We begin today’s post-Thanksgiving roundup with an op-ed by fired Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer:
On Nov. 14, partly because the president had already contacted me twice, I sent him a note asking him not to get involved in these questions. The next day, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone called me and said the president would remain involved. Shortly thereafter, I received a second call from Cipollone, who said the president would order me to restore Gallagher to the rank of chief. [...]
This was a shocking and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review. It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.
Damon Linker at The Week argues in favor of a House censure:
Instead of trying and failing to remove Trump through impeachment, the House should pass a resolution formally censuring the president. In doing so, it would be following the example laid down by the Senate, which censured President Andrew Jackson in 1834. [...]
Of course this way of proceeding would be guaranteed to leave the president in office. But then, so would a failed impeachment effort. At least a formal censure would deny Trump the appearance of exoneration.
Meanwhile, Manisha Sinha at The New York Times draws the Johnson-Trump comparisons:
Much more than impeachment connects the presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump. No one expected either man to enter the White House. Both presidencies began with a whiff of illegitimacy hanging over them: Johnson’s because he became president when Lincoln was assassinated, Mr. Trump’s because he won the Electoral College despite having nearly three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, the largest losing margin of any president who actually won the election. The size of the gap did not bode well for American democracy.
Historical parallelism rarely works in a simplistic manner. But it does work when historians discern broad similarities and patterns that link our present moment to the past. Many fallible men have inhabited the office of the presidency. Only a handful have been so oblivious to the oath they took that they have met the constitutional standard for impeachment.
At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik makes an excellent point in how pundits are describing impeachment as political:
[T]here’s another, more urgent sense in which impeachment exists as an alternative to politics. Recall that both modern-day impeachments in this country were launched against Presidents who had won overwhelming reëlection victories. Impeachment in this sense is anti-politics; it presumes that there exists a constitutional principle that overrules the politics of popularity. The point of an impeachment is not to do the popular or the poll-tested thing but to have the courage to do an unpopular thing, because what is at stake is a larger, even existential matter. [,,,[
All power is bound by duty; no magistrate—or President—can act badly and then just say that they do so by right. Impeachment is not a substitute for politics; it appeals to the principles of law and duty that make politics possible.
On a final note, here’s Peter Nicholas at The Atlantic on Trump’s need for conspiracy theories:
“We’ve never had a president who trades in conspiracy theories, who prefers lies instead of fact,” Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and a presidential historian, told me.
A U.S. president has at his disposal the most authoritative information available on Earth. Yet Trump doesn’t seem to want it. Disdainful of credentialed professionals, Trump has taken extraordinary steps, and spent taxpayer dollars, standing up dubious ideas of his own creation.