Shortly after 11 A.M. on Thursday, Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, took to the Senate floor for his farewell speech. One of President Trump’s few remaining public critics in the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, Flake used the chance for one more lament about the perilous state of American democracy in the Trump era. “We all know well that this is not a normal time and that the threats to our democracy from within and without are real,” Flake said. “None of us can say with confidence how the situation that we now find ourselves in will turn out.” As Flake was still speaking, Trump tweeted out the two-word slogan that more than any other captures the current political agenda in the capital of the most powerful nation in the world. “WITCH HUNT!” the President wrote. No explanation offered, none needed.
Trump’s critique is familiar by now. By one count, that tweet marked the hundred-and-forty-second time he has complained on social media about the investigations into his possible collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election; he started in March of 2017, not even two months into his White House tenure. By May 18, 2017, he was already calling it “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.” By late November of this year, Trump was asking, almost plaintively, “When will this illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt, one that has shattered so many innocent lives, ever end-or will it just go on forever?”
Given the constant, repetitive nature of Trump’s “WITCH HUNT” tweets, it might be tempting to ignore them. That would be a mistake. The chief executive’s attention is the most valuable resource of any Administration—what a President spends his time on reflects, more than anything else, an Administration’s true priorities. By those standards, the “WITCH HUNT” is the overriding priority of the Trump White House, and it will be even more so in the new year, when the special counsel, Robert Mueller, moves toward a conclusion and a new, Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, with the power and the votes to subpoena and impeach Trump, takes office. The uncertainty that Flake captured, then, is not about the political agenda of Washington in 2019, which Trump’s tweet perfectly summed up; it is about what those who run the battered, gridlocked, dysfunctional institutions of American democracy will do about it. Events may soon force them to take action.
This is a week, after all, in which President Trump, or “Individual-1,” as the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York are now calling him, was implicated in federal court as the leader of a criminal conspiracy to pay off two women to hide his affairs in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, the fixer who once bragged he would take a bullet for the President, has turned on him, and on Wednesday Cohen received a three-year prison sentence for violating campaign-finance laws with the payoffs. The President’s tabloid friends at the National Enquirer who participated in the scheme have admitted to it in a deal with the prosecutors, and new details were reported this week that place the President directly in the room when the hush-money plan was being discussed. His campaign chairman is also going to prison, as a result of a separate case. His first national-security adviser has pleaded guilty. All of them are coöperating to various degrees with Mueller.
In other words, the criminality of key figures in the President’s inner circle is now established, by their own admissions, as they start to implicate the President himself. And this is even before Mueller issues findings or criminal charges related to the central subject of his inquiry into whether Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016. Additional damning evidence against Trump is increasingly likely to emerge from outside of the Mueller investigation, as in the case of Cohen, or as a consequence of aggressive investigations and oversight by the new Democratic House. For example, on Thursday, the de-facto incoming Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said that the Ways and Means Committee will use its subpoena powers to demand Trump’s tax returns, which, given the extensive reporting in the Times about his family’s decades-long tax dodges, could produce an untold wealth of damaging information.
Largely overlooked in the daily flood of Trump-era news, a week ago, his former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said in an interview that Trump had repeatedly pressed him to violate the law. “I’d have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you wanna do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law, it violates treaty.’ He got really frustrated,” Tillerson said. “I think he grew tired of me being the guy who told him, ‘You can’t do that.’ ” The coverage of Tillerson’s interview with the journalist Bob Schieffer focussed more on Trump’s outraged response than on the underlying revelation. “Tillerson calls Trump undisciplined. Trump calls Tillerson ‘dumb as a rock,’ ” one headline, in the Washington Post, read. But Tillerson’s allegation was more than just another bout of Trump-era name-calling between a former Secretary of State who once called his boss a “fucking moron” and the President who fired him by tweet. Imagine Tillerson before Congress come January, testifying under oath and live on television, about which laws Trump told him to break. Speaking of testimony, I can hardly wait for that of the two White House chiefs of staff whom Trump also fired—the latest one, John Kelly, just this week. When asked about the chaos of the Trump White House, Reince Priebus, Kelly’s predecessor, who was dumped by tweet while on Air Force One, once told the author Chris Whipple, “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by fifty.”
Washington seems extremely unprepared for the mess that will result from all of these revelations. We are still in the pretending-this-isn’t-really-happening stage of the drama. Indeed, up on Capitol Hill, few Republicans have joined Flake’s rhetorical resistance, and conventional wisdom holds that, even if the Democratic House impeaches Trump, the Republican majority in the Senate will refuse to convict him in a subsequent trial. That would leave President Trump politically damaged, to be sure, yet essentially immune from real accountability. But is Congress really going to do nothing about it?
So far, the Senate Republicans who hold the key to Trump’s survival have remained largely silent, performing the time-honored Washington dance of delay, deny, and ignore when confronted this week by reporters wondering what they plan to do about the President being named as a criminal conspirator. The highlight reel that CNN made on Tuesday of awkward senatorial dodging is an instant classic of the genre. When reporters asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about Trump’s implication in the Cohen case, McConnell said, “I don’t have any observations about that.” Until Mueller’s investigation is concluded, that studied air of pained non-comment is likely to continue. But I think the expectation of blind fealty to Trump on the part of Republicans understates the potential peril he faces.
During Watergate, the last time a sitting President was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal investigation, Hugh Scott, who was then the Minority Leader, and other Republican senators marched into the White House to tell Nixon to resign, but only once his fate was already clear. Nixon was not only a two-term President but a lifetime Republican who had devoted his career to the Party. The senators may not have loved him, but, by most accounts, he had earned their respect.
Trump faces a far different situation, with far fewer reserves of personal or partisan loyalty to call upon. A former Democrat, he was opposed by the vast majority of congressional Republicans in the party primaries for President. He has little personal connection to most of them now, did not spend decades raising money for their elections or campaigning for them, and has often publicly feuded with their leaders. He disagrees with many of their core ideological beliefs on issues such as free trade and deficit spending. He has fired two White House chiefs of staff who saw it as their responsibility to try to interpret the President to the wary troops on the Hill. For now Trump is banking on his continued high popularity with core Republican voters to keep their representatives in line. But if and when the politics change, he should watch out.
The other day, in an interview for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” I asked the defeated senator Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, about her Republican colleagues’ fealty to Trump. She observed that it is Trump’s party now, and I asked whether that meant the G.O.P. senators had really abandoned their previous views or were simply appearing to accommodate themselves to the President. “They’re waiting him out,” she responded, unequivocally. They may be publicly loyal to Trump at the moment, she added, but that doesn’t mean they like or respect him. “You should hear the way these guys talk about him behind his back,” she said. As for McConnell, she argued, his loyalty is not to Trump but to keeping control over the Senate. “McConnell will stand with him as long as it is in the interest of the majority of the Senate,” McCaskill told me. “He will challenge Trump,” she added, but only when he thinks it’s necessary for his Republicans.
Of course, McCaskill, on her way out of the Senate after losing to a Republican who embraced Trump in a state that heavily favors the President, is right. Trump’s political survival is in the hands of Party members who neither love nor trust him. Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz may have opportunistically abandoned their previously stated views that Trump is a “kook” and a liar wildly unsuited to be President. But, having flip-flopped on Trump before, there is nothing stopping them from doing it again. Grand appeals to the “defense of democracy,” as forty-four of their former Senate colleagues made in an open letter in the Post on Monday, may not sway them. But Robert Mueller and a dramatic swing in Republican opinion against Trump could certainly cause them to abandon Trump once more.
