The Case for Impeachment
Professor Allan J. Lichtman, who has correctly forecasted thirty years of presidential elections, makes the case for impeaching the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.Impeachment will ‘proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,’ and ‘they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. ’(Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, 1788)In The Case for Impeachment, Professor Lichtman lays out the reasons why Congress removing Donald J. Trump has become a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Shedding some light on the consequences of his ties with Russia before and after the election, complicated financial conflicts of interest at home and abroad and abuse of executive authority, this is an authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the most controversial presidency since Richard Nixon.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
First published in the United States by Dey Street Books in 2017
Copyright © Allan J. Lichtman 2017
Introduction © Allan J. Lichtman 2018
Cover photograph © Bloomberg/Getty Images
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Allan J. Lichtman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008292676
Ebook Edition 2018 © ISBN: 9780008257415
Version: 2018-05-23
‘[Lichtman’s] book is a pretty substantial case for why Donald Trump should not have been president at all … A good backdrop for conversations that will likely remain a part of [the] national dialogue for some time’ New York Journal of Books
‘The US system takes a long time to gather speed. Once it does, it can be hard to stop’
Financial Times
Contents
Copyright
Praise for The Case for Impeachment
Author’s Note
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: High Crimes and Misdemeanors
CHAPTER 2: The Resignation of Richard Nixon: A Warning to Donald Trump
CHAPTER 3: Flouting the Law
CHAPTER 4: Conflicts of Interest
CHAPTER 5: Lies, Lies, and More Lies
CHAPTER 6: Trump’s War on Women
CHAPTER 7: A Crime Against Humanity
CHAPTER 8: The Russian Connections
CHAPTER 9: Abuse of Power
CHAPTER 10: The Unrestrained Trump
CHAPTER 11: Memo: The Way Out
CONCLUSION: The Peaceful Remedy of Impeachment
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
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Impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and “they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
—Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, 1788
I began thinking about impeachment before the November 2016 election. For weeks, my students had been asking who I thought would be our next president, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Finally, on a late evening in mid-September 2016, I leaned back in my chair and peered out into the hall at the mostly darkened offices of American University in Washington, D.C. I had just finished my analysis: Donald Trump would win the presidency. My forecast ignored polls, debates, advertising, tweets, news coverage, and campaign strategies—the usual grist for the punditry mills—that count for little or nothing on Election Day. I had used the same proven method that had led me to forecast accurately the outcomes of eight previous elections, and I’d kept my eye on the big picture—the strength and performance of the party holding the White House currently. After thirty-two years of correctly forecasting election results, even I was surprised by the outcome.
Among those who noticed my prediction was Donald J. Trump himself. Taking time out of preparing to become the world’s most powerful leader, he wrote me a personal note, saying, “Professor—Congrats—good call.” What Trump overlooked, however, was my “next big prediction:” that, after winning the presidency, he would be impeached.
Here I did not rely on my usual model, rather I used a deep analysis of Trump’s past and proven behavior, as well as the history of politics and impeachment in our country. In the short span of time between Trump’s election and this book’s publication in April 2017, his words and deeds have strengthened the case considerably. History is not geometry and historical parallels are never exact, yet a president who seems to have learned nothing from history is abusing and violating the public trust and setting the stage for a myriad of impeachable offenses that could get him removed from office.
America’s founders, who had so recently cast off the yoke of King George’s tyranny, granted their president awesome powers as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief of its armed forces. Yet they understood the dangers of a runaway presidency. As James Madison warned during the Constitutional Convention, the president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression” and “betray his trust to foreign powers,” with an outcome “fatal to the Republic.” To keep a rogue president in check, delegates separated constitutional powers into three independent branches of government. But knowing that a determined president could crash through these barriers, they also put in place impeachment as the rear guard of American democracy.
