So now Donald Trump has signaled that he’s prepared to fire Robert Mueller if the former FBI director’s investigation of Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign strays beyond whatever bounds Trump says are proper — in other words, he’s prepared to fire Mueller if Mueller continues to do his job. The president’s remarks to this effect came in the midst of a frequently mind-boggling and never-reassuring interview by The New York Times last week: an interview filled with enough deeply shocking statements that the basic fact of the president’s rambling, self-centered focus throughout the interview hasn’t gotten as much coverage as it should. This man was elected to serve the interests of the American people, and when given a golden opportunity to talk about how he’s doing so, he doesn’t even pretend to fake an interest, instead issuing threats against Mueller, signaling his loss of confidence in former buddy Jeff Sessions, and bashing Barack Obama and James Comey.
As some of the political writers we follow closely note here and here, we’ve now arrived at an unmistakeable point of political crisis. As Talking Points Memo hammers home, in ruling out quite valid lines of inquiry, most importantly into his family’s finances, Donald Trump has essentially said he won’t permit any investigation into possible collusion with Russia. And the NYT interview was closely followed by news of how the Trump camp has essentially declared war on the Mueller investigation.
Finally, we also learned in the last few days that Trump has asked advisors about the scope of the president’s power to pardon — including his power to pardon himself. This news has been surrounded with disclaimers about the president not having any actual concrete interest in the pardon path — but it seems foolhardy to believe this. Yesterday, as if on ominous cue, the president, unprompted, has visited the pardon issue, tweeting that, “While all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.” (And in an ironic twist stranger than fiction, Trump made this tweet the same day he attended the commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford, a ship named after the former president who also happens to be the most controversial issuer of a pardon in U.S. history.)
Together with the fact that Trump considers the Mueller investigation illegitimate, news of interest in the pardon power suggests that the president is prepared to push the presidency well past a point compatible with either the rule of law or democratic governance, to a point of unfettered lawlessness. How else to describe it when the president suggests that he has the power to pardon any crime he or anyone else has committed, and asserts the ability to limit any investigation as he sees fit? To put the situation in the stark, concrete terms we need to understand in order to figure out how to respond: There are strong suspicions that the Trump campaign colluded with already-established Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Over the past weeks, we have received increasing evidence that this collusion is real. The president has now signaled he is willing to abuse his powers to stop that investigation.
The president is acting exactly like someone who has something to hide; is acting, in fact, exactly as someone so unprincipled as to have colluded with a foreign power to win the presidency would act, up to attacking our system of government itself and moving it out of the realm of democracy into something authoritarian and vile.
Where will we be if, tomorrow, Donald Trump fires Mueller and pardons himself and everyone in his administration for any crimes related to the 2016 election? This would be a clear statement that the law does not apply to the president, an abuse of the pardon power that transforms the president into the equivalent of a king. It is grotesque enough that collusion and possible treason would be excused. But this would only be the beginning of a reign of lawlessness — because if you can use the pardon power on the most serious of issues, why not on other ones? And why not all the time? After all, the Constitution doesn’t say there are limits to how often the president can pardon. The logic quickly leads to a situation of authoritarianism, with an effective dictator who by definition cannot break the law — who can, by extension, do anything he wants.
This turn of events wouldn’t feel so ominous if the majority Republicans had so far indicated any commitment to constrain the president’s norm-breaking, from his attacks on the press to his attempts to delegitimize the Russian-related investigations. But Republicans, particularly the House and Senate leadership, have been the president’s enablers for the past six months. They have chosen to make a deal with the devil in order to push conservative legislation like Obamacare repeal and tax cuts for the rich. As I’ve detailed here, they’ve already made themselves complicit with Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies.
So as a first order of business, it’s time to turn up the pressure on those who could persuade the president that there is a point beyond which his political party will not allow him to go. Democrats need to demand that GOP senators and congresspeople make it clear that the president’s firing of Mueller or use of the pardon to excuse possible crimes committed by him or his campaign will mean the loss of the party’s support, and impeachment for the president. If the GOP fails to do this — and such failure is likely, but calling them out will establish their positions for all to see — Democrats need to make it clear to the public at large that the GOP is at risk of becoming an accessory to something that we haven’t yet had to face as a nation — a president whose actions threaten to take us into a realm of full-bore authoritarianism.
More than this — the public needs to make its voice heard, starting now. Jeet Heer at New Republic is right on when he says that the public needs to signal immediately, including by means of mass demonstrations, that the American people won’t countenance the lurch into authoritarianism that either a firing of the special counsel or issuance of pardons would represent. Michelle Goldberg reports on current organizing for mass responses should the firing occur, which is good news, but this seems not proactive enough. Too many norms have already been broken, from the Muslim ban to Trump’s ongoing actions to subvert voting rights based on lies that there were millions of illegal ballots cast in 2016; we need to start getting ahead of the curve.
Just the possibility that the president is considering the pardon should be warning enough — six months after his inauguration, he’s already started thinking about turning what has traditionally been a limited power meant to soften the edges of the judicial system into the keystone of uninhibited rule. What sort of person even thinks about this? Not one fit to be president. It’s time to take the initiative back from Trump. Months ago, I had wondered whether he would ever start thinking about using pardons to weasel out of the Russia investigation, and I immediately thought this was a histrionic and absurd idea for me to have. Now, it’s as clear as day that the most extreme anti-democratic possibilities can become reality when the president is Donald Trump.
This has never really been an matter of whether the Russians made a difference in Trump winning, which because of its essential unknowability is sort of a non-issue. The real concern was whether his camp colluded with the Russian in the effort. Such a collusion would be so far beyond the pale of what is acceptable in our country that it is fair to say that it is now a major fault line of what sort of citizen you are: one with a basic patriotism and belief in our democracy and political union, or one who believes in power over patriotism, power over democracy, power over the rule of law. And it is serious enough a possibility that it raises the question of what might still be occurring in the way of distorted policy, payoffs, and other sordid arrangements with the Russians.
But now we are past even that deeply-destabilizing point, with the president’s apparent desperation to cover up any investigation into that collusion — not to mention prevent any exposure of his financial history — leading him to essentially declare war on our democracy itself. He’s already fired the FBI director, and said on national TV he did so because he didn’t like the Russia investigation. That firing in itself was a shocking event. Now, as evidence increasingly mounts of bad deeds committed by Team Trump in the 2016 election, his desperation to cover up the crime is increasing accordingly. Unfortunately for us, the only ways left to him to cover up are direct attacks on the rule of law in our country. Unfortunately for Trump, I’m pretty sure that most Americans won’t accept this.
