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Naomi Klein: Trump Is Not the Crisis — He Is the Symptom of the Crisis<\/span><\/h2>\n

Monday, June 12, 2017 <\/span>By Sarah Jaffe<\/a>, Truthout<\/a> | Interview<\/span><\/div>\n

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\"AuthorAuthor Naomi Klein. (Photo: Kourosh Keshiri)<\/span>How did we get to the Trump presidency and the current political moment? How might things get worse and what can we do to build an alternative? In her new book, Naomi Klein offers what she describes as “a plan for how, if we keep our heads, we might just be able to flip the script and arrive at a radically better future.” Arundhati Roy calls <\/em>No Is Not Enough “an ordinary person’s guide to hope.” Order your copy today by making a donation to Truthout!<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Since election night 2016, the streets of the US have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this ongoing “Interviews for Resistance” series, experienced organizers, troublemakers and thinkers share their insights on what works, what doesn’t, what has changed and what is still the same. Today’s interview is the 46th in the series.\u00a0Click here for the most recent interview before this one<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Today we bring you a conversation with author and organizer Naomi Klein about her new book,\u00a0No\u00a0Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and\u00a0Winning the World We Need<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sarah Jaffe: You have a new book that, once again, has managed to both scare the shit out of me and also leave me with hope. This book is a synthesis of all of your prior work filtered through the lens of Trump. It is kind of scary how well Trump consolidates all your earlier work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Naomi Klein:<\/strong> [Laughs] I didn’t set out to do that. I was having a lot of people ask me to update\u00a0The Shock Doctrine<\/em>\u00a0and add a chapter about Trump. I was like, “Well, I am not going to do that, but maybe there is a way that I can write something to prepare people for what happens if there is a major crisis.” Because everyone was talking about “shock this” and “shock that” and how they are using shock and Kellyanne Conway as a shock to the system and all of that.<\/p>\n

These shocks are just the shocks that Trump is generating himself, whether by design or by incompetence and corruption, but what really scares me is: What happens when there is a major external shock to exploit? When I look at who he has surrounded himself with, from Mike Pence, who played a central role in the looting of New Orleans, to vulture bankers like Steven Mnuchin, to Betsy DeVos and her dreams of privatizing the school system\u2026. I wanted to do that, but then once I started writing about Trump I was like, “Well, it does have some relevant stuff from\u00a0No Logo<\/em>, too.” He is first and foremost a brand who has spawned brands. He breeds brands, in his family.<\/p>\n

I think in understanding his relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, I don’t think you can understand it without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Then, there is climate change. I had to get that in. So, it turned into being a bit of a mixtape.<\/p>\n

It is interesting because that shows us how shocking Trump isn’t. In the book, you point out that the term “horror” might actually be more appropriate to apply to Trump because he is not that shocking.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think by naming him “shocking” there is a way in which people absolve themselves. Shocking is like a bolt from the blue. It is something external that ruptures your world. That is why I think the most helpful way of understanding Trump is as living dystopian fiction, in the sense that what dystopian art tries to do is just follow existing trends to their logical conclusion, in exaggerated form, and then reflect that back to people and say, “Well, this is where all roads are leading. Do you want to get off this dangerous road?”<\/p>\n

A lot of the emotion is being misnamed. It is not shock. It is the horror of recognition. It is actually really bad dystopian fiction because it is so predictable. Like, “Of course America would elect Donald Trump as the corporate president.” I really do think we need to interrogate this idea of shock. Of course, there were many people in the United States who were not shocked by Trump’s election because they were very in touch with the racism and misogyny and xenophobia that elevated him and saw him as a fulfillment. There is this way of casting ourselves as innocents, “I am shocked! How could that happen?” It is almost like, “How could this not have happened? Everything has been put into place for this to happen.”<\/p>\n

It is interesting to think back to the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s. It seems very far away, but when you are talking about these questions of hollow brands, the way you described Trump, and then the fact that it would be impossible for Trump to divest from his brand because his brand is his name. But, that movement and that time actually sort of gives some opportunities for ways to challenge Trump and his family.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My point in writing about that movement was not to say, “We told you so,” but there is no doubt that the far right is entering into a vacuum left by neoliberal centrism and liberalism. It is worth remembering that not so long ago, there was a very large, progressive, committedly internationalist movement that was taking on the whole logic of what was called “free trade” or “globalization” or “corporate globalization.” We called it “corporate rule” for the most part, because the problem was not trade, it was the writing of rules for the global economy in the interests of a small group of powerful corporations. Forget hollow brands. The center of that fight was about the hollowing out of democracy. Yes, sure, you can still vote, but the most important decisions about your life are being outsourced to institutions over which you have no control.<\/p>\n

The fact that neoliberal centrist parties pushed those deals, signed those deals, negotiated those deals, and never aligned themselves with that grassroots progressive movement, left the space open for the Donald Trumps and the Nigel Farages and the Marine Le Pens of the world to come in and say, “We know how out of control you are. We believe you should be authors of your own fate, of your own destiny.” We left these ideas unattended, let’s just say. There are lots of great groups that never stopped focusing on trade, like Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch and lots of groups in Europe. But it stopped being a mass movement in the global north after September 11. It is worth interrogating why that happened.<\/p>\n

As you mentioned, this is not just a US phenomenon, which is another way that we could talk about Trump not being shocking. Can you talk about how that movement faded from the attention of people in the US and other places and where we saw the rise of these nativist movements? It is also interesting to think about where we didn’t see those.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It played out differently in different contexts. The turning point for us in North America, and also for Europeans, was September 11. I remember very, very vividly because immediately we started to see leaders try to associate our movement with terrorism.<\/p>\n

That July, the July before the September 11 attack, there had been a huge demonstration in Genoa. I think 300,000 people on the streets. It was really all walks of Italian life. It was against the G8 Summit, but it was really a continuation of these mobilizations that had been happening outside summits, IMF, the World Bank. This was a movement against neoliberalism, really, more than anything. Some people called themselves anticapitalist; not everybody did, there was diversity within the movement ideologically.<\/p>\n

Immediately after September 11, Silvio Berlusconi said, “These are the same forces that we were up against in Genoa.” And already the repression, the violence that demonstrators were facing was getting more intense. In Genoa, there had been a young man who had been killed by police. We started to see more live ammunition used against protestors.<\/p>\n

But even the symbolism of it. We were taking on the World Trade Organization, which sounds a little bit like the World Trade Center. Obviously, it was very different, but there was such a desire to bury that movement. In the book, I quote a headline that appeared in a Canadian newspaper, a right-wing national newspaper that appeared just a few days after the September 11 attacks, “Globalization Is So Yesterday.”<\/p>\n

So, part of it was smearing the movement as being quasi-terrorist because people were fighting with police and they were breaking windows and it was not a neat purely pacifist movement. There was property destruction. It was not violence against people, but there was property destruction.<\/p>\n

There had been very broad coalitions bringing together people across political spectrums. You have coalitions that brought together big NGOs that were focused on trade, as well as big trade unions, as well as anticapitalist anarchist groups and No One is Illegal and Indigenous groups. It was difficult navigating that diversity, but it was happening. What happened overnight after 9\/11, to be perfectly honest, is that \u2026 these coalitions need anchor institutions. Institutions that have resources. Particularly because the kind of organizing that has happened in the neoliberal age has mostly not been attached to some sturdy institutions. So, we needed the trade unions to stay with us, and pretty notably large trade unions basically just decided that they couldn’t be associated with people who were being cast as quasi-terrorists. That broke apart the coalition.<\/p>\n

People still continued to do the work, but it was the broadness of it that was where the power lay. I think there are important lessons to be learned from that — this is hard, but you can’t [get] spooked in the midst of crisis. That movement was important\u2026. It was always too white in North America. It was a diverse movement, it was a deeply international movement, it was around the world, it was largest in countries like India\u2026. If it had become more diverse and not less, that space would never had been available to Donald Trump to exploit.<\/p>\n

In that space, you saw the terrorist-baiting of that movement and then these right-wing nativist movements — the Trumps and the Marine Le Pens — put together that fear of terrorism with the “Also, trade is bad for you” and really weaponized that in a way that was interesting.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Latin America wasn’t spooked by 9\/11. The global South wasn’t, in general. But, particularly in Latin America, what happened was that in several countries, the left took power and was able to put policies in place that started to significantly take on some of the core institutions of neoliberalism. I don’t want to overly idealize it and say they had everything figured out by any means. In\u00a0This Changes Everything<\/em>\u00a0I am quite critical of the fact that a lot of these countries continued to be very extractive in where their incomes were coming from, which also made them extremely vulnerable — most notably Venezuela and Bolivia — these essentially petrol and gas states, and were doing very important income redistribution. But then, when the prices collapse, what have you got?<\/p>\n

Then the old school corporate right manages to slide back into power in some of these places.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes.<\/p>\n

Since you completed this book, Trump is officially\u00a0pulling out of the Paris\u00a0Accord<\/a>. He already had signalled that he wasn’t going to do anything, he was going to\u00a0get rid of the Clean Power Plan<\/a>. The immediate response is people are just like, “We are doomed. We are all going to die. There is nothing you can do about it.” I would love for you to contextualize Trump pulling out of the Paris Accord and then talk about how we can fight that doom — what can still be done while Trump is still president.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This decision was really a decision about the Trump brand, essentially a public relations decision. I say that because the Trump administration had already decided that they were going to destroy the Paris Accord from their perspective, because the Paris Accord is just a target of what we want to accomplish. We want to keep warming below two degrees Celsius, and preferably 1.5. But in terms of achieving that goal, all the Paris Accord is, is a kind of quilt where every country brings its own plans.<\/p>\n

The centerpiece of the US plan was Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Trump had already announced that they were abandoning that plan. So, the debate was whether or not they were going to officially pull out of the Paris Accord or whether they were going to stay in the Paris Accord, but completely ignore it and break their commitments, defiantly. Both of those decisions have a huge moral hazard attached to them, because it means that other countries can respond by saying, “Well, we are going to do the same thing.”<\/p>\n

Arguably, staying in the Paris Accord and treating it like it is not worth the paper it is printed on, which was what Ivanka and Rex Tillerson wanted to do, would have been more damaging for other countries in terms of what that signalled they could get away with. Whereas now, when he is openly raising the middle finger and saying, “We are walking away. I can get a better deal from this deal that was negotiated over a quarter of a century by almost 200 countries,” I think it is forcing countries to step up. If they are not going to walk away, then they kind of have to do more.<\/p>\n

What has been really inspiring is watching mayors step up, particularly the mayor of Pittsburgh who has stepped forward. The ultimate repudiation, because Pittsburgh was held up in Trump’s speech, he said that he was elected by the people of Pittsburgh as opposed to the people of Paris, perhaps not knowing that Pittsburgh has a very progressive mayor at the moment who corrected the record that Pennsylvania may have voted Trump, but Pittsburgh did not. There was already a very live, very energetic campaign in Pittsburgh to try to get the mayor to adopt this really ambitious target of\u00a0getting to 100 percent renewable energy\u00a0by 2035<\/a>, which is better than anything else in the country. The next day after Trump’s Paris withdrawal, the mayor adopted that target.<\/p>\n

Now we have hundreds of cities that have committed themselves to the Paris goals. I think we are seeing more ambition from states like California and New York, because they are under pressure from the climate justice movement. It is similar to what we are seeing with health care, where as we see how much damage they are willing to do, just the complete disregard for life on every level that this administration represents, it is starting to build momentum for state level deep change. We are seeing some really positive signs towards single-payer health care\u2026.<\/p>\n

When [Michelle Obama] said, “When they go low, we go high,” she was talking about tone and I am really not sure I agree with that [laughs]. I am not so concerned about tone, but I do think that that ethos of as they go low, rogue — as they abandon the world and so many millions of people — that every space in which they are not in control, whether it is universities, cities, states, other countries, tribes, whatever it is, all of us as organizers and activists and people who can be powerful when we get together in groups, we all have to do more. We have to step up. We have to be more ambitious. I see people rising to that and that is so exciting.<\/p>\n

Your book is titled\u00a0No Is Not Enough<\/em>. A lot of the organizers that I have talked to for this series have stressed over and over again that resistance is not enough now, we need to be pushing for something different. Then, there is this other tendency that basically is like, “We just need anyone but Trump. We just need to elect any Democrat.” Americans love the superficially shiny Justin Trudeau, but also \u2026 we are seeing Jeremy Corbyn put forward a legitimately left-wing platform, and it turns out it is really popular.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who knew? [Laughs] I mean, Jeremy Corbyn is the anti-Trudeau. He couldn’t be less slick. He has got some good social media folks working for him, but it is not about him\u2026. He has done better than all predictions of the supposedly expert class who have gotten it wrong again and again. The beauty of it has been, I have never seen political messaging that is so varied. He is not putting himself front and center. You have whole ads where he is not even in it and people are just hearing the message directly from teachers and pediatricians, the\u00a0amazing video that\u00a0Ken Loach made<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is showing that maybe it is possible to reject this celebrity model for politicians, whether it is Donald Trump or Justin Trudeau or frankly, Barack Obama. I hope to hell they prove that it is possible. What worries me is not just what you are saying, that it is just about getting rid of Trump and electing Democrats, but this talk of “We need to get Oprah” or “We need our own brand-based.\u2026” Or Mark Zuckerberg, god forbid. Or Bloomberg.<\/p>\n

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Donald Trump’s products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America. He is the culmination of a great many dangerous ideas that were fostered in this country and there has to be some ownership over that.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

What I am trying to do with this book is point out that Trump is not the crisis. He is a symptom of the crisis. If we don’t get at the underlying trends that made his rise possible, there are worse versions of Trump out there. There are more racist versions of Trump out there. There are even more violent versions of Trump out there. This idea of treating him as this alien intervention in the American political psyche — look, I want the Russia connections to be investigated, but there is a way in which it is reinforcing this idea of him as a foreign agent, somehow other. I can tell you\u00a0Donald Trump’s products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America. He is not an alien.\u00a0He is the culmination of a great many dangerous ideas that were fostered in this country and there has to be some ownership over that.<\/p>\n

To wrap up, you end the book talking about the\u00a0Leap Manifesto<\/a>, the platform that you worked on for Canadian politics, which immediately made me think of the\u00a0Right2Change<\/a>\u00a0platform that the Irish left put together before its last election. You talk about the\u00a0Vision for Black Lives<\/a>\u00a0platform. Tell us about the Leap Manifesto and why these people’s platforms, rather than personalities, are important right now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think there is some utopianism in the air. The triumph of neoliberalism has expressed itself so much in this atrophying of the political imagination. Even when the ideological project of neoliberalism is sort of in tatters on the floor, the idea that there is no alternative remains.<\/p>\n

The process of writing the Leap was so interesting in that way. It is hard. We had 60 people in a room together representing a very wide range of movements, all real anchors of social movements of the left were there. We realized that we had not done this before, or it had been generations. We had come together to oppose free trade deals. We had come together to oppose austerity agendas. We had come together to oppose some particularly vile politician. But, we had not come together to say, “What is [it] that we actually want?”<\/p>\n

Just recognizing that, yes, this is an atrophied muscle. We need practice. You can feel almost like a child in this moment when you are actually doing something you are not good at. But it was really gratifying. We spent two days and out of that came this brief document. It is only 1,400 words, that has now been endorsed by hundreds of organizations, a very broad range, including the largest trade union in the country and grassroots groups like No One Is Illegal, Coast Salish territory. Groups that don’t agree on everything but were able to come together around a vision that was much bolder than anything that was on offer in our last federal election.<\/p>\n

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TRUTHOUT PROGRESSIVE PICK<\/h4>\n
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\"No<\/a>“This book is a top-of-the-stack summer must-read.\u201d — Michael Stipe<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Click here now to get the book!<\/a><\/h4>\n
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It is continuing to be used to push politicians at the federal, provincial and municipal level. We are seeing slates of Leap candidates emerge in municipal elections and there has been a lot of interest in just sharing information around the world. For us, this is not about “We are trying to colonize the world with the Leap.” But we want to trade information because this idea is in the air and there are many social movements — I think the Vision for Black Lives, the platform that emerged last summer in the midst, once again, of a federal election campaign, coming from the Movement for Black Lives, it is such a visionary document. This is new to see this from social movements. Think about Occupy or even the criticism of the movement taking on free trade that we were talking about earlier. The criticism we always had was “We know what you are against, but what are you for?” We weren’t really ready to step up and answer that question, but I think that is changing.<\/p>\n

It is important on a lot of levels, but one of them is whoever the candidates turn out to be in the next election cycle, how great would it be for there to be a vision, or multiple visions, that are articulated? In the US, I think it is going to be a process where it bubbles up from cities and states. There is some really interesting work going on in Michigan. You have been covering all kinds of examples of this. Jackson. If that coalesced around a vision where any candidate that wanted the progressive vote would have to follow this platform, as opposed to having this sort of celebrity savior relationship with a political figure.<\/p>\n

Where can people get the book and how can they follow up with your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They can find out about the book at\u00a0www.NoIsNotEnough.org<\/a>. All my book tour dates are on there. It is available in bookstores soon. They can follow me on Twitter\u00a0@NaomiAKlein<\/a>\u00a0and they can find out about the Leap at\u00a0www.TheLeap.org<\/a>\u00a0where we have got lots of examples of what we are calling the “living Leap,” ways in which people are taking this broad-strokes vision and changing it and making it their own.<\/p>\n

Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a\u00a0podcast<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>. Not to be reprinted without permission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission<\/a>.<\/span><\/h1>\n
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Sarah Jaffe<\/a><\/h2>\n
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Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute and has covered labor, social and economic justice and politics for Truthout, The Atlantic, The Guardian, In These Times and many other publications. She is the cohost of\u00a0Belabored<\/em>, a labor podcast hosted by Dissent magazine, and the author of\u00a0Necessary Trouble: Americans In Revolt\u00a0<\/em>(Nation Books, 2016). Follow her on Twitter:\u00a0@sarahljaffe<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

* * * * *<\/h1>\n

Militant again, ’60s hippies saddle up against Trump in Philly burbs<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

Updated:<\/strong> May 15, 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

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By\u00a0Jane M. Von Bergen \/ Staff<\/b><\/a><\/div>\n
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Ilse Sakheim,<\/b> 91, at an “Uncover Trump’s Coverups” rally at Sandy Run Middle School in Dresher Saturday. Sakheim, whose parents died in the Holocaust, is part of Indivisible Gwynedd, a group of about 50 who live at the Foulkeways at Gwynedd retirement community and are opposed to President Trump’s policies.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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by Jane M. Von Bergen<\/b><\/a>, STAFF WRITER @JaneVonBergen<\/a> | <\/span>jvonbergen@phillynews.com<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There weren’t any horses tied up outside a Montgomery County middle school Saturday, but inside the troops were ready to saddle up.<\/p>\n

They had been on this ride before.<\/p>\n

Noticeably lacking in piercings, tattoos, and dyed-purple hair, the mostly older crowd that gathered for an anti-Trump rally Saturday wasn’t short on passion, because they had already seen the trail map.<\/p>\n

Now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, they remembered marching on Washington in the 1960s for the civil rights movement and hearing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in person. They had held up peace signs to protest the Vietnam War. They had watched the White House unravel in the 1970s as the Watergate scandal swamped American politics.<\/p>\n

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“We’ve got a whole bunch of hippies in the room,” State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Phila. and Montgomery) said, to laughter from the crowd of about 275\u00a0at the “Indivisible Rally — Uncover Trump’s CoverUps — Make Him and Congress Answer to Us” at the Sandy Run Middle School in Dresher.<\/p>\n

“We have a whole bunch of ex-Woodstockers in the room,” he said, “singing ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ Lord have mercy.”<\/p>\n

More laughter. The tribe had been recognized, so obvious when no one needed a printout of the lyrics to sing along to the Pete Seeger tune that had been one of the protest anthems in the 1960s and 1970s.<\/p>\n

Hughes told the audience members that, as involved as they were, they needed to work harder to get others involved, to encourage those “who can’t figure out how to make the transition from feeling the pain to inflicting the pain.”<\/p>\n

All of the speakers, U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, the Rev. Gregory Holston, Montgomery County Commissioner Val Arkoosh, Wharton business-ethics professor Eric Orts, Temple law professor Craig Green, and a representative from Common Cause PA, urged the group to resist President Trump and his policies in every way.<\/p>\n

They listed their many complaints: Trump’s connection with the Russians; the odd timing of FBI Director James Comey’s firing coinciding with a White House visit of Russian leaders; the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act; the loosening of regulations designed to protect the environment; their fears that Trump was using the presidency to make himself and his family wealthier; the ban on travel from Muslim countries; the budget that would cut scores of programs that help the poor and the elderly; and plans to prosecute crimes more vigorously.<\/p>\n

“I can’t stay home,” said Ilse Sakheim, 91, who carried a “No Tax Cuts for Trump” sign.<\/b><\/p>\n

Sakheim belongs to Indivisible Gwynedd, a group of about 50 people who live at Foulkeways at Gwynedd, a retirement community in Montgomery County. Their group is one of hundreds of “Indivisible” groups around the country whose leaders are borrowing from the tea party playbook to combat and resist what they see as a full-frontal attack on democracy by Trump, his inner-circle, and his followers.<\/b><\/p>\n

Sakheim and her husband were in their late 30s in 1963 when they joined 200,000 others in Washington at the march during which King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “It was absolutely wonderful. The feeling was fabulous. We were all together and it was a joyous march — blacks and whites together.”<\/b><\/p>\n

But her participation in Saturday’s rally has its roots in a frightening and tragic part of her past.<\/b><\/p>\n

In 1939, when she was a 13-year-old Jewish teenager in Germany, her parents put her on a ship to England. Her parents never made it out of Germany alive. They were killed in Auschwitz.<\/b><\/p>\n

“I see too many parallels now with what happened in Germany,” she said. “They also fired people” who opposed them. “They talked bad about minorities. They hated homosexuals. They lied about everything. They said they were going to make Germany great again, and that in 10 years we wouldn’t recognize Germany.<\/b><\/p>\n

“You sure didn’t recognize it. It was in ashes,” she said, as she waited for the rally to begin Saturday.<\/b><\/p>\n

“All the preaching of hate. All the talk about immigrants. The untruths about corporations. Corporations made the gas that killed my parents.<\/b><\/p>\n

“My parents would have loved to be immigrants to this country,” she said. “And we who were immigrants, we contributed to this country with our work, with our brains, with our taxes,” she said.<\/b><\/p>\n

“It means that I can’t stay home. I have to protest. I have to try and help to change it,” she said. “I can’t give up at 91. It’s up to everybody. I have to do it because my parents died, because my friends died. People went to jail. People were suffering. They are still suffering.”<\/b><\/p>\n

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Read more by Jane M. Von Bergen<\/a><\/div>\n

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How Trump Could Get Fired
\nThe path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment
\n(replacing an unfit president)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

May 8, 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hours after Donald Trump\u2019s Inauguration, a post appeared on the official White House petitions page, demanding that he release his tax returns. In only a few days, it gathered more signatures than any previous White House petition. The success of the Women\u2019s March had shown that themed protests could both mobilize huge numbers of people and hit a nerve with the President. On Easter weekend, roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people protested in two hundred cities, calling for him to release his tax returns and sell his businesses. On Capitol Hill, protesters chanted \u201cImpeach Forty-five!\u201d In West Palm Beach, a motorcade ferrying him from the Trump International Golf Club to Mar-a-Lago had to take a circuitous route to avoid demonstrators. The White House does all it can to keep the President away from protests, but the next day Trump tweeted, \u201cSomeone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tax Day itself, Trump travelled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he would be among his supporters again, giving a speech at Snap-on, a manufacturer of high-end power tools and other gear. Wisconsin has emerged as one of Trump\u2019s favorite states. He is the first Republican Presidential candidate to win there since 1984. He included the state in a post-election \u201cthank-you tour.\u201d Another visit was planned for shortly after the Inauguration, but it was cancelled once it became clear that it would attract protests.<\/p>\n

By this point in George W. Bush\u2019s term, Bush had travelled to twenty-three states and a foreign country. Trump has visited just nine states and has never stayed the night. He inhabits a closed world that one adviser recently described to me as \u201cFortress Trump.\u201d Rarely venturing beyond the White House and Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes through reports from friends, staff, and a feast of television coverage of himself. Media is Trump\u2019s \u201cdrug of choice,\u201d Sam Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, told me recently. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t drink. He doesn\u2019t do drugs. His drug is himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Tax Day itinerary enabled him to avoid the exposure of a motorcade; instead, he flew on Marine One directly to Snap-on\u2019s headquarters. Several hundred protesters were outside chanting and holding signs. But the event\u2019s organizers had created a wall of tractor-trailers around the spot where Trump would land, blocking protesters from seeing Trump and him from seeing them.<\/p>\n

Snap-on\u2019s headquarters, a gleaming expanse of stainless steel, chrome, and enamel, provided a fine backdrop for muscular American manufacturing, though in fact the firm closed its Kenosha factory more than a decade ago. Nick Pinchuk, the C.E.O., led Trump past displays of Snap-on products, showing him a car hooked up to state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment (\u201cIt\u2019s a different world!\u201d Trump mused), and a table of Snap-on souvenirs, including small, colorful metal boxes that Pinchuk said some customers buy to hold ashes after a cremation. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of depressing,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

An auditorium was packed with local dignitaries and Snap-on employees. As \u201cHail to the Chief\u201d played on the sound system, Trump stepped onto the stage. He stood in front of a sculpture of an American flag rippling in the wind, made from hundreds of Snap-on wrenches. Behind him was a banner: \u201cBUY AMERICAN\u2014HIRE AMERICAN<\/small>.\u201d For a moment, the President, wearing a red tie, leaning on the lectern, looked as if he were back on the campaign trail. \u201cThese are great, great people,\u201d he began. \u201cAnd these are real workers. I love the workers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a level playing field,\u201d he said. It was a treasured campaign line, to which he now added a vow of imminent progress: \u201cYou\u2019re gonna have one very soon.\u201d After Republicans abandoned their first effort to enact health-care reform, and courts blocked two executive orders designed to curb immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, he was determined to dispel any sense that his Administration had been weakened. \u201cOur tax reform and tax plan is coming along very well,\u201d he assured the crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be out very soon. We\u2019re working on health care and we\u2019re going to get that done, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s approval rating is forty per cent\u2014the lowest of any newly elected President since Gallup started measuring it. Even before Trump entered the White House, the F.B.I. and four congressional committees were investigating potential collusion between his associates and the Russian government. Since then, Trump\u2019s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have become senior White House officials, prompting intense criticism over potential conflicts of interest involving their private businesses. Between October and March, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics received more than thirty-nine thousand public inquiries and complaints, an increase of five thousand per cent over the same period at the start of the Obama Administration. Nobody occupies the White House without criticism, but Trump is besieged by doubts of a different order, centering on the overt, specific, and, at times, bipartisan discussion of whether he will be engulfed by any one of myriad problems before he has completed even one term in office\u2014and, if he is, how he might be removed.<\/p>\n

When members of Congress returned to their home districts in March, outrage erupted at town-hall meetings, where constituents jeered Republican officials, chanting \u201cDo your job!\u201d and \u201cPush back!\u201d The former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who is now a Republican congressman, told me that he\u2019d held eight town halls in his district. Trump won South Carolina by nearly fifteen points, so Sanford was surprised to hear people calling for him to be impeached. \u201cI\u2019d never heard that before in different public interactions with people in the wake of a new President being elected,\u201d he told me. \u201cEven when you heard it with the Tea Party crowd, with Obama, it was later in the game. It didn\u2019t start out right away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit.<\/b> During the past few months, I interviewed several dozen people about the prospects of cutting short Trump\u2019s Presidency. I spoke to his friends and advisers; to lawmakers and attorneys who have conducted impeachments; to physicians and historians; and to current members of the Senate, the House, and the intelligence services. By any normal accounting, the chance of a Presidency ending ahead of schedule is remote. In two hundred and twenty-eight years, only one President has resigned; two have been impeached, though neither was ultimately removed from office; eight have died. But nothing about Trump is normal. Although some of my sources maintained that laws and politics protect the President to a degree that his critics underestimate, others argued that he has already set in motion a process of his undoing. All agree that Trump is unlike his predecessors in ways that intensify his political, legal, and personal risks. He is the first President with no prior experience in government or the military, the first to retain ownership of a business empire, and the oldest person ever to assume the Presidency.<\/p>\n

For Trump\u2019s allies, the depth of his unpopularity is an urgent cause for alarm. \u201cYou can\u2019t govern this country with a forty-per-cent approval rate. You just can\u2019t,\u201d Stephen Moore, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation, who advised Trump during the campaign, told me. \u201cNobody in either party is going to bend over backwards for Trump if over half the country doesn\u2019t approve of him. That, to me, should be a big warning sign.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has embraced strategies that normally boost popularity, such as military action. In April, some pundits were quick to applaud him for launching a cruise-missile attack on a Syrian airbase, and for threatening to attack North Korea. In interviews, Trump marvelled at the forces at his disposal, like a man wandering into undiscovered rooms of his house. (\u201cIt\u2019s so incredible. It\u2019s brilliant.\u201d) But the Syria attack only briefly reversed the slide in Trump\u2019s popularity; it remained at historic lows.<\/p>\n

It is not a good sign for a beleaguered President when his party gets dragged down, too. From January to April, the number of Americans who had a favorable view of the Republican Party dropped seven points, to forty per cent, according to the Pew Research Center. I asked Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a Presidency. \u201cNo, nobody has,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we\u2019ve never lived in a Third World banana republic. I don\u2019t mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise.\u201d Very few Republicans in Congress have openly challenged Trump, but Taylor cautioned against interpreting that as committed support. \u201cMy guess is that there\u2019s only between fifty and a hundred Republican members of the House that are truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump as President,\u201d he said. \u201cThe balance sees him as somewhere between a deep and dangerous embarrassment and a threat to the Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Administration\u2019s defiance of conventional standards of probity makes it acutely vulnerable to ethical scandal. The White House recently stopped releasing visitors\u2019 logs, limiting the public\u2019s ability to know who is meeting with the President and his staff. Trump has also issued secret waivers to ethics rules, so that political appointees can alter regulations that they previously lobbied to dismantle.<\/p>\n

On the day that Trump spoke in Wisconsin, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW<\/small>), a prominent legal watchdog group, expanded a federal lawsuit that accuses Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, a provision that restricts officeholders from receiving gifts and favors from foreign interests. The lawsuit cites the Trump International Hotel, half a mile from the White House, which foreign dignitaries have admitted frequenting as a way to curry favor with the President. (\u201cIsn\u2019t it rude to come to his city and say, \u2018I am staying at your competitor\u2019?\u201d an Asian diplomat told\u00a0the Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0in November.) The suit, first filed in January, in the Southern District of New York, is partly an effort to pry open the President\u2019s business records. Two plaintiffs involved in the hotel-and-restaurant industry joined the current case, arguing that Trump\u2019s businesses enjoy unfair advantages. \u201cThis isn\u2019t about politics; I\u2019m a registered Republican,\u201d Jill Phaneuf, a plaintiff who books receptions and events for hotels, has said. \u201cI joined this lawsuit because the President is taking business away from me.\u201d<\/p>\n

CREW<\/small> is best known for its role in exposing the ethics violations of Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, who, in 2006, resigned under indictment; and of Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who went to prison for corruption the same year. Richard Painter, the vice-chair of CREW<\/small>\u2019s board, was formerly the chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush\u2019s White House. He said that the Bush Administration maintained a policy of forbidding senior officials from retaining business interests that conflicted with their responsibilities, as some in Trump\u2019s White House have done. \u201cWe never had controversies over divestment,\u201d Painter told me. \u201cThey\u2019d ask, \u2018What is Hank Paulson\u2019\u00a0\u201d\u2014who became Treasury Secretary in 2006\u2014\u201c\u00a0\u2018going to do?\u2019 \u2018He\u2019s going to sell his Goldman Sachs stuff.\u2019 It was pretty cut and dried.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, nine months after the F.B.I. started investigating Russian interference in the campaign, it continues to examine potential links between Trump\u2019s associates and the Kremlin. Michael Flynn<\/a>, who resigned as Trump\u2019s national-security adviser after acknowledging that he lied about his contact with Russia\u2019s Ambassador, is seeking immunity in exchange for speaking with federal investigators, raising the prospect that he could reveal other undisclosed contacts, or a broader conspiracy. Robert Kelner, Flynn\u2019s lawyer, wrote in a statement, \u201cGeneral Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.\u201d The F.B.I. is also investigating Paul Manafort<\/a>, Trump\u2019s former campaign chairman, after it was reported that Manafort received millions of dollars in cash payments from pro-Kremlin groups in Ukraine; and Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign until last September. The F.B.I. has described Page, in court filings, as having connections to Russian agents.<\/p>\n

The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links to the Kremlin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access to the findings. Recently, one of them, Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, privately told friends that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump completing a full term. (Warner\u2019s spokesperson said that the Senator was \u201cnot referring specifically to the Russia investigation, but rather the totality of challenges the President is currently facing.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In a gesture intended to convey transparency, Jared Kushner and Trump\u2019s outside adviser Roger Stone have offered to speak to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Newt Gingrich, a Trump campaign adviser who, when he was Speaker of the House, led the push for Bill Clinton\u2019s impeachment, believes it is a risky maneuver. \u201cAnybody who goes in front of a congressional hearing for something that is being investigated by the F.B.I. is in immediate danger of perjury in the most innocent way, and I think that\u2019s really dangerous,\u201d Gingrich told me. \u201cNone of these guys understand that this is a war, and, if the left can put them in jail, they\u2019re going to put them in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear how fully Trump apprehends the threats to his Presidency. Unlike previous Republican Administrations, Fortress Trump contains no party elder with the stature to check the President\u2019s decisions. \u201cThere is no one around him who has the ability to restrain any of his impulses, on any issue ever, for any reason,\u201d Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican consultant, said, adding, \u201cWhere is the \u2018What the fuck\u2019 chorus?\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s insulation from unwelcome information appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. \u201cHe tends to not like a lot of negative feedback,\u201d Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump\u2019s associates are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. \u201cI don\u2019t think he realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he\u2019s such a large guy and he\u2019s so powerful,\u201d Ruddy went on. \u201cI already sense that a lot of people don\u2019t want to give him bad news about things. I\u2019ve already been approached by several people that\u2019ll say, \u2018He\u2019s got to hear this. Could you tell him?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

There has been considerable speculation about Trump\u2019s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. His personal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, issued brief, celebratory statements\u2014Trump\u2019s lab-test results were \u201castonishingly excellent\u201d\u2014mentioning little more than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin. Trump himself says that he is \u201cnot a big sleeper\u201d (\u201cI like three hours, four hours\u201d) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald\u2019s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.<\/p>\n

Secrecy about a President\u2019s health has a rich history. \u201cNo one in the White House wants to emphasize the fact that the President might be too ill to carry out his responsibilities,\u201d Robert E. Gilbert, a political scientist at Northeastern University who studies Presidential health, told me. \u201cThey want everyone to think that the President is able to surmount any problem, no matter how serious, because they are thinking of re\u00eblection, and they are thinking of the judgment of history.\u201d Although John F. Kennedy\u2019s tan was often described as a sign of vigor, it was caused by Addison\u2019s disease, an endocrine disorder, which Kennedy and his aides hid for decades, and which left him dependent on multiple medications.<\/p>\n

Yet it is impossible to conceal the sheer physical strain of the Presidency. Studying the medical records of Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Roizen, the chairman of the Cleveland Clinic\u2019s Wellness Institute, has concluded that \u201cunrequited stress\u201d\u2014the absence of peers and friends\u2014takes the greatest toll. Kennedy, who liked to compare his critics to hecklers at a bullfight, quoted a poem by the matador Domingo Ortega: \u201cOnly one is there who knows\u00a0\/\u00a0And he\u2019s the man who fights the bull.\u201d A 2015 study, led by Anupam Jena, of Harvard Medical School, analyzed the life expectancy of five hundred and forty politicians in seventeen countries. Jena found that the lives of elected leaders are, on average,\u00a02.7 years shorter<\/a>\u00a0than those of the runners-up.<\/p>\n

The Framers of the Constitution planned ahead for the death of Presidents\u2014hence, Vice-Presidents\u2014but they failed to address an unnerving prospect: a President who is alive and very sick. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and been left comatose, there would have been no legal way to allow others to assume his powers. To fend off that possibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution in February, 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is judged to be \u201cunable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.\u201d The assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel of medical experts. If the President objects\u2014a theoretical crisis that scholars call \u201ccontested removal\u201d\u2014Congress has three weeks to debate and decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to remove the President. There is no appeal.<\/p>\n

However, the definition of what would constitute an inability to discharge the duties of office was left deliberately vague. Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and others who drafted the clause wanted to insure that the final decision was not left to doctors. The fate of a President, Bayh wrote later, is \u201creally a political question\u201d that should rest on the \u201cprofessional judgment of the political circumstances existing at the time.\u201d The Twenty-fifth Amendment could therefore be employed in the case of a President who is not incapacitated but is considered mentally impaired.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0by psychiatrists at Duke University, published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease<\/em>, in 2006, made a striking assertion: about half the Presidents they studied had suffered a mental illness at one time or another. The researchers examined biographies and medical histories of thirty-seven Presidents, from Washington to Nixon, and found that forty-nine per cent met the criteria for a psychiatric disorder\u2014mostly depression, anxiety, and substance abuse\u2014at some point in their lives. Ten Presidents, or about one in four, had symptoms \u201cevident during presidential office, which in most cases probably impaired job performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of these illnesses had far-reaching historical consequences. Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce\u2019s Presidency was marked by the \u201cdead weight of hopeless sorrow,\u201d according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Years after the death of Lyndon B. Johnson, it emerged that, as the war in Vietnam intensified, he exhibited symptoms of profound paranoia, leading two of his assistants to secretly seek the advice of psychiatrists. Johnson imagined conspiracies involving the Times <\/em>or the United Nations or \u00e9lites whom he called \u201cthose Harvards.\u201d He took to carrying, in his jacket pocket, faulty statistics that he recited about \u201cvictory\u201d and troop commitments in Vietnam. \u201cFor a long time, Johnson succeeded,\u201d one of the assistants wrote, \u201cnot in changing reality, but in deceiving much of the country and, perhaps, himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only one Administration is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became Reagan\u2019s chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in disarray. \u201cHe seemed to be despondent but not depressed,\u201d Baker said later, of the President.<\/p>\n

Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White House officials about the Administration\u2019s dysfunction, and Cannon learned that Reagan was not reading even short documents. \u201cThey said he wouldn\u2019t come over to work\u2014all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence,\u201d Cannon recalled, in \u201cLandslide<\/a>,\u201d a 1988 account of Reagan\u2019s second term, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Baker summoned a small group of aides to his home. One of them, Thomas Griscom, told me recently that Cannon, who died in 2011, \u201cfloats this idea that maybe we\u2019d invoke the Constitution.\u201d Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he proposed a diagnostic process of sorts: they would observe the President\u2019s behavior at lunch.<\/p>\n

In the event, Reagan was funny and alert, and Baker considered the debate closed. \u201cWe finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, \u2018You know, boys, I think we\u2019ve all seen this President is fully capable of doing the job,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Griscom said. They never raised the issue again. In 1993, four years after leaving office, Reagan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer\u2019s. His White House physicians said that they saw no symptoms during his Presidency. In 2015, researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Alzheimer\u2019s Disease<\/em>, in which they examined transcripts of news conferences in the course of Reagan\u2019s Presidency and discovered changes in his speech that are linked to the onset of dementia. Reagan had taken to repeating words and using \u201cthing\u201d in the place of specific nouns, but they could not prove that, while he was in office, his judgment and decision-making were affected.<\/p>\n

Mental-health professionals have largely kept out of politics since 1964, when the magazine Fact<\/em> asked psychiatrists if they thought Barry Goldwater was psychologically fit to be President. More than a thousand said that he wasn\u2019t, calling him \u201cwarped,\u201d \u201cimpulsive,\u201d and a \u201cparanoid schizophrenic.\u201d Goldwater sued for libel, successfully, and, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association added to its code of ethics the so-called \u201cGoldwater rule,\u201d which forbade making a diagnosis without an in-person examination and without receiving permission to discuss the findings publicly. Professional associations for psychologists, social workers, and others followed suit. With regard to Trump, however, the rule has been broken repeatedly. More than fifty thousand mental-health professionals have signed\u00a0a petition<\/a>\u00a0stating that Trump is \u201ctoo seriously mentally ill to perform the duties of president and should be removed\u201d under the Twenty-fifth Amendment.<\/p>\n

Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes that, in this instance, the Goldwater rule is outweighed by another ethical commitment: a \u201cduty to warn\u201d others when he assesses that a person might harm them. Dodes told me, \u201cTrump is going to face challenges from people who are not going to bend to his will. If you have a President who takes it as a personal attack on him, which he does, and flies into a paranoid rage, that\u2019s how you start a war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many of his colleagues, Dodes speculates that Trump fits the description of someone with malignant narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, a need for admiration, sadism, and a tendency toward unrealistic fantasies. On February 13th,\u00a0in a letter to the Times<\/a>, Dodes and thirty-four other mental-health professionals wrote, \u201cWe fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.\u201d In response, Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University Medical College, who wrote the section on narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders\u2014IV<\/em>, sought to discourage the public diagnoses. Frances\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cHe may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn\u2019t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.\u201d<\/p>\n

To some mental-health professionals, the debate over diagnoses and the Goldwater rule distracts from a larger point. \u201cThis issue is not whether Donald Trump is mentally ill but whether he\u2019s dangerous,\u201d James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, told attendees at a recent public meeting at Yale School of Medicine on the topic of Trump\u2019s mental health. \u201cHe publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged followers to beat up protesters. He approves of torture. He has boasted of his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault,\u201d Gilligan said.<\/p>\n

Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No. 28: Do you often lose your temper?) \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt in my mind that Trump would never pass muster,\u201d Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control officer in the Army, told me. \u201cAny of us that had our hands anywhere near nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the months since Trump took office, several members of Congress have cited concern about his mental health as a reason to change the law. In early April, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a professor of constitutional law at American University, and twenty co-sponsors introduced a bill that would expand the authority of medical personnel and former senior officials to assess the mental fitness of a President. The bill has no chance of coming up for a vote anytime soon, but its sponsors believe that they have a constitutional duty to convene a body to assess Trump\u2019s health. Representative Earl Blumenauer, of Oregon, introduced a similar bill, which would also give former Presidents and Vice-Presidents a voice in evaluating a President\u2019s mental stability. Of Trump, he said, \u201cThe serial repetition of proven falsehoods\u2014Is this an act? Is this a tactic? Is he just wired weird? It raises the question in my mind about the nature of Presidential disability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters, but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental health as a \u201cliberal fantasy.\u201d Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, \u201cI believe that invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool\u2014not immediately, but well before 2020.\u201d In Tribe\u2019s interpretation, the standard of the amendment is not \u201ca medical or otherwise technical one but is one resting on a commonsense understanding of what it means for a President to be \u2018unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office\u2019\u2014an inability that can obviously be manifested by gross and pathological inattention or indifference to, or failure to understand, the limits of those powers or the mandatory nature of those duties.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an example of \u201cpathological inattention,\u201d Tribe noted that, on April 11th, days after North Korea launched a missile, Trump described an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, as part of an \u201carmada\u201d advancing on North Korea, even though the ship was sailing away from North Korea at the time. Moreover, Tribe said, Trump\u2019s language borders on incapacity. Asked recently why he reversed a pledge to brand China a currency manipulator, Trump said, of President Xi Jinping, \u201cNo. 1, he\u2019s not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it\u2019s like generalities, it\u2019s not. They have\u2014they\u2019ve actually\u2014their currency\u2019s gone up. So it\u2019s a very, very specific formula.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence C. Mohr, who became a White House physician in 1987 and remained in the job until 1993, came to believe that Presidential disability must be understood to encompass \u201cvery subtle manifestations\u201d that might impair the President\u2019s capacity to do the job. A President should be evaluated for \u201calertness, cognitive function, judgment, appropriate behavior, the ability to choose among options and the ability to communicate clearly,\u201d Mohr told a researcher in 2010. \u201cIf any of these are impaired, it is my opinion that the powers of the President should be transferred to the Vice-President until the impairment resolves.\u201d<\/p>\n

In practice, however, unless the President were unconscious, the public could see the use of the amendment as a constitutional coup. Measuring deterioration over time would be difficult in Trump\u2019s case, given that his \u201cjudgment\u201d and \u201cability to communicate clearly\u201d were, in the view of many Americans, impaired before he took office. For those reasons, Robert Gilbert, the Presidential-health specialist, told me, \u201cIf the statements get too strange, then the Vice-President might be able to do something. But if the President is just being himself\u2014talking in the same way that he talked during the campaign\u2014then the Vice-President and the Cabinet would find it very difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

The power of impeachment is a more promising tool for curtailing a defective Presidency. The Framers considered the ability to eject an executive so critical that they enshrined it in the Constitution even before they had agreed on the details of the office itself. On June 2, 1787, while the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, were still arguing whether the Presidency should consist of a committee or a single person, they adopted, without debate, the right to impeach for \u201cmalpractice or neglect of duty.\u201d They gave the House of Representatives the power to impeach a President for \u201ctreason, bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors\u201d by a simple majority vote, and they gave the Senate the power to convict or dismiss the charges, setting a high bar for conviction, with a two-thirds majority.<\/p>\n

But what would \u201chigh Crimes and Misdemeanors\u201d mean in practice? In 1970, during an unsuccessful effort to impeach the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Representative Gerald Ford argued that an impeachable offense was \u201cwhatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.\u201d That was an overstatement\u2014the President was never intended to serve at the pleasure of Congress\u2014but it contained an essential truth: impeachment is possible even without a specific violation of the U.S. Criminal Code. When Alexander Hamilton wrote of \u201chigh Crimes,\u201d he was referring to the violation of \u201cpublic trust,\u201d by abusing power, breaching ethics, or undermining the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The first test came with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, in 1868. Johnson, who became President after Lincoln\u2019s assassination, was a combative Tennessean, sympathetic to the Southern states, and was uncomfortable in Washington, which he disparaged as \u201ctwelve square miles bordered by reality.\u201d He mocked the legislative branch as \u201ca body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress,\u201d and vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which was intended to confer citizenship on freed slaves. Congress was incensed; Senator Carl Schurz, of Missouri, compared Johnson to \u201ca wounded and anger-crazed boar.\u201d Eventually, the President engineered a showdown with Congress, by deliberately breaking a law against firing a Cabinet secretary without Senate consent. As a result, the House moved to impeach him, accusing him of \u201cdenying\u201d the work of another branch of government and \u201cpreventing the execution\u201d of laws passed by Congress. Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.<\/p>\n

David O. Stewart, the author of \u201cImpeached<\/a>,\u201d a history of the case, told me that it established a crucial point: impeachment is not a judicial proceeding but a tool of political accountability. \u201cBecause of the unique powers of the executive, we are depending on a single person to be wise and sane,\u201d Stewart said. \u201cIf, in fact, there are enough people who no longer think those are both true, impeachment is designed to deal with that.\u201d For this reason, actual evidence of misconduct may not be the most important criterion in determining which Presidents get impeached. \u201cThe most important thing is political popularity,\u201d Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina, told me. \u201cA popular President is unlikely to be threatened with impeachment. Second is your relationship with your party\u2014how strongly are they connected to you? Third is your relationship with Congress, and fourth is the nature of whatever the misconduct may be.\u201d<\/p>\n

By far the most valuable lessons about impeachment come from Richard Nixon. In 1974, Nixon resigned shortly before he could be impeached, but his misjudgments\u2014political, psychological, and legal\u2014have illuminated the risks to Presidents ever since. In 1972, Nixon\u2019s White House oversaw the bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex and the ensuing coverup. That was illegal and unethical, but it did not guarantee Nixon\u2019s downfall, which came about because of two critical mistakes.<\/p>\n

First, when the scandal emerged, the President underestimated the threat. \u201cThere were any number of steps that could have made it go away,\u201d Evan Thomas, the author of \u201cBeing Nixon<\/a>,\u201d told me. \u201cThey could have cleaned house and fired people.\u201d But Nixon assumed that his supporters would never believe the accusations. \u201cHe was ahead by thirty-four points in the polls in August, 1972,\u201d Thomas went on. \u201cHe could have taken his clothes off and run around the White House front yard and he was going to win re\u00eblection.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the scandal ground on, Nixon made his second mistake: he flouted the authority of a coequal branch of government. In October, 1973, Nixon refused to obey a federal appellate-court ruling that ordered him to turn over tapes of conversations in the Oval Office, and he forced out the investigation\u2019s special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. For nine months, Nixon continued to resist\u2014in effect threatening the basic constitutional system\u2014until, in July, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that he had to comply. By then, the damage was done, and the House Judiciary Committee launched impeachment hearings. By thwarting other branches, Nixon weakened his support in Congress and convinced the country that he had something to hide. Until that point, much of the public had not focussed on the slow, complex investigation, but interviews at the time show that Nixon\u2019s stonewalling made people pay attention, and he never recovered. \u201cWell, everything has added up to his incompetence over the last few months, and I don\u2019t think the American people should stand for it any longer,\u201d a woman interviewed in New York by the Associated Press said. \u201cIn fact, I just signed an impeach petition.\u201d<\/p>\n

By August, many of his top aides had been indicted, and polls showed that fifty-seven per cent of the public believed that Nixon should be removed from office. On August 6th, after a tape recording surfaced which captured him orchestrating the coverup, he was abandoned by Republicans who had previously derided the Watergate scandal as a witch hunt. Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, told colleagues, \u201cNixon should get his ass out of the White House\u2014today!\u201d On August 9th, Nixon sent a letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: \u201cDear Mr. Secretary, I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.\u201d<\/p>\n

A quarter century later, the Bill Clinton impeachment yielded two related lessons\u2014one about the path into crisis, and one about the path out of it. The first lesson was that investigations beget investigations. In January, 1994, when a special prosecutor started looking into Bill and Hillary Clinton\u2019s investments in Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real-estate deal, there was no way to anticipate that it would conclude, nearly five years later, with Clinton\u2019s impeachment for trying to cover up an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. Many raged against the conduct of that inquiry, accusing Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, of abusing his powers, but the outcome demonstrated that a White House under investigation is in danger of spiralling into crisis.<\/p>\n

The second lesson of the Clinton impeachment comes from the strategy adopted by his legal team. Learning from Nixon\u2019s fate, the lawyers realized that congressional Democrats would abandon Clinton if they concluded that he had lost the trust of the public. Gregory Craig, one of the lawyers who directed Clinton\u2019s defense, told me recently, \u201cThe fundamental point is that it\u2019s a political process.\u201d He and his team spent less energy on disputing the details of evidence than on maintaining support from fellow-Democrats and from the public. They painted Clinton as the victim of a partisan quest to exploit an offense\u2014covering up an affair\u2014that was not on the scale of abuse that the Framers had in mind. \u201cTo be honest, we pursued a strategy that embraced polarization,\u201d Craig recalled. \u201cI gave a statement to the press that said this is the most unfair process since the Inquisition in Spain. Some arcane historical reference came out of my mouth. I said, \u2018It\u2019s like they\u2019ve tied up President Clinton, put him in a closet in the middle of the night and turned off the lights, and they\u2019re whipping him.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

The strategy succeeded. By the time the House impeached Clinton, on December 19, 1998, his approval rating had risen to more than seventy per cent\u2014his highest level ever. \u201cIt\u2019s a vindictive party that just went out to get him,\u201d a man at an American Legion post in San Diego told a reporter, in December, just before the House voted to impeach. When the case reached the Senate, Clinton\u2019s lawyers capitalized on his popularity and presented his misdeeds in the broader context of his Presidency. In closing arguments, Charles Ruff, the White House counsel, asked, \u201cWould it put at risk the liberties of the people to retain the President in office?\u201d The Senate acquitted Clinton on all charges.<\/p>\n

Were Trump to face impeachment, his lawyers would likely try to present him as a victim of a partisan feud, but his unpopularity would be a liability; Republicans in Congress would have little reason to defend him. Nonetheless, the Clinton impeachment may contain an even larger warning for Democrats in pursuit of Trump. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty important to be seen in sorrow rather than anger,\u201d Stewart, the historian of impeachment, said. \u201cDon\u2019t emerge red in tooth and claw. That\u2019s not merely tactical\u2014it\u2019s good for the country, because you should only pursue impeachment if you really have to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not long ago, the topic of impeaching Trump occupied a spot on the fringe of Democratic priorities somewhere around the California secessionist movement. \u201cIf you\u2019d have asked me around Election Day, I would have said it\u2019s not realistic,\u201d Robert B. Reich, Clinton\u2019s Secretary of Labor, told me in April. \u201cBut I\u2019m frankly amazed at the degree of activism among Democrats and the degree of resolution. I\u2019ve not seen anything like this since the anti-Vietnam movement. \u201d In April, Reich, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, released\u00a0an animated short<\/a>, mapping out the path to impeachment, and it became an unlikely viral hit, attracting 3.5 million views on YouTube in the first twenty-four hours.<\/p>\n

Because the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will almost certainly not initiate the ouster of a Republican President, the first step in any realistic path to impeachment is for Democrats to gain control of the House. The next opportunity is the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans have been relatively confident, in part because their redistricting in 2010 tilted the congressional map in their favor. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and the president of the right-leaning American Action Forum, believes that the chances of control shifting to the Democrats is greater than many people in either party realize. \u201cAfter a party takes the House, the Senate, and the White House, they typically lose thirty-five seats in the House in the next midterm,\u201d he told me. \u201cRepublicans now hold the House by twenty-three seats, so, as a going proposition, they\u2019re in trouble. They need to do really, really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for the congressional G.O.P., unpopular Presidents sow midterm fiascos. Since 1946, whenever a President has had an approval rating above fifty per cent, his party has lost an average of fourteen seats in the midterms, according to Gallup; whenever the rating has been below fifty per cent, the average loss soars to thirty-six seats. Steve Schmidt, the Republican consultant, is concerned that, in 2018, the Party faces a convergence of vulnerabilities akin to those which pertained during the 2006 midterms, whose outcome George W. Bush characterized as \u201ca thumping.\u201d Schmidt told me, \u201cThe last time Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, it was on a mix of competency\u2014Iraq and Katrina\u2014and corruption in government, with the Tom DeLay Congress.\u201d The Trump Administration has a comparable \u201cbasic competency issue,\u201d he said. \u201cThe constant lying, the lack of credible statements from the White House, from the President on down to the spokesperson, the amateurishness of the threats to the members of Congress, the ultimatums, the talk of \u2018enemy lists\u2019 and retribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Davis, who twice led Republican congressional-election efforts during fourteen years as a representative from Virginia, believes that his former colleagues are overly complacent. \u201cThese guys need a wake-up call. They\u2019re just living in la-la land,\u201d he said. He pointed out that regardless of the final outcome of an attempt to impeach\u2014the two-thirds majority in the Senate remains a high bar to clear\u2014Democratic control of the House would immediately make Trump more vulnerable to investigations. \u201cIf the gavels change hands, it\u2019s a different world. No. 1, all of his public records, they will go through those with a fine-tooth comb\u2014income taxes, business dealings. At that point, it\u2019s not just talk\u2014they subpoena it. It gets ugly real fast. He has so far had a pass on all this business stuff, and I don\u2019t know what\u2019s there, but I\u2019ve got to imagine that it\u2019s not pretty in this environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Democrats retake the House, the Judiciary Committee could establish a subcommittee to investigate potential abuses and identify specific grounds for impeachment. The various investigations of Trump already in process will come into play. In addition to allegations of business conflicts and potential Russian collusion, Trump is facing dozens of civil proceedings. In a case in federal court, he is accused of urging violence at a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, in March, 2016, where he yelled, referring to a protester, \u201cGet \u2019em out of here.\u201d In a New York state court, he is facing a suit brought by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d who alleges that he sexually assaulted her in 2007. The constitutional question of whether a President could be impeached for offenses committed before he took office is unsettled, but, as Clinton\u2019s case showed, civil proceedings contain risks whenever a President testifies under oath.<\/p>\n

Many scholars believe that the most plausible bases for a Trump impeachment are corruption and abuse of power. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in constitutional studies, argues that, even without evidence of an indictable crime, the Administration\u2019s pattern of seemingly trivial uses of public office for private gain \u201ccan add up to an impeachable offense.\u201d Last week, after the State Department took down an official Web page that showcased Trump\u2019s private, for-profit club, Mar-a-Lago, Feldman told me, \u201cA systematic pattern shown through data points would count as grounds for impeachment.\u201d He said that economic analysis of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi\u2019s self-enrichment proves the concept. \u201cBerlusconi is said to have gained at most one per cent per business transaction from his Presidency, but that added up to more than a billion euros,\u201d Feldman said.<\/p>\n

Allan J. Lichtman is an American University historian who has correctly forecast every Presidential election since 1984 (including Trump\u2019s victory). In April, he published \u201cThe Case for Impeachment<\/a>,\u201d in which he predicted that Trump will not serve a full term, because of a \u201cNixonian\u201d pattern of trespassing beyond constitutional boundaries. He cited an incident in late January, during the legal battle over Trump\u2019s first executive order on immigration. James L. Robart, the U.S. district judge who blocked the order, rejected the White House\u2019s claim that the court could not review the President\u2019s decision, ruling that the executive must \u201ccomport with our country\u2019s laws, and more importantly, our Constitution.\u201d Trump\u2019s response was a further violation of democratic norms: he disparaged Robart as a \u201cso-called judge\u201d and said that he should be held responsible for future terrorist acts on Americans. \u201cIf something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!\u201d Trump tweeted.<\/p>\n

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, believes that the Administration\u2019s actions denigrating or denying the power of equal branches of government portend a \u201cconstitutional crisis\u201d akin to Nixon\u2019s refusal to accept the appellate-court judgment regarding the White House tapes. Last week, lawmakers from both parties announced that White House officials had refused a request from an oversight committee to turn over internal documents related to the hiring and resignation of Michael Flynn. In a letter to the House oversight committee, Marc T. Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, said that the Administration is withholding documents because they \u201care likely to contain classified, sensitive and\/or confidential information.\u201d Blumenthal told me, \u201cI foresee a point that there will be subpoenas or some kind of compulsory disclosure issued against the President or the Administration by one of the investigative bodies\u2014the F.B.I. or the Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, if there is one\u2014and, at that point, there may be the sort of confrontation that we haven\u2019t really seen in the same way since United States versus Nixon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump campaigned as a dealmaker who could woo disparate Republicans. Though there was no natural Trumpist wing of the Party, he was expected to ally with the three dozen conservative members of the Freedom Caucus, who tended to admire his anti-establishment populism. But the relationship descended into acrimony almost immediately. After the caucus objected to part of Trump\u2019s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to the collapse of the bill, Trump publicly threatened to target its members in next year\u2019s elections. \u201cThe Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don\u2019t get on the team, & fast,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cWe must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!\u201d<\/p>\n

He went after individual members as well. At one point, he threatened to support a primary challenger against Mark Sanford, the South Carolina congressman. I asked Sanford if he regarded the threat as a bargaining tactic. \u201cI think it was genuine,\u201d he said. \u201cIt certainly wasn\u2019t said in a way that suggested a bluff and then a wink and a nod.\u201d Sanford said, of the level of support for Trump among Republicans in Congress, \u201cIn general, the mood of the conference is that we\u2019re in the same boat together.\u201d But he added a caveat: \u201cThis has to fundamentally be a game of addition, not just subtraction. I\u2019m not sure the Administration has fully grasped that concept yet. You\u2019re probably not adding to the list of permanent allies and friends.\u201d He went on, \u201cI think that there\u2019s a degree of immunity that has come with the way that he has broken all of the past molds. But I would also argue that there\u2019s a half-life to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is not faring much better with moderate Republicans. At a meeting in March, Charlie Dent, a seven-term centrist congressman from Pennsylvania, expressed misgivings about the health-care plan, and Trump lashed out. \u201cHe said something to the effect that I was destroying the Republican Party,\u201d Dent told me. \u201cAnd that the tax reform is going to fail because of me, and I\u2019d be blamed for it.\u201d In targeting Dent, Trump found an unlikely antagonist. Dent co-chairs an alliance of fifty-four moderate Republicans so resolutely undogmatic that they call themselves simply \u201cthe Tuesday Group.\u201d Dent said that he remains ready to back Trump \u201cwhen the President is on the right track,\u201d but he left no doubt that he would break when his conscience requires it. \u201cWe have to serve as a check. I mean, that\u2019s kind of our one power. We should accept that.\u201d<\/p>\n

William Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard<\/em>, one of the most prominent conservative critics of Trump, told me that the Administration\u2019s failure to get any bills passed was stirring frustration. \u201cMost Republicans, I would say, wanted him to succeed and were bending over backwards to give him a chance,\u201d Kristol said. \u201cI think there was pretty widespread disappointment. You kind of knew what you were getting in terms of some of the wackiness and also some of the actual issues that people might not agree with him on\u2014trade, immigration\u2014but I think that just the level of chaos, the lack of discipline, was beginning to freak members of Congress out a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has been meeting with congressional Republicans in small groups. By and large, they have found him more approachable than they expected, but much less informed. \u201cSeveral have been a little bit amazed by the lack of policy knowledge,\u201d Kristol said. \u201cGod knows Presidents don\u2019t need to know the details of health-care bills and tax bills, and I certainly don\u2019t, either\u2014that\u2019s what you have aides for. But not even having a basic level of understanding? I think that has rattled people a little bit.\u201d He added, \u201cReagan may not have had a subtle grasp of everything, but he read the briefing books and he knew the arguments, basically. And Trump is not even at that level.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked Kristol about the chances of impeachment, he paused to consider the odds. Then he said, \u201cIt\u2019s somewhere in the big middle ground between a one-per-cent chance and fifty. It\u2019s some per cent. It\u2019s not nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The history of besieged Presidencies is, in the end, a history of hubris\u2014of blindness to one\u2019s faults, of deafness to the warnings, of seclusion from uncomfortable realities. The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known. \u201cWhat is never said,\u201d Robert Caro writes, in \u201cMaster of the Senate<\/a>,\u201d about Lyndon Johnson, \u201cis that power reveals.\u201d Trump, after a lifetime in a family business, with no public obligations and no board of directors to please, has found himself abruptly exposed to evaluation, and his reactions have been volcanic. Setting a more successful course for the Presidency will depend, in part, on whether he fully accepts that critics who identify his shortcomings are capable of curtailing his power. When James P. Pfiffner, a political scientist at George Mason University, compared the White House crises that confronted Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, he identified a perilous strain of confidence. In each case, Pfiffner found, the President could not \u201cadmit to himself that he had done anything wrong.\u201d Nixon convinced himself that his enemies were doing the same things he was; Reagan dismissed the trading of arms for hostages as the cost of establishing relations with Iran; Clinton insisted that he was technically telling the truth. In Pfiffner\u2019s view, \u201cEach of these sets of rationalizations allowed the Presidents to choose the path that would end up damaging them more than an initial admission would have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Law and history make clear that Trump\u2019s most urgent risk is not getting ousted; it is getting hobbled by unpopularity and distrust. He is only the fifth U.S. President who failed to win the popular vote. Except George W. Bush, none of the others managed to win a second term. Less dramatic than the possibility of impeachment or removal via the Twenty-fifth Amendment is the distinct possibility that Trump will simply limp through a single term, incapacitated by opposition.<\/p>\n

William Antholis, a political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of Virginia, told me that, thus far, the President that Trump most reminds him of is not Nixon or Clinton but Jimmy Carter, another outsider who vowed to remake Washington. Carter is Trump\u2019s moral and stylistic opposite, but, Antholis said, \u201che couldn\u2019t find a way to work with his own party, and Trump\u2019s whole message was pugnacious. It was \u2018I alone can fix this.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Like Trump, Carter had majorities in both chambers, but he alienated Congress, and, after four years, he left the White House without achieving his ambitions on welfare, tax reform, and energy independence.<\/p>\n

Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a \u201cdisjunctive\u201d President, one \u201cwho reigns over the end of his party\u2019s own orthodoxy.\u201d Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?<\/p>\n

When Trump\u2019s speech in Kenosha was over, he walked across the stage to sign an executive order. \u201cGet ready, everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a big one.\u201d Since taking office, he had issued twenty-four executive orders, and the signings had become a favorite way of displaying his power. The scope of this order was modest\u2014it merely established studies of visas and imports\u2014but he described it as \u201chistoric.\u201d<\/p>\n

He uncapped a pen and, just before he signed the order, he said, \u201cWho should I give the pen to? The big question, right?\u201d There was nervous laughter, and he called some local and visiting politicians up to the stage to stand beside him while he signed. Then he said, \u201cThis is a tremendous honor for me,\u201d and tried his joke again: \u201cThe only question is, who gets the pen?\u201d He held up the signed order to the cameras, as always, pivoting left, then right, and grinned broadly.<\/p>\n

He stepped down from the stage and walked along the front row of the audience, shaking hands, before his Secret Service detail escorted him toward Marine One. He was going straight back to Washington. The audience, kept in place until he was safely extricated, milled about awkwardly. The theatrical atmosphere dissipated, leaving behind the remainder of an ordinary Tuesday at work.<\/p>\n

I approached a woman who introduced herself as Donna Wollmuth. She was sixty-eight years old, and she worked in Snap-on\u2019s warehouse, packing boxes for shipment. I asked her what she thought of Trump\u2019s comments. \u201cI believe in it,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I believe in America. I want the jobs back here.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, I wondered if she was merely repeating Trump\u2019s slogans, but it became clear that she had thought hard about his message. Her story was of the kind that has become a stock explanation for Trump\u2019s rise. For twenty-three years, she operated a sewing machine, making briefs and sportswear at Jockey. When the plant closed, in 1993, and production moved offshore, she found a job at the Chicago Lock factory (\u201cFive years later, they closed\u201d) and then one at Air Flow Technology, making industrial filters. After fourteen years there, she was earning almost seventeen dollars an hour, but in 2015 she was laid off. \u201cI lost my job there because they hired somebody that they could pay seven dollars less. It was a lot of immigrants there. Let\u2019s put it that way. I\u2019m sure you know what I mean.\u201d She didn\u2019t like the way it sounded, but she wanted me to understand. \u201cI\u2019m just so stuck on this immigration thing. I really am, because I\u2019ve lived through it, giving benefits and everything to people that aren\u2019t here legally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wollmuth had almost always voted for Democrats, but she had come to believe that her family\u2014she has seven grandchildren and stepgrandchildren\u2014faced a dark future. When Trump entered the race, Wollmuth was turned off by his antics. \u201cHe\u2019s gotta learn to keep his mouth shut,\u201d she said, but his pledge to re\u00ebnergize American manufacturing was too specific and attractive to ignore. She took a chance on Trump, as did many of her neighbors. After going for Obama by large margins in the previous two elections, Kenosha County sided with Trump, by just two hundred and fifty-five votes out of more than seventy-one thousand cast.<\/p>\n

That is a fragile buffer. In late April, Trump promoted the results of a Washington Post<\/em>\/ABC News poll showing that only two per cent of those who voted for him regretted doing so. When I asked Wollmuth if she had any regrets, she made it clear that it was the wrong question. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be disappointed, and I hope he\u2019s really trying,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d like to believe that. I\u2019d like to see it happen. I\u2019ve got mixed emotions with him so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walking out of Snap-on\u2019s headquarters, through the chanting crowd, I wondered whether Trump could see the protesters from his chopper. He knows the unpredictable potential of a crowd. I remembered something that Sam Nunberg, the Trump campaign adviser, had told me about Trump\u2019s fixation on crowds. \u201cI said to him once, \u2018I understand it\u2019s the biggest. Who gives a shit? Who cares at this point? What we care about is votes,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Nunberg said. \u201cAnd he says, \u2018No. It\u2019s got to be.\u2019 Some of it was he was seriously concerned about the country. He also wanted to see where this went and what it was. The crowds and energy showed him it was a movement.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/span><\/p>\n

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Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker<\/em> as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of \u201cAge of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This article appears in other versions of the May 8, 2017, issue, with the headline \u201cEndgames.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

* * * * * \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emails released to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveal close ties between (Oklahoma) Attorney General Scott Pruitt, the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the fossil fuel interests that fund ALEC, including the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity Group.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Tuesday, March 07, 2017 <\/span>By David Armiak<\/a>, PR Watch<\/a> | Report<\/span><\/div>\n
\n

\"ProtestersProtesters rally outside of the Senate before a confirmation hearing for Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, January 18, 2017. (Photo: 350.org \/ Flickr<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Emails released to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveal close ties between (Oklahoma) Attorney General Scott Pruitt, the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the fossil fuel interests that fund ALEC, including the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity Group.<\/span><\/p>\n

The emails were obtained after the Center for Media and Democracy filed an open records lawsuit against Pruitt for his two-year-long failure to respond to our open records requests for his email correspondence with major fossil fuel corporations. The court ordered Pruitt to release thousands of emails which are now online and available for public inspection<\/a>, but CMD is still in court seeking to obtain 1,600 pages withheld and responses to eight additional open records requests.<\/p>\n

Pruitt an ALEC Alumnus Who Kept in Touch<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pruitt was an Oklahoma state senator from 2002-2007. As a legislator, Pruitt chaired<\/a> the ALEC Civil Justice task force in 2003 and perhaps other years. ALEC is a corporate bill mill where legislators and industry lobbyists work together behind closed doors to draft industry-friendly bills that are then introduced in state houses across the nation as “innovative” public policy stripped of their industry origins.<\/i><\/p>\n

But Pruitt touted industry influence as a plus in an interview. “ALEC is unique in the sense that it puts legislators and companies together and they create policy collectively,” Pruitt said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One cookie-cutter bill approved by ALEC’s Civil Justice task force in 2003 was the Asbestos and Silica Claims Priorities Act.<\/a> It is one of many ALEC bills geared toward protecting the deadly asbestos industry and companies that don’t protect their workers from known asbestos or silica hazards. The bill increases the burden on a person bringing a lawsuit alleging an asbestos and silica-related injury.<\/p>\n

Asbestos<\/b>-related diseases kill at least 10,000 Americans every year, in many cases from mesothelioma, an incurable and painful cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. For decades, asbestos was used for insulation and industrial purposes, and the diseases particularly affect veterans, firefighters, construction workers, and individuals who worked in factories with high-heat machinery. In Wisconsin, veterans groups have been some of<\/a> the most vocal opponents<\/a> of the legislation: veterans make up just 8 percent of the population, but are 30 percent of mesothelioma cases.<\/p>\n

Crystalline silica<\/b> is also deadly. It can be found in sand, gravel, and stone as well as sidewalks and building materials. Silica dust has been classified as a human lung carcinogen and results in fatalities and seriously disabling illnesses. According to OSHA, silica exposure “remains a serious threat to nearly 2 million U.S. workers, including more than 100,000 workers in high risk jobs such as abrasive blasting, foundry work, stonecutting, rock drilling, quarry work and tunneling.” ALEC wants to make it harder for injured workers or their families to seek compensation.<\/p>\n

Other bills approved by ALEC around that time include:<\/p>\n