Is Firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller the President's Inevitable Next Step?

The single biggest piece of political news this past week was the revelation, broken by The Washington Post, that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice.  In the first place, this a victory for our basic sense of a shared reality.  Donald Trump, after all, did tell an interviewer on national TV that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation; everyone witnessed (or can witness, through the glories of YouTube) his statement, unlike, say, Comey’s allegations that the president asked him to call off the probe against General Michael Flynn.  The way that Trump’s corruption is often in plain view is one of the most disorienting things about our current political crisis — and it’s a relief that a formal response is taking shape under the aegis of Mueller’s investigation.

But we here at The Hot Screen share a belief with many others that the president will not allow the wheels of justice to spin to their proper conclusion.  Stopping the investigation into Russian election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign was important enough to Donald Trump to take the political risk of firing James Comey (although there is evidence that he did not see the move as overly risky, for instance thinking that Democratic animus towards Comey would give him some cover).  In light of the second-most important political news of the week — that Mueller’s investigation is exploring lines of inquiry that are likely to spell serious trouble for Trump allies — the president has more reason than ever to quash the Russia investigation.  

Already, Trump is attacking Mueller (as is the right-wing media) with a clear interest in discrediting whatever results the investigation might bring.  These attacks by Trump seem to be another variant of obstruction of justice — what else do you call it when a president seeks to preemptively undermine the results of an investigation against himself?  But beyond these initial attacks on Mueller, Trump has already shown with the Comey firing that he’s willing to break political norms in order to protect himself, even if it means creating severe problems for himself down the road.

But here’s the thing — as a general principle, Donald Trump’s entire candidacy and presidency, apart from the Russia angle, have been one relentless breaking of political norms, from calling for Hilary Clinton to be jailed, to inciting violence against protestors at campaign rallies, to attempting to implement a ban against Muslims from entering the country.  The heightened stakes around the Russia investigation are due to the fact that we are no longer just talking about questions of political culture, but about whether, to use the dramatic, familiar phrasing, the president is above the law.   

Based on what we’ve been reading, there would be nothing outright illegal about Donald Trump ordering Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller.  But first and foremost, as Josh Marshall points out, firing Mueller would mean unequivocally that Trump “will not allow any investigation of Russia and his campaign to go forward.”  Calling this obstruction of justice would be to hide the gravity of such a move: firing the special counsel would be tantamount to the president asserting he is above the law, since he would have stopped an investigation of himself.  And as Marshall concludes, the logical next step under our system of government would be for Congress to look into impeaching and convicting Donald Trump.  Marshall doesn’t say it explicitly, but it’s clear that the reason Congress should at such a point take the step of impeachment is that our system of government clearly can’t exist as intended if one branch of government can operate beyond the law, or, in plainer words, can do whatever the hell it wants in the manner of any tinpot dictatorship.

Here’s the reality of the situation, though: given the choice between Robert Mueller having enough time to identify specific laws that Trump and his team may have broken, and having the current Republican Congress decide whether to impeach the president for effectively declaring himself above the law as a general principle, it seems naive in the extreme to think that Donald Trump’s decision here is not foreordained.  Republican members of the House will not turn on a president who still enjoys high approval ratings from Republican voters; they will neither consider nor vote on impeachment.  Indeed, this basic fact — that we seem on the precipice of requiring impeachment of the president, without any prospect of this happening — seems to be quickly looming as the most basic point of our political crisis, and is a point explored in various detail both in Marshall's piece and in this latest post by Andrew Sullivan.  There is no doubt in our minds that, as with everything else the president has done to date, fellow Republicans would seek to defend and exculpate the president from his anti-democratic actions, once again defining presidential deviance down.  And if Donald Trump is able to stop the Russia investigation, then he will likely feel totally unshackled, as he will have, by design or side effect, established the essential lawlessness of his administration.

So it is probably the understatement of the year to say that the Democrats need to start playing offense, and be ready for Trump’s next move.  This is not politics as usual.  This is not a matter of waiting for the president and the Republicans to overreach, and then reaping the benefits of a backlash in the next election.  They need to be actively laying the groundwork for Trump’s removal, based on the mounting evidence of his unfitness for office, and to be making the case that the Republican Party as a whole is implicated in this unfitness by dint of their unwavering support for the president.  Along these lines, we strongly encourage everyone to read this piece by Brian Beutler, which makes the case that the Democrats must make it clear immediately that they would consider the firing of Robert Mueller to be an impeachable offense.

The Democrats need to define without ambiguity what the stakes are, both on the broader level of the rule of law versus a de facto authoritarian presidency, and on the practical, visible effects, such as a presidency unwilling to respond to Russian hacking of the past election.  Even if there is close to zero likelihood Republicans will explore the possibility of impeachment, the Democrats must keep in full view of the public a reality-based, democratic, pro-rule of law narrative that counters the derangements of the Oval Office and the president’s Republican enablers.  They cannot simply wait for the Republicans to overreach; they need to be telling a compelling, accurate story of how the Republicans are overreaching and why Americans need to oppose this.  

In a conflict between lawlessness and the rule of law, The Hot Screen patriotically believes and fervently hopes that the latter will prevail in the U.S., given the strength and continuity of our traditions.  But clearly something has gone terribly wrong for the U.S. to have elected a president as unqualified and authoritarian as Donald Trump in the first place.  One of the twists to this convoluted situation is that, to protect the rule of law, the opposition cannot look to the law alone, not when any lawbreaking by the president must be dealt with by an aiding and abetting Congress.  Instead, this is ultimately a political battle — one that has at its forefront the basics of government accountability, competence and lawfulness, but is a political battle nonetheless — over what sort of country we want this to be.

This struggle is being conducted in a political environment that has been severely disrupted by Donald Trump’s media savvy and blatant untruthfulness.  But it is also being conducted over some very basic, easy-to-grasp issues that we believe will play out in increasingly destructive ways for the president and his party, if the opposition works to keep them front and center in the public dialogue.  After all, the investigation that is at the heart of our current state of affairs concerns another country — Russia, no less! — attempting to subvert our electoral process in favor of a particular candidate.  Donald Trump has made a decision that this is not a matter that needs to be looked into.  A majority of American disagree with this assessment.

In staking his presidency on an issue that appears so black and white to so many Americans, Donald Trump has given the opposition incredibly solid grounds for making its case.  He has created a space for Americans to remember and renew a fundamental, inspiring, and uniting patriotism based on the basic fact that we’re the greatest democracy on earth and will not countenance anyone fucking with it.  To our minds, there is a clear line between Republican indifference to assessing Russian interference in our democratic processes and Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters through bogus voter ID laws and other such measures.  At the base of both is a fundamental opposition to the democratic spirit of our country, and the case of Russia makes it clear how this can easily be defined as an essential un-Americanness, a lack of the most basic patriotism.