Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, writing for the New York Times, persuasively argues that Donald Trump’s violent, unhinged rhetoric, more than amply demonstrated on Twitter and in his campaign rallies, may well be sufficient grounds for impeachment in and of itself.
The 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson, another virulent, racist president who Americans were forced to endure directly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, provides the historical precedent. And the rhetoric Americans have been subjected to under Trump makes Johnson look like a model schoolboy in comparison.
Bouie begins his analysis with a recap of what Trump has spewed via Twitter over the past weekend alone.
Over the weekend, in a rage over impeachment, President Trump accused Representative Adam Schiff of “treason,” promised “Big Consequences” for the whistle-blower who sounded the alarm about his phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and shared a warning — from a Baptist pastor in Dallas — that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
By any objective standard, these are threats. In particular, the threat of violent retaliation against the still-unknown whistleblower—who exposed Trump’s plan to extort phony “dirt” from Ukraine so he could tilt the election in his own favor—distinctly qualifies as witness intimidation. False accusations, against members of Congress for doing their sworn duty to protect the country from domestic enemies such as Trump, are also slanders with a view towards the incitement of violence from his followers. The thinly-veiled call to his followers to wage civil war is another incitement of violence, much akin to terrorism.
So the idea that these statements don’t qualify as high crimes or misdemeanors doesn’t wash, particularly in light of history.
There’s precedent for making transgressive presidential speech a “high crime or misdemeanor.” The 10th article of impeachment against Andrew Johnson in 1868 was about his language and conduct over the course of his term.
The violent language that became an issue for Johnson arose in a context similar to Trump’s—when verbally attacked, he could not restrain himself, much in the way Trump cannot restrain his tweeting when he feels he is being unfairly abused. Johnson had taken a tour of various states to build support for his plan to disallow Southern racists any real punishment for their insurrection during the Civil War. Much like Trump, he tried to confine himself to tight insular rallies of friendly crowds. But eventually his opponents were able to come out and challenge him.
(W)hen a heckler yelled, “Hang Jeff Davis!” — referring to the former leader of the Confederacy, then held at Fort Monroe in Virginia — Johnson replied, “Why don’t you hang him?” When another shouted, “Thad Stevens” — the chief Radical Republican in the House of Representatives — a now angry Johnson responded with “Why don’t you hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” Phillips had been a leading abolitionist.
Like Trump, Johnson would blame his political opponents for violence that his own followers caused. Similar to Trump’s delusional attacks on “Antifa,” Johnson would blame abolitionists for violence that resulted in the killing of African Americans.
In St. Louis, as in Cleveland, hecklers yelled “New Orleans” in reference to a massacre that summer in which white Democrats, most of them ex-Confederates, attacked a large gathering of black Republican marchers, killing nearly 50 people. In response, Johnson said the “riot at New Orleans was substantially planned.” But he blamed Radical Republicans who, he said, encouraged the city’s “black population to arm themselves and prepare for the shedding of blood.” At this point, someone in the crowd called him a “traitor,” which — as Garry Boulard recounts in “
The Swing Around the Circle: Andrew Johnson and the Train Ride That Destroyed a Presidency”
—
Johnson
angrily denounced with one of the strangest tirades of the tour: “I have been traduced! I have been slandered. I have been maligned. I have been called Judas — Judas Iscariot and all of that.”
There is not much—if any—daylight between Johnson’s rhetoric against abolitionists and Trump’s implicit praise of white supremacists as “very fine people,” or his reflexive blaming of those who would protest against Trump-inspired Neo-nazi violence. Trump’s rhetoric has already killed more people than anything that could be attributed to Johnson, with the final body count still to be tallied.
The House of Representatives decided to impeach Johnson in 1868. His rhetoric while campaigning on his “Swing Around the Circle” tour was explicitly included in a separate article of impeachment, specifically the 10th.
All of this would resurface in 1868, when the House adopted its 11 articles of impeachment against the president. Among them was a reference to his summer swing through the North — to the idea that Johnson had sullied the office of the presidency with dangerous, demagogic rhetoric. In its 10th article of impeachment, the House of Representatives accused Johnson of being “unmindful of the high duties of his office and the dignity and proprieties thereof.” His behavior, they argued, was an “attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach the Congress of the United States” and to “impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof.”
Ultimately, after the articles of impeachment were presented, the Senate opted to drop the article condemning Johnson’s rhetoric, as Bouie notes, not out of “any love for Johnson,” but because the constitutional questions surrounding Johnson’s right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment would have proved unnecessarily time-consuming and difficult to resolve. Other paths were available against a terrible president. Johnson was impeached, but was not removed from office by the margin of a single vote.
Trump’s verbal and written excesses, his stoking of hatred and violence, and his disdain for the rule of law all far exceed what we know of Johnson. The difference between now and then are stark, in terms of the easy availability of instruments intended to kill others, including those who are deemed unworthy by someone with a megaphone as loud as Trump’s, and the instantaneous spread of such violent rhetoric through social media.
As Bouie points out, Trump has spent the last three years deliberately dividing Americans, with a view towards inciting hatred among us. He has repeatedly warned of the possibility that his supporters will become violent if his wishes are not fulfilled, specifically mentioning his ties to the military, to the police, even “Bikers for Trump.” It’s clear where the endgame of all his rhetoric lies.
If this country wants to prevent another Trump, or something even worse (if that can be imagined), then Congress could set a useful precedent by holding this president accountable for the vile, hateful and violent words that come out of his mouth and Twitter finger.