No, my point is not that our side dare not pursue impeachment vigorously for fear of appearing too extreme. I actually think that there is far less downside with the public now than there was at the time of Watergate to pushing for removal of a duly-elected president without waiting for the next election. It wouldn’t be seen as inherently radical or extreme to openly be for removing Trump, now. And he does both deserve and need removal, now. We shouldn’t hesitate to be for removal because we can justify that. We couldn’t justify not being for removal, now.
My point is that impeachment is the wrong tool for removing Trump. Impeachment is the right tool to use to remove presidents who have committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump doesn't have the mental capacity to commit crimes. He needs to be removed because he is dangerously unfit to carry out the duties of the office because of his mental incapacity.
If it were just a matter of form, like not using the "wrong" fork to eat your salad at a formal dinner, I would have nothing to say on the matter. Who cares what fork you use. Any tool that will remove Trump from the WH would be the right tool. That’s my point, impeachment won’t work. It’s isn’t wrong for merely formal or purely procedural reasons. It’s the wrong tool because, however promising a way forward it seems to present now, it will lead to a dead end. We cannot afford to have the removal of this president wind up in a dead end, and certainly not a dead end that actually prolongs his stay in office because it works to delay the way forward along the path that will lead to his timely and successful removal, the 25th Amendment.
It Was the Crime, Not the Cover Up
The main impetus leading us down this wrong path of impeachment is the example of Watergate. And the compelling similarity just at the moment, is that Trump has most clearly gotten himself into trouble, put himself in the zone of potential removal, by his ham-handed efforts to cover up the original wrong-doing. That was the conventional wisdom about Watergate, that it wasn’t the third rate burglary that got Nixon impeached, it was his cover up of the burglary. It was the cover up, not the crime.
Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom is dead wrong, except in this limited sense. In Watergate, the cover up is what led a trail of guilt back to Nixon from that third-rate burglary. Had there not been a cover up, his pursuers could never have tied Nixon to the crime. That’s how the two-year long drama of Watergate played out. Leads provided by Nixon's involvement in the cover up led slowly -- because the nation was so reluctant to remove a duly elected president other than by election -- but inexorably back to Nixon.
But Nixon had no choice but to engage in that cover-up, because that one burglary was just one small fragment of a whole pattern of very large and threatening official criminality, the so-called White House horrors. What tends to get lost if you look back at what happened in Watergate is the huge importance of what didn’t happen at the outset, the what-didn't-happen that got that third rate burglary going. Nixon tried to get the FBI and the CIA to do the dirty work of surveilling and then acting against the Democratic Party, and his other whole long list of political enemies. Because that effort failed, because these agencies refused the pressure to become the president's private goon squads, Nixon had to turn to the services of an ad hoc group of fourth rate burglars, who were fortunately not up to pulling off the third-rate burglary of the Watergate offices of the DNC without getting caught.
However much it violated all the rules of being a successful criminal mastermind because it required Nixon's direct participation, Nixon had no choice but to cover up. Had the attempt to turn the FBI and CIA into his personal secret police been revealed because there was no prompt and vigorous cover up to scare the middle management criminals between Nixon and the fourth rate burglars into silence, Nixon would have been on the hook for far more serious crimes than the of obstruction of justice he put himself on the hook for by launching the cover up. Not having his fingerprints on any criminality would have been a nice thing to have. Obstructing justice was an existential necessity.
All Cover Up, No Crime
Trump hasn’t covered up any underlying crime. He’s just acted like the idiot he obviously is, or, more likely, has become because of his advancing dementia, with no family strong enough to keep him from making the huge mistake of taking on a job which would massively decompensate that dementia.
Sure, firing Comey sure would be obstruction of justice if the investigation of Flynn ends up incriminating Trump for anything more serious than the error of not vetting him more thoroughly. Trump had already sucked up the public relations downside of admitting that error when he had to fire Flynn. You would have to imagine that there is some deeper, wider conspiracy — that we don’t know about already — to sell the US down the river to Russia or Turkey that would be revealed if Flynn were thoroughly investigated, something so massive that it justified getting Trump’s fingerprints all over a cover up. Even if that implausible scenario is true, you have to imagine that Trump would turn a sleep[y investigation into Flynn that wasn't going anywhere that he and Sessions didn't want it to go even if Comey had stayed on the case, into something that he no longer has control over. But, you say, “He didn’t realize there would be this reaction to firing Comey!”. Yeah, he’s an idiot. But you have to imagine that he is such a massive idiot that this conspiracy is as beyond him as composing a symphony.
And yes, revealing secret information to the Russians in that meeting would be at least a political high crime and misdemeanor, if there was any shadow of possible intent to do the US harm in order to favor Russia. That would have been abuse of the presidential authority to declassify, at least in the sense of sharing intel with whoever he had to in order to advance US interests. But the people who defend Trump on those grounds, that a president gets to use his discretion in such matters, are urinating up a rope. Really, Trump had some reason to blab beyond the two-second feeling of importance a five year old might have in revealing a secret to an adult relative? People who come at this from the opposite side, that Trump has committed some equally purposeful act, but as part of a conspiracy to help Russia rather than to advance US interests, are equally ridiculous. This man has no ulterior motives any more than he has a higher purpose, because there is no ulterior or interior left in him. There is nothing left beyond the sad demented old man he is on the outside for all to see.
If you look at this in Watergate terms, we’ve skipped two whole years of hard slog from fourth rate burglars back to the president. Trump himself gave us, with no pressure or prompting, just a week into this, his version of the White House Tapes — the last act smoking gun that ended Watergate -- as a gift. But that won’t do the cause of removing him from office any good at all. We have him dead to rights, already, for covering up — nothing, nothing at all. If he had removed Comey and blabbed secrets to the Russian Foreign Minister as part of a secret plot to hand over the nation’s security apparatus to a foreign power, sure, this evidence that he had acted to cover up this secret plot would do him in. But it wasn’t even a secret plot. He blabbed these secrets at a public visit.
Mueller will go about investigating the Flynn matter with his accustomed seriousness and fairness and impartiality. The man already has almost enough gravity all by himself to trigger an event horizon. When you add the gravity of the matter at hand, you can bet it will take him about 20 years to reach the conclusion that, yes, Flynn shouldn’t have been hired as National Security Advisor. Maybe he’ll find evidence that Flynn actually did criminal things. But it’s a slam dunk that he will not find anything close to getting 2/3 of the Senate to vote for removal of the president because, what, he didn't fire Flynn fast enough, didn’t vet him thoroughly enough? Oh, wait, here’s the killer, Trump is guilty of firing the investigator who was closing in on his felony inadequate vetting. These are impeachable offenses?
Even in the unlikely event that Mueller does find things that would get 2/3 to vote removal, it will take too long, and it will discredit and delay during that period any other approach to getting rid of Trump, including the right approach, using the provisions of the 25th.
Worse than a Criminal, a Blunderer
Trump doesn’t need to be removed from office because he is some international criminal mastermind who revealed sensitive information to Lavrov and Kislyak. He needs to be removed from office because he’s a bathroom idiot. He didn’t do the national security any even trivial harm with his idiot stunt boasting to the Russians that he knew something that they didn’t. What he did was prove that he has the mentality of a five year old. A mental five year old will do irreparable harm to the nation sooner or later, when the next crisis hits that requires an adult in the office.
We have a Constitutional provision that keeps physical age 5 year olds out of the White House. And we have another provision, the 25th Amendment, that both allows and requires us to get mental age 5 year olds out of an office they are not fit to hold. Anything we do that distracts from that purpose and that path, getting Trump out of office under provisions of the 25th because he is mentally unfit, is a dereliction of that duty.