked by open threats of impeachment for whoever won. As early as April 2016, before he had secured his party’s nomination, Politico reported on speculation about the likely impeachment of a hypothetical President Trump.⁸⁹ That belief simmered throughout the campaign—sometimes encouraged by conservatives who saw it as a creative path to installing Mike Pence as president. Generally, though, Democratic officials avoided pre-election impeachment talk. The same couldn’t be said for Republicans. On November 3, 2016, the Washington Post reported that “senior Republican lawmakers are openly discussing the prospect of impeaching Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency.”⁹⁰ New York magazine and the New York Times separately confirmed statements by top Republicans that Hillary would face impeachment if she were elected.⁹¹ Trump joined the fray at his rallies, reminding crowds of Bill’s trial and asking, “Folks, do we want to go through this again?”⁹² Republicans used these threats to achieve two goals: (1) increasing their odds of winning the election, and (2) laying groundwork for their siege of a likely Clinton administration.

After Trump’s surprise victory, many Democrats fell into a state of grief and despair. The sheer enormity of the disaster left them too stunned to plan their next steps. Within weeks of the election, though, early sparks of impeachment talk appeared in liberal blogs and Twitter feeds. Like so much else about the 2016 election, the wave of impeachment sentiment that built from November through January was unprecedented. But so were Trump’s flagrant violations of the Emoluments Clauses, which made it conceivable that he would commit an impeachable offense on his very first day.⁹³ As winter gripped the nation, calls for Trump’s swift ouster appeared in Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, and other liberal outlets.⁹⁴ Then, on Inauguration Day, the impeachment campaign launched in earnest. ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org went live and received so many hits that it crashed. In GQ, commentator Jay Willis explained “How to Impeach a U.S. President (Say, Donald Trump).”⁹⁵ And in Ireland, the online bookmaker Paddy Power cheerfully reported that 90 percent of all relevant bets wagered against Trump lasting a full four-year term.⁹⁶

Through the rest of 2017, impeachment remained a dominant motif of Trump’s presidency. Indeed, just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, nearly one-third of the American public supported impeaching him. Even in a world gone topsy-turvy, this was a truly extraordinary data point. As the year progressed, Trump’s approval ratings started low and trended lower—impelled downward by legislative failures, outrageous public statements, and a thick haze of malice, incompetence, and kleptocracy. At the end of 2017, 41 percent of Americans favored impeachment proceedings, including 70 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of independents.⁹⁷ An unceasing parade of dismal polls confirmed that Trump was the most unpopular first-year president since the advent of polling. Quinnipiac University reported that “idiot,” “liar,” and “incompetent” were the most common words used to describe Trump in a December 2017 survey.⁹⁸ And real-money prediction websites offered 20 percent odds that Trump would be impeached by the end of 2018.⁹⁹

Of course, impeachment talk during Trump’s first year resulted from more than his unpopularity. Time and again, Trump violated basic norms of presidential behavior and personal decency. It soon became clear that no major issue would escape his unparalleled capacity for mayhem, dishonesty, and vulgarity. This realization cast a pall over American democracy. As journalist Masha Gessen wrote in November 2017, “the sun still rises every morning, but an [early] barrage of Trump’s tweets might obscure it… we have settled into constant low-level dread.”¹⁰⁰ Ultimately, many people concluded that Trump threatened the rule of law, national security, and global peace. This threat was so great, they believed, that only his immediate removal could stop it.

Support for impeachment drew strength from plausible claims that Trump may have committed “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” His alleged offenses included grave abuse of the pardon power and illegal financial entanglements with foreign countries. Some experts also invoked impeachment as a remedy for Trump’s assault on the news media, his attacks on free speech and religious pluralism, and his chilling demands that federal prosecutors target his political opponents.

But nothing loomed so large as Russia. Too many officials close to Trump had lied about meeting and dealing with Russians, and had then lied about the circumstances and context of those meetings. By December 2017, pollsters reported that over half of American voters believed that members of the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.¹⁰¹ An increasing number of Americans also suspected that Trump himself had played a role in such collusion. Trump stoked these suspicions by pandering to Vladimir Putin, bragging to the Russian Ambassador about firing FBI Director James Comey, denying Russian interference despite clear evidence, and sabotaging efforts to protect the nation from Russian cyberattacks.

At the same time, many of the calls to remove Trump were based on conduct that is not properly impeachable. For instance, some Americans appeared to support impeaching him for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, for having abused women before taking office, for gutting the US Foreign Service, or for lending comfort to the neo-Nazi thugs who terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia. Others pushed impeachment as a response to Trump’s many illegal executive orders—including his anti-Muslim entry bans, his ban on military service by transgender persons, his threats to punish sanctuary cities, and his mistreatment of undocumented migrants brought here as children (“Dreamers”). Still others favored removing Trump due to his erratic nuclear brinksmanship with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un. As many experts pointed out, Trump risked disaster by publishing tweets bragging that his “nuclear button” is “much bigger & more powerful than his, and my Button works!”¹⁰² (Obviously, Trump suffers from severe insecurity about size.)

As 2017 wore on, the bill of particulars against Trump grew longer and more detailed. So did the bizarre reports swirling around him. Rumors spread that Trump’s mental capacity had deteriorated—as evidenced by a noticeably smaller vocabulary, a near-total unwillingness to read, and increasingly frequent repetition of the same point. Reporters claimed that Trump spent four to eight hours per day obsessively watching (and sometimes live-tweeting) cable news, mainly Fox and CNN. Cabinet officials were overheard describing him as an idiot, a moron, and a dope—but were also forced to attend meetings where they fawned over him and offered obsequious thanks for his leadership. Trump got into weird Twitter fights, including an exchange in which he said that he should have left three UCLA basketball players in Chinese prison because one of their parents was not grateful enough for his son’s release. Trump also falsely accused Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower; endorsed an alleged pedophile to win a Senate race in Alabama; claimed credit for the lack of any commercial airplane crashes worldwide in 2017; and continued to favor eating food from McDonald’s due to a nonspecific fear that somebody would try to poison him.¹⁰³

To many Americans who supported Trump’s removal, there was little need for fine-grained analysis of whether particular misdeeds qualified as “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Rather, a generalized assessment of Trump’s conduct led them to a single conclusion: Trump was unfit to serve as president and had proved it by committing a bevy of impeachable (or at least despicable) acts. Channeling that mindset and urging an expansive view of when impeachment is justified, political commentator Ezra Klein made a sharp case for Trump’s ouster:

Sometimes I imagine this era going catastrophically wrong—a nuclear exchange with North Korea, perhaps, or a genuine crisis in American democracy—and historians writing about it in the future. They will go back and read Trump’s tweets and his words and read what we were saying, and they will wonder what the hell was wrong with us. You knew, they’ll say. You knew everything you needed to know to stop this. And what will we say in response?¹⁰⁴

Even as Trump’s base largely stood by him, dismissing attacks on their hero as elitist hokum, millions of Americans concluded that Trump posed too great a threat if left in power.

That rise in impeachment sentiment was accompanied by large and creative public displays. When a US science envoy submitted his resignation to the State Department, he spelled “IMPEACH” with the first letter of each paragraph (needless to say, it went viral).¹⁰⁵ On October 15, Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, offering $10 million for information leading to Trump’s impeachment. Five days later, a billionaire philanthropist named Tom Steyer launched an eight-figure television ad campaign laying out the case for impeaching Trump. In a stroke of genius, Steyer made sure to purchase airtime during Fox & Friends, one of Trump’s favorite shows. True to form, Trump responded almost immediately: “Wacky & totally unhinged Tom Steyer, who has been fighting me and my Make America Great Again agenda from beginning, never wins elections!”¹⁰⁶ Thanks in part to free publicity from Trump, Steyer’s impeachment petition boasted more than 3.6 million signatures by the end of the year.¹⁰⁷

Steyer’s national campaign crystallized a dynamic familiar from 2006 and 2014. Once again, a strong majority of the opposition party supported impeaching the president. Once again, an alliance of wealthy donors, grassroots campaigners, and ideological House members called for impeachment. Once again, allies of the president publicly emphasized the threat of impeachment to inflame and unify his base. And once again, leaders of the opposition party in Congress repeatedly discouraged impeachment talk—explaining that the best way to win the next midterm election was to offer an attractive governance agenda.

This time, however, the stakes were higher and the possibility of impeachment less remote. The White House was beset by scandals, resignations, investigations, and indictments. Attempts at damage control faced crushing external pressure and intermittent bouts of presidential sabotage. Even though Republicans in Congress generally stood by Trump’s side, especially after they passed a major tax cut, impeachment came to feel like a plausible endgame. That seemed to excite right-wing talk show hosts and agitators, who rallied Trump’s base with warnings of a coup. At the same time, it energized the anti-Trump #resistance movement. Buoyed by a wave of popular outrage, aggressive Democratic legislators formally proposed articles of impeachment against Trump in November and December 2017. House Democrats then chose Representative Jerrold Nadler—an expert on impeachment—as their ranking member for the Judiciary Committee.

These developments reflected extraordinary public opposition to Trump, but they also put Democratic leaders in an awkward position. Vanity Fair nicely captured their dilemma with the headline “Will Impeachment Mania Doom the Democrats?”¹⁰⁸ Political pundits filled the air with warnings that Democrats risked losing the midterm elections if they stood for nothing more than impeaching Trump. In response, other pundits insisted with equal certainty that dodging this issue would alienate the Democratic base and demonstrate unforgivable cowardice.

Deploying strategies that she had honed a decade earlier, House Minority Leader Pelosi came down in favor of muzzling impeachment talk. As Politico reported in November 2017, “Pelosi is eager to show her party can govern—in contrast to the chaos surrounding Trump—and she believes that a reputation as the ‘no drama’ Democrats is key to taking back the House in 2018.”¹⁰⁹ Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed Pelosi in urging caution. But he pointedly left the door open: “There may be a time. It is premature. And to call for [impeachment] now you might blow your shot when it has a better chance of happening. It is serious, serious, serious. And so… you wait.”¹¹⁰

As we finish this book in mid-March 2018, the American people are still waiting. Thanks to heroic efforts by investigative journalists, the public has become intimately acquainted with the tawdry affairs of Trump’s inner circle. Americans have been flooded with accounts of Trump’s highly irregular conduct in office, as well as his financial dealings in foreign nations. They have come to anticipate that his latest tweet might range from a snarky putdown of CNN to blustery threats of a nuclear holocaust. And they have taken a keen interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to investigate ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. For good reason, his selection was initially received with bipartisan acclaim. Trump, however, spent much of 2017 desperately trying to demonize and discredit Mueller. He was joined in that effort by a gaggle of right-wing hacks and ambitious congressional Republicans. Their partisan criticism ultimately expanded to encompass the FBI and the entire Justice Department, which Trump denounced as part of the “deep state” (even though he had appointed its senior leadership). As part of this strategy, Trump and his allies sought to distract the public by demanding federal investigations of Hillary Clinton, her associates, and private groups that had found evidence of Trump’s shady conduct.

Many Democrats now hope—and many Republicans now fear—that Mueller will produce incontrovertible evidence of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” We don’t know if these expectations will be met. Even if Trump engaged in misconduct, it’s very difficult to find a smoking gun in these sorts of cases. But we do believe that the nation needs definitive, credible answers to important questions about the 2016 presidential election. At this point, Mueller may be the only person capable of delivering them. We therefore hope that Trump’s cynical strategy will not succeed. Firing Mueller, subjecting him to improper political control, or turning half the country against him would forever condemn an anxious public to disruptive uncertainty. The people of this nation deserve better.

Given the pace of recent events, we can’t begin to imagine what will happen next. Trump has repeatedly matched law and order with chaos and nihilism. At least until the 2018 midterm elections, his political destiny will be determined by Republicans, who have yet to find a principle they won’t sacrifice at his altar. For the time being, it is solely by virtue of continuing support from congressional Republicans that Trump remains in office. But even if Congress ultimately declines to act against him, it’s clear that impeachment will remain a defining theme of Trump’s presidency—and likely of many more presidencies to come.

There are numerous compelling explanations for the surge of impeachment talk under Trump. Most of them involve the unique circumstances of his presidency. But this development also reflects dynamics with deeper historical roots and more enduring significance. Since 1998, impeachment has become a weapon of first resort in partisan combat. The post-Clinton normalization of impeachment talk is a dramatic and underappreciated departure from past practice. While it’s too soon to grasp the full implications of this change, we suspect that it will ultimately cause more harm than good.

To be sure, impeachment talk can sometimes play a valuable role in our constitutional scheme. When a president approaches the outer limits of his power, inspires doubt concerning his mental fitness, or adopts bizarre positions on important issues, demands for his removal may function as an early warning system. In that respect, they might help the American people signal in a peaceful way that opposition to the president has escalated beyond ordinary political disagreement. Such warnings may convince the president to turn back or change tactics. In the alternative, they may invigorate other checks and balances by creating an atmosphere of constitutional crisis. If nothing else, a burst of impeachment talk can allow an outraged segment of the public to blow off steam.

Impeachment talk is also essential when there is credible proof that the president committed “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” As we’ve seen, impeachment doesn’t automatically fall from the sky when a president veers toward tyranny. Instead, it’s a fundamentally political process that should involve extensive public deliberation. When a president’s conduct lands him in impeachment territory, the nation must decide how to respond. In those circumstances, it would be irresponsible for the American people not to debate whether removal is warranted.

But impeachment talk can fulfill its worthy functions only if it is taken seriously. When calls to impeach the president are played on repeat for years at a time, they lose their punch. And two full decades after the Clinton saga, that is where we find ourselves. The normalization of impeachment has trapped the American people in a massive “boy-who-cried-wolf” dilemma. Panicked warnings that the public must impeach or face extinction have dulled our senses and encouraged skepticism. A nation over-saturated with impeachment talk may find it especially difficult to remove a president from office when it’s really, truly necessary.

Rising partisanship exacerbates this concern. To succeed, an impeachment must transcend party conflict. Since the 1990s, however, impeachment has become increasingly entangled with the daily grind of partisan politics. As a result, the president’s political opponents are quick to frame their major disagreements in terms of impeachment. The president’s supporters, in turn, are quick to dismiss even legitimate impeachment talk as a partisan conspiracy to nullify the last election. This state of affairs is unfortunate. In principle, calls for impeachment should seek to vindicate the constitutional foundations on which all other political debate transpires. In practice, impeachment talk has been degraded in ways that may prevent it from achieving that purpose.

Even as partisanship has subverted the impeachment power, an overdose of impeachment talk has pushed our politics toward extremes. This dynamic should now sound familiar. When political conflict unfolds in the constant company of impeachment threats, it can feel more existential and all-encompassing. That’s true even when the odds of a successful impeachment are low. Committed to an impeachment mindset, some of the president’s opponents may come to view every skirmish as a battle in their larger war to depose a tyrant. Some of the president’s allies, in turn, may see every challenge as a threat to their leader’s survival and legitimacy. Public fixation on impeachment can thus reinforce tribal tendencies on both sides of the aisle, undercutting compromise and bipartisanship. It can also divert valuable time, energy, and resources from the ordinary business of politics and policy. When the major question on TV and Twitter is whether to impeach, other issues may fail to attract the attention they deserve.

Perversely, the normalization of impeachment talk can actually leave presidents freer to commit abuses. That’s true for three reasons. First, removal from office becomes less likely when a president’s supporters presumptively view impeachment talk as a tired partisan ploy. Second, as threats of impeachment motivate a president’s base to rally around him, he may worry less about political pushback from within his own party. Finally, the public may punish a president’s opponents at the polls if they’re seen as standing only for the negative step of impeachment.

This is why recent presidents and their political advisors have deliberately stirred the pot around midterm elections. It’s why Pelosi resisted calls to support impeaching Bush and Boehner did the same with Obama. And it’s why anyone publicly urging impeachment should think strategically about what they’re trying to achieve—especially if their party doesn’t control enough seats in the House to initiate impeachment hearings.

There are circumstances in which impeachment talk is necessary. There are circumstances in which full-blown impeachment proceedings are necessary. It’s possible that Trump has created those circumstances. But we must proceed with caution. When impeachment talk overtakes our politics, it can cause a lot of harm without doing any good. Since the late 1990s, that dynamic has increasingly afflicted our democracy. If we are going to spend the Trump presidency immersed in impeachment talk, we must reflect carefully on the use and abuse of such potent rhetoric.