He had started his Washington career working for the Right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. In a town of grey suits and cement blocks, he wrote with cleverness and style. I covered local crime for a small newspaper in Alabama. But I wanted to write like he did, so I asked: to work for the Weekly Standard, did I need to buy into a whole ideology? Or could I write for the Left-leaning New Republic, too? I wanted to tell all kinds of stories.

I’ve returned to his answer many times since. “Just pick a side,” he said.

In the years that followed, Carlson rose, then fell, then rose higher again, and often I wondered how he did it. I believe among the millions of words he employed — the thundering waterfall of words; the warring, imprecatory, wheedling words — only one mattered most: “you”.

This was his great insight. Instead of describing events from around the globe with detachment, he invited viewers into a conspiracy of knowing. It was a modern Gnosticism, a rebellion outside the gates of information. And his audience — an ageing, shrinking middle class — found that call irresistible. It was ingenious television.

Never mind that he was one of the most influential figures in the ruling party. Never mind that the most powerful news network paid him $20 million per year for that influence, on the highest-rated cable news show in history. It wasn’t about him. The mobs are coming for you.

Then, a few months ago, Carlson suddenly lost his lofty seat. In a book published today, he claims Fox News fired him as part of a $787.5 million deal with Dominion Voting Systems, after the network broadcast Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson says in Tucker, a biography by Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this.” (Dominion’s lawyers flatly deny this: “Dominion made no requests or demands whatsoever regarding Mr Carlson’s employment with Fox.”)

In the days after his downfall, Carlson posted a video to social media in which he described how most of it — the whole televised political battle — was a sham, but that he would soon reveal the truth. And he concluded with a final, second-person invitation: “See you soon.”

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Now Carlson truly does find himself cast outside the gates, maybe for the first time. He’s been an insider since his magazine stories turned into occasional television appearances, which became regular guest spots on CNN, then a hosting job on the show Crossfire, which pitted him against the liberal commentator Paul Begala. Carlson’s most famous moment on that show was a catastrophic encounter in 2004 with the comedian Jon Stewart, who accused Carlson and Begala of faking their outrage. “You’re partisan — what do you call it? — hacks,” Stewart said. He had drawn back a curtain to reveal the machinery of television debate, and the show never recovered. CNN soon cancelled it.

Carlson moved to MSNBC, where he hosted a show called Tucker. It never really caught on, and after its cancellation Carlson retreated to start a website called The Daily Caller, a conservative tabloid that gained popularity but never much respect as a real source of news. Then, in 2013, Carlson began his true upward trajectory, joining Fox News to co-host the chatty Fox & Friends. In 2016, he took over his own primetime show.

His timing was serendipitous, coming in the churn of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. But Carlson didn’t win an audience of millions by accident; he was exceptionally effective at the job, in ways small and large. His pacing, for instance, is impeccable. Speaking on television is hard — too slow and you’re plodding, too fast and you seem nervous — but Carlson had perfect timing. More importantly, he understood historical timing; as white Americans shifted from majority towards minority, many hardened into a political bloc and eyed institutions with distrust. Carlson recognised the power in their grievance and made a shift alongside them, casting himself as a populist voice for the forgotten and downtrodden.

It was a deft dance with his audience. It required them to forget that he rose to prominence wearing a bow tie, an affectation he began at preparatory school; that he lunched at The Palm on DuPont Circle in Washington, deep inside the Beltway; that he embodied the very Republican establishment against which he raged. It required him to rage for you.

Carlson and his producers pioneered a new style of commentary. Instead of bowing to Jon Stewart’s accusations of manufactured outrage, they built a full-scale factory. It worked like this: producers would scour the American landscape for someone — anyone — behaving in outlandish ways. Hyper-wokeness worked best, but sheer nuttiness served at a pinch. Then they presented this fringe behaviour as central, as representative of them, the un-Americans who would supplant you.

It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.

Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”

For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”

Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?

Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.

Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.

Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”

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Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.

It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.

At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”

In any event, all states have now ratified their results without serious incident, and the hucksterish post-election litigation efforts undertaken by Trump’s various sundry representatives have predictably gone nowhere. Yesterday, Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell even declared Biden the “president-elect” and now the Democrat is faithfully filling his forthcoming administration with a cast of characters drawn directly from the pits of the Washington, DC Democratic Party professional class — the same people whom he openly campaigned on rehabilitating and restoring to power.

The election is well and truly over, whatever toothless protestations may continue to arise.

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By Michael Tracey

What’s far from over, however, is the political influence of Trump. No one can say with total certainty what he’ll do when he eventually leaves office; no one can even say exactly on what terms he’s going to leave. But in just over a month now, we may face a scenario that would be a first in modern US history: an aggrieved former president making a competing claim to the presidency and refusing in perpetuity to acknowledge the reality of his defeat. In other words, a “shadow” president.

Trump’s lack of compunction about doing something like this would seem to solidify his position as the most thoroughgoing “post-exceptionalist” president since at least World War II. That is, he is entirely unmoved by the kind of bipartisan “American exceptionalism” dogma that had previously bound together the elite US political class, across partisan lines. It’s the dogma which holds that, in short, the US possesses a singular uniqueness that sets it apart in all of world history. Often blended together with notions of Christian providence, it ascribes the very foundations of the US Constitutional order with a kind of divine import.

But over the last four years, Trump has thrown these old assumptions into doubt. For one thing, the Constitution certainly makes no provision for a “shadow” president. How could a country with a mystically-endowed “exceptional” nature — the “shining city on a hill,” Ronald Reagan once proclaimed — be said to retain its “exceptional” status if its elections are, as Trump vigorously maintains, structurally and systematically fraudulent?

“The whole world is watching, and the whole world is laughing at our electoral process,” Trump recently charged, during the same rant in which he also condemned Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State as “an enemy of the people”. He’s also taken to referring to the US as a “third world country” on similar grounds. A president for whom the doctrine of American exceptionalism was a genuinely animating principle would be less inclined to encourage the impression that America’s system of choosing its elected leaders is so hopelessly corrupt that it deserves to be the object of international ridicule.

That Trump has harped on this theme with negligible public opposition from conservatives and Republicans suggests an ongoing reformulation in how the US Right conceptualises the very notion of “American exceptionalism”. It’s the culmination of a longstanding trend in terms of how conservatives have processed the experience of Trump; nationalism has been disentangled from reverence for institutions like the FBI and CIA which have been among the most frequent targets of Trump opprobrium. Even his popularisation of the term “Deep State” cuts against traditional American exceptionalist theology — America was never supposed to be the type of country that could even have a “Deep State” in the first place.

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Given that Trump is so profuse in his proclamations of nationalistic fervour, this element of his underlying worldview has often been obscured. But it’s not as though he’s really tried to hide it: shortly before launching his candidacy in 2016, he went on an extended soliloquy explaining how he “never liked” the term “American Exceptionalism” in the first place, and accused US politicians of “insulting the world” when they use it.

Nor did the prestige of office meaningfully change Trump’s attitude on the matter. During a pregame Superbowl interview shortly after he took power in 2017, he was asked by interviewer Bill O’Reilly about Russia. Drawing a kind of off-handed moral equivalence that would have once been unthinkable for a sitting president to propose, Trump replied: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” This dark — but again, not-entirely-wrong — view of everything from the US intelligence services, to the principles undergirding US foreign policy, to the motives of workaday state and local election officials, always set him rhetorically apart from his more guarded predecessors.

And as is typical with Trump, the grievances he wildly purveys usually have at least a kernel of truth to them. He will have a reasonable argument in his post-presidency, for instance, that his tenure was “rigged” from before it started due to the depredations of select CIA/FBI malefactors who colluded against him. In December 2016, when the first official accusation that he’d been sinisterly aided by “Russian interference” was leaked via unnamed members of the “intelligence community,” he instructed his press department to retort: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It was a justifiable statement. But then, a few weeks later, Trump would liken the CIA and FBI to the Third Reich. Again — not the rhetorical style of your typical “American exceptionalist”.

It’s in that context that both Trump and his supporters feel they have more than ample justification to claim, possibly for decades to come, that he was defrauded rather than defeated in this election. The issue is not even so much that they believe the election was literally fraudulent — although they do. But more elementally, what they believe is that the opposition to Trump was the culmination of a “rigged” process in a sense that far transcends the administrative mechanics of absentee ballot distribution in Wisconsin.

These grievances will persist whether or not Trump wields state power. But there are plenty of informal powers that a newly-christened “shadow president” could conceivably wield. Having garnered 74.2 million votes — more than anyone in history, except Joe Biden — he’ll have a limitless range of options to continue exerting political influence. The first thing virtually any ambitious Republican who wants to win a competitive primary election will seek is his endorsement. We can likely expect a steady stream of flamboyantly-orchestrated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago.

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President Manuel López Obrador of Mexico — a Left-wing populist who developed an idiosyncratic bond with Trump — potentially provides something of a precedent for the Trump to emulate. After Obrador’s loss in the 2006 Mexico presidential election, the candidate openly rejected the outcome on the basis of what he said was widespread fraud. He even went so far as to participate in his own counter-inauguration event, attended by huge numbers of supporters, and declared himself head of a “parallel government.” It took another twelve years, but Obrador eventually won the official presidency on his own terms.

Trump probably lacks the concentration of mind to replicate Obrador’s feat; governing always seemed to be his least favourite part of the job, anyway. More probably, he will be permitted to once again inhabit his most natural state, which is that of pundit-in-chief. However should he choose to forge this new, yet-to-be defined role as a “shadow president”, he’ll have hastened the reversion of the US to a country with a manifestly less “exceptional” stature — and it would be perfectly in keeping with his long-expressed worldview.

In a way, this isn’t an entirely bad thing — it could bring a much-needed dose of humility to those whose livelihoods have long been predicated on fictionalised “American Exceptionalism” fantasies — especially to the DC think-tank class whose foreign policy obsessions usually entail imposing Americanised democratic customs on other countries by force. That will be far harder to rationalise when a former president dedicates his life to insisting that American democratic customs are… a farce.

Yet as far as presidents go, it’s been a while since a majority of Texans voted for a Democrat — nearly half a century, in fact. The last time it happened was 1976, when residents of the state opted for Jimmy Carter over the Nixon-pardoning Gerald Ford. Back then, Emmanuel Macron was still two years away from being born and Joe Biden was but a bonnie wee laddie of 34, serving out the first of his seven terms in the Senate. We hadn’t yet hit peak disco, let alone gone through the backlash and subsequent revival, and nobody knew who Darth Vader was. Needless to say, things didn’t exactly end well for Carter and since then, Texans have steered well clear of Democratic candidates for president.

Until now, perhaps. With less than a week to go before the election, and at least one poll showing that Biden might be slightly ahead in Texas, the question of whether the Democrats could finally break a decades-long losing streak and score electoral victory in the Lone Star State is filling the party (and pundits) with a sense of nervous excitement.

A Biden victory in Texas is regarded as a prelude to flipping the entire state, reversing the Republicans’ vice-like grip on Lone Star politics, from the presidency downwards. In this scenario, the prophecy of The Emerging Democratic Majority will at long last be fulfilled: the Republicans will be reduced to a rump of elderly trailer-dwelling deplorables clinging to their guns and scratched Duck Dynasty DVDs, while the youthful, diverse, progressive Democrats shall enjoy political hegemony forever and ever, amen.

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Is their hope misplaced? Recently, it seemed that reports of the demise of the Republican Party in Texas were greatly exaggerated, to say the least. Consider, for instance, the lightning fast rise-and-fall of Democrat Wendy Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer and Texas state senator who in 2013 became briefly famous for filibustering a bill that would have placed numerous restrictions on abortion in the state.

Davis not only made headlines on CNN and in the pages of the NYT but some parts of the British media also did that weird self-colonising thing where they reported on US regional politics with far more interest than they do their own. The Guardian in particular dedicated lots of column inches to Davis, including a particularly hard-hitting piece of reporting on how the trainers she wore during her filibuster had become the bestselling shoe on Amazon and an “unlikely feminist symbol”.

The attention went to Davis’s head: she published a memoir (17 copies going used on Amazon, from $0.08) and then, in 2014, ran for governor against the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, only to lose by over 20 percentage points. Davis promptly vanished from the scene (although she is having a stab at entering the House of Representatives this year).

Yet despite Davis’s failure, her campaign for governor was significant in at least one respect: having achieved fame as an abortion rights campaigner she did not feel the need to represent herself as a “blue dog” or conservative Democrat. She was, essentially, very similar to the “progressive” type of Democrat you might find on the ballot elsewhere in America, except for her shameless pandering on guns (during her campaign Davis claimed to support the open carry of handguns, a position she denounced almost immediately upon losing.)

Because Davis’s campaign was so obviously a hallucinatory byproduct of Democrat wishful thinking and national media fantasising, I was initially equally dismissive of the “Beto” phenomenon. When the representative from El Paso announced he would challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018, nobody knew much about him; I read that he was from El Paso, spoke fluent Spanish and campaigned where other Democrats feared to tread, and that was about it. It was some time before I saw a photograph of him and was surprised to discover that, despite the Spanish nickname, “Beto” was actually Robert O’Rourke, an Irish-American almost as pale as myself — a Scotsman who didn’t see the sun until he was about 20 years old.

However, despite the fact that O’Rourke was the subject of giddy national media coverage just as Wendy Davis had been, his sudden rise to prominence seemed different. Despite the flood of endorsements from such incisive political thinkers as Beyoncé, Jim Carrey and Willie Nelson, there was also a genuine grassroots excitement around O’Rourke. “Beto for Senate” signs were proliferating on lawns like an invasive species and lots of people I knew were talking about him with cautious optimism. Texas Democrats, after decades of tilting at windmills, were allowing themselves to believe that it might finally happen this time. Betomania was certainly not at Obama ’08 levels, but the stakes were also lower — whereas Obama was running for leader of the free world, O’Rourke had merely set his sights on unseating Ted “No Mates” Cruz, a Tea Party obstructionist widely reviled even by fellow Republicans.

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But there was another significant difference. Where Obama’s rise represented something new and genuinely progressive in American politics and culture, so O’Rourke’s was a variation on a very old theme. The wunderkind from nowhere was actually the pampered scion of the establishment; not only was he the son of Pat O’Rourke, an El Paso judge and Democrat Party apparatchik, he was also the step-grandson of Fred Korth, JFK’s secretary of the navy. After receiving the obligatory Ivy League education, he worked for his family or ran businesses where members of his family were either financial backers or significant clients, and along the way married the daughter of a real estate billionaire.

He then ran for the El Paso city council, where he distinguished himself by supporting a plan to redevelop a Hispanic neighbourhood in which his real estate mogul father-in-law was an investor. Then, when this horny-handed son of toil decided he’d like a seat in congress, one of his father-in-law’s companies contributed $37,500 to a $240,000 campaign against the incumbent, farmer’s son Silvestre Reyes. Inspiring!

Of course, most people weren’t looking all that closely at O’Rourke’s bona fides and in the end he couldn’t quite get it over the line. He did, however, spend a ton of money and set a new record for the most votes ever cast for a Democrat in Texas, finishing a mere two percentage points behind a very nervous Cruz. Like Davis, O’Rourke had not disguised his progressive leanings, but unlike Davis he managed to inspire hope among Texas Democrats that victory was within reach. In Williamson County, where I live — traditionally a conservative stronghold — O’Rourke beat Cruz by almost three points in 2018. The Democrats did not get the “blue wave” they had hoped for, but they made Republicans anxious in a way they hadn’t been for decades. O’Rourke had put them on notice.

Which brings us to 2020. Things are changing so rapidly it is difficult to keep up. O’Rourke, of course, jumped the shark in the eyes of many following his spectacularly unsuccessful campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president, but he still has believers in Texas. The Democratic candidate for my district touts his endorsement. His portrait is bigger than hers on her own posters. With the exception of Fort Worth, all the major cities in Texas — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and El Paso — have Democrat mayors, and as Texas attracts more and more emigrants from California to the cities and suburbs, it is common to hear complaints that these new arrivals are changing the political culture by voting for the very same high tax, regulation-heavy progressive policies that would turn Texas into the type of place they just left. Meanwhile, polling indicates that white, college-educated voters in the hitherto reliably red-voting suburbs are shifting towards the Democrats and that up to a third of Texas’s Republican congressional seats may be up for grabs.

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If Texas turns blue, or even a shade of purple, it could have a major impact on national politics long-term. Today, Texas is second only to California for electoral votes (38 to 55) and thanks to its growing population, it will have 41 by the next election (while California might actually lose influence). Meanwhile, not only is the population of Texas growing, but its demographics are changing; it is already a majority-minority state.

That the Republican establishment will now have to contend with a more competitive state seems undeniable. The extent to which they are willing or able to adapt to a changing Texas without alienating their base will be key to their fortunes. Yet the overall picture may be more ambiguous than it seems.

One of the most striking things about O’Rourke’s Senate campaign was that he actually polled higher among native born Texans in his Senate race than he did among those who have moved to the state. Therefore, rather than turning the state blue, it may well be that some of those new arrivals, having fled progressive strongholds, are aligning with rural voters with Trump flags flying over their properties and actively resisting the drift towards the Democrats. It also remains to be seen whether the shift in the suburbs represents an epochal turn towards the Democrats or simply disgust at the hi-jinks of this particular president and his enablers. Trump, meanwhile, has made gains among black and Latino voters. Could a less obnoxious populist a few years from now build on those gains and chip away further at the Democrats’ lead among minority voters?

As for whether Texas will finally elect a Democrat for president, well — even Biden seems doubtful. Having splurged a lot of cash earlier in the campaign he is resisting pleas to spend more money in the state,  so that well-known billionaire of the people, Michael Bloomberg, a man with no fear of setting fire to his own money, has chipped in to make up the shortfall. And yet regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, I think the Democrats can be sure of at least one thing: they will not have to wait the century the Republicans did before they start winning elections in Texas again.

In a follow-up piece, And Then the Breitbart Lynch Mob Came for Me, Brooks detailed the torrent of abuse that came her way after the piece was published. The alt-right had responded to her suggestions with howls of indignation, culminating in a death threat: ‘I AM GOING TO CUT YOUR HEAD OFF … BITCH!’

Four years later, and President Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, is referring to mail-in ballots as a “big scam”, and declaring he wasn’t sure that the election could be “honest”. Shortly after his release from the Walter Reed Medical Center, Trump shows no signs of softening. He reiterated his contempt for the American electoral system in a frenzied tweet-storm:

Ari, THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, JUST LIKE OUR DEMOCRAT RUN BALLOT SYSTEM IS CORRUPT! Look at what’s happening with Fake, Missing and Fraudulent Ballots all over the Country??? VOTE https://t.co/PaFBuskB19

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

Along with his recently expressed desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send troops onto American streets during the protests which followed the killing of George Floyd, the President has spurred speculation that he might seek to use the US military to prolong his time in office. New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, described Trump’s statements as “a six-alarm fire”, saying “I think it’s DEFCON 5;” and Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, warned that Trump, protected from ongoing criminal investigations only so long as he is in power, is unashamedly putting the nation on notice that he is planning a coup d’état.

Leading Republicans have promised an “orderly transition” which has reportedly been insufficient to relieve deep anxieties shared by senior military and Defense Department officials that they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests after the vote. In public, officials have insisted that the US military will not play a role settling election disputes — but debate is said to be intensifying in private about its role should there be civil unrest.

And now, a group of lawyers is officially offering advice to worried military and National Guard members. In the US, the law requires service members not to obey “flagrantly unlawful” orders but those who refuse to obey orders take considerable risks as, under military law, disobeying an order is itself a criminal offence. The Orders Project, founded in response to the militarised use of force against protestors this summer, has compiled a legal sourcebook for military personnel as a guide to what a soldier’s legal position might be in situations where loyalties conflict.

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By Justin webb

So, it turns out that Brooks anticipating that the military might refuse “to obey certain orders” wasn’t such an incendiary fantasy after all.

In fact, exactly this scenario — in which a president’s closest aides and military chiefs deliberately ignore or subvert orders from their Commander in Chief — has already played out in American history, under Richard Nixon. Such were his aggressive and impulsive outbursts that military and defence officials feared he might upset the fragile geopolitical order of the late 1960s/early 1970s. “If the President had his way,” Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, quipped on several occasions, “there would be a nuclear war each week.”

According to several members of Nixon’s inner circle, many of whom I met during the making of the documentary, The Secret World of Richard Nixon, there were a number of episodes in which the President’s staff thought it better to ignore his orders or to come up with explanations of why they couldn’t be carried out.

On 29 August 1969, for instance, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a US passenger plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land at Damascus International Airport. Nixon spent that evening with his friend Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, a Florida businessman who also served as his personal financial adviser. At 3am, according to Leonard Garment, Nixon’s Special Assistant from 1969 to 1973, the President called Kissinger, and said: “Henry, I want you to set in motion plans for the bombing of Damascus. This is an order. This is not something for discussion.”

Kissinger told the President that he would do as he asked, but in fact did nothing. Syria, then as now, was a Russian ally, and such a move would have been highly confrontational, potentially sparking a larger conflict between the superpowers. Kissinger interpreted Nixon’s order as, in his words, “posturing for the people he was with that evening” and decided to take the matter into his own hands. No bombs were dropped on Damascus.

A year later, in the middle of September 1970, terrorists from the same organisation hijacked several aeroplanes and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert. Nixon again responded by ordering bombing raids on PFLP positions in Jordan, which this time would have provoked both Syria and Iraq, the PFLP’s Russian-backed sponsors, and complicated Jordan’s position as a US ally.

After consultation with Kissinger, Nixon’s then Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, told the President that cloud cover made such a raid impossible. ‘Conveniently,’ Laird said later, ‘there was bad weather.’ (Jordan’s deserts in summer aren’t known for their heavy rainfall.) ‘I’ve always tried to carry out the orders of the Commander in Chief’ said Laird, ‘but on some occasions it was better to protect him.’

Towards the end of Nixon’s presidency, as Watergate took its toll on his mental equilibrium, some of his staff went further.

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In the spring of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public affairs officer at the Bureau of the Budget, was walking up a stairway in the West Wing of the White House when someone ran down the other way, bowled into him, and took off with a number of other men in pursuit. ‘My God,’ Laitin thought. ‘That was the President of the United States running away from six Secret Service agents.’ The look in Nixon’s eye, he said later, ‘was one of desperation. And that bothered me.’

James Schlesinger, then Secretary of Defense, felt similarly. He was concerned about Nixon’s access to the nuclear codes. At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs attended by Laitin, the chairman General George S. Brown the told the gathered company that Defense Secretary Schlesinger ‘wanted an agreement from the Joint Chiefs that nobody would take any action, or execute orders on the use of nuclear weapons, without all of them agreeing to it.’ According to Laitin, ‘they were shocked, but they all agreed.’

Schlesinger was also concerned about the possibility of the President trying to sidestep impeachment by surrounding the White House with troops loyal to the presidency – in the same way that Pentagon officials are now worried about Trump potentially refusing to leave the White House and ordering troops onto the streets to quell any civil unrest should he contest the election result.

Fearing the ‘bloody mess’ that might ensue if two sets of US troops found themselves facing each other outside the White House, Schlesinger issued another unorthodox order. “I told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he disclosed in an interview 26 years after the event, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me, directly, immediately upon receipt. There were not to be any extraordinary military measures that would be taken at anyone’s behest.”

A former head of the CIA, Schlesinger was not a liberal by any definition. Reportedly, his first words on taking office there were: “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.” By the spring of 1974, however, he believed that the President was no longer capable of controlling his emotions. Some – such as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler – maintained that it was inappropriate for Schlesinger to issue such orders. But Schlesinger, who died in 2014, remained adamant that he had done the right thing. “The President was the duly elected man in office,” he explained, “and it is not the responsibility of his cabinet officers to question whether or not he is balanced – save when there is clear evidence that he is no longer capable of the job.”

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How Trump could refuse to go

By Daniel Baer

Interviewing members of the Nixon Administration about this period, a picture emerged of individuals constantly improvising in the untidy grey area of conflicting loyalties to the Constitution and Commander-in-Chief. Their responses altered from day to day with Nixon’s changing mental condition as well as rapidly evolving political events.

In the end, facing the near-certainty of impeachment, Nixon resigned peacefully on the 8^th of August 1974. No ‘extraordinary military measures’ were taken. Ultimately politics and personality decided the day. Evidence of Nixon’s complicity in the cover up surrounding the Watergate burglary had eroded his remaining political support and, in the face of overwhelming opposition, his rage and paranoia gave way to defeat. These factors and the presence of certain key individuals around him ensured that the system was respected.

Of course Trump is not Nixon. And, although Trump’s political support may wane should he lose the election, his grandiose narcissism may elicit a different response, as might the guidance of those around him. In an interview last month, former political consultant to the Trump campaign and convicted felon, Roger Stone, told InfoWars’s Alex Jones that Trump should impose ‘martial law’ in the event of ‘election fraud’. And in June, when Trump decided to put on a show of strength and give a speech outside a church that had been damaged during protests close to the White House in D.C.’s Lafayette Square, the military provided assistance – armed members of the National Guard were present while military helicopters circled above. And, as he walked across the square, the president was flanked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, wearing military fatigues, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.

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Trump's biblical power play

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Both Milley and Esper faced a barrage of criticism for taking part in the event. Milley publicly apologised. “I should not have been there,” he said in a video address soon afterwards. Esper also broke with the president, saying that active duty troops should not be sent to control protests. “I don’t support invoking the Insurrection Act” he told reporters gathered at the Pentagon.

If Trump fails to agree to a peaceful transfer or questions the election result, it will be another ‘stress-test’ for a political system, which has already been pushed to new extremes under this presidency. For now, at least, the military has made its position clear, stating that it will play no role in the transition of power after the election. In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall at the end of September, General Milley encouraged US troops to remain neutral: “Stay apolitical,” he said “and keep the Constitution close to your heart.”

Milley’s words contained an echo of President Gerald Ford’s speech given at his swearing-in ceremony after Nixon’s resignation. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” said Ford. “Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

Let’s hope that, whatever the result, the same is true after November.

Presidential transitions are often messy affairs. That was the first: John Adams is writing to his wife Abigail, in 1797, about the scenes two weeks after George Washington had left office. Washington had left his servants in charge, and they had little consideration for the new man or for the decorum of the new republic.

In 1801, when Adams handed over to Jefferson, things were even worse. Adams used his last months in office to appoint judges he thought would block the programme of his successor, and refused to attend the inauguration.

So what happens on November 4 this year, if Donald Trump has lost his bid for re-election, which most presidents manage pretty easily? How haywire will things be?

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How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

Let us begin with a fact that many Americans find uncomfortable, but which is broadly true: Donald Trump won the election of 2016 because the Democratic party put up a candidate who failed to enthuse the nation enough to muster the necessary votes to beat him. It really was as simple as that. And the Democrats — remarkably — could be about to repeat the feat in 2020. They have a job of work to do in getting Joe Biden to look and feel like the natural man for the job.

But rather than focus on addressing their failure of 2016, and the risk of repeating it, some in the party are going full Apocalypse Now: they’re claiming the President is going to delay the election or not accept the result. Joe Biden himself, at a fundraising event last month that was meant to be about his programme for office, managed to darken the mood. “Mark my words,” he said. “I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”

But ask yourself this, Joe: would Donald Trump like the election to be fought amid wild talk of cancelled democracy, history ending, systems collapsing? Or would he prefer to dive into the weeds of post-coronavirus planning, health system reform, future pandemic readiness? It’s the former, obviously. This is his thing. He is comfortable here. Famously, in the White House when they want him to do something they say: “it’s never been done before!” Or: “the lawyers will never allow it!” I mean, come on: have we learned nothing?

So let us assume that the election will go ahead on 3 November. It is constitutionally mandated (and, as I have noted before, the lower the turnout the better for the Donald so there is really no reason at all that he would delay it even if he could). But what if he loses? Here is where some Democrats are getting really excited, and not in a good way. They think, or pretend to think, that he will refuse to leave.

There is a body of Trumpocalypse theorising out there. To begin at the scenic end: a book by that name, Trumpocalypse, co-written by Paul McGuire, who is described as “an eschatology professor and prophecy expert”. The front cover depicts the White House in flames and no wonder because the book is an “explosive exposé of the chilling truth about the fierce opposition to the Trump presidency, and why the globalist elite and Deep State will stop at nothing — assassination, military coup, staged economic collapse, or worse — to overthrow him”.

Laugh (or cry, or cower) if you must but there are others, of a more serious bent, who think it will all end in tears. Steve Bannon — Trump’s former campaign chief — suggested years ago to the author Michael Wolff that the end of Trump would not be pretty. Nixon went quietly in the end, mused Bannon, but with Trump it would be “ugly”. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, was blunter: “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” he said, if the re-election bid went badly.

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Mr Trump is his usual self in these matters. When Jerry Falwell Jr., one of his most prominent evangelical supporters, suggested Trump should get two years tacked on to his first term as “pay back” for the Mueller Russia investigation, Trump re-tweeted the idea. As if he were mulling it over.

But is he, really? Many of his supporters would suggest that the no-respect-for-elections shtick is a Democratic party thing. How often do those who hate the President talk of the fact that he lost the popular vote in 2016? That the Russians were involved, despite the lack of firm evidence that their involvement swayed the result? That the Donald is unfit for all manner of reasons, including mental incapacity? In other words, who is it, actually, that doesn’t accept the result of the 2016 poll?

And how long have they been up to this? A few days ago George W. Bush released a video message of solidarity and affection for all Americans in the time of coronavirus — a message that Trump hated and his opponents swooned over. How short are their memories? Or how selective? They hated Bush back in the day and they wondered, too, whether he would end freedom — or, in the words of one book, End America. Naomi Wolf — author of The End of America — said free America was under assault. There was little time to lose. There were parallels between George W’s rule and the 1930s. A fascist shift — whatever that might mean — was under way.

We know how this ended: with the Bush-Obama transition a model of decorum and George and Michelle Obama seen since, flirting like school kids.

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Joe Biden has already blown it

By Justin Webb

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump will be a happy man on 4 November if he loses. Or that he will go quietly and gently. I doubt he would attend Biden’s inauguration. But there is simply no evidence that he is planning a revolution. He is mandated by law — a new law passed by Congress during Obama’s time in office — to prepare a transition team even while trying to win re-election. He is, it seems, doing it. Only days ago, according to the Associated Press, Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a directive asking federal agencies to select transition coordinators by the end of the week. It is in hand. Joe: relax.

It’s worth remembering that Trump might like fizzing drama and the Democrats might be tempted to fight in this territory but most Americans are not comfortable here. Not at all, and certainly not in this terrifying year of all years. So does that turn them off Trump, as the Democrats might hope, or does it frighten them to such an extent that they decide to placate a man portrayed as a danger to the world if he doesn’t get his way? Four more years: perhaps that’s a price worth paying for not crashing the whole show? I have no evidence that this is true, but knowing how little many Americans focus on politics, it seems to me by no means impossible that talk of ‘what Trump might do’ will play right into his hands.

To focus on the wildness, the oddness, the danger of Trump may be to commit a terrible tactical error. The former Obama speech writer Jon Favreau has a new job now as truth-teller to his party. He conducts focus groups in which potential Democratic voters are asked about the political scene. Favreau’s conclusion: “They really do see Trump as part of a broader political media culture that’s just out of control, silly, nasty, and not focused on what they care about.” Favreau says he comes away from his focus groups “thinking that Trump may not be as big of a challenge as the cynicism and distrust that a lot of these voters have towards the entire political system and the media”.

Hysterical talk of cancelled elections — terrifying talk of incipient totalitarianism — either leaves folks cold or, if I am right, could actually push them into the ‘placate Trump or something ghastly might happen’ camp. I think Mr Trump might know this too.

But if he does lose it does not follow that he actually blows up. We should be prepared, in other words, for anything, including anti-climax. Victor Davis Hanson, a Trump supporter, wrote a book in which he compared the president to Clint Eastwood’s police anti-hero Dirty Harry who, at the very end of the whole long violent saga of chasing a baddie “shoots the psychopathic Scorpio, ending both their careers, and walks off after throwing his inspector’s badge into the water”.

I doubt there will be an actual shooting. There may well be legal action to void the result in some states, particularly if it’s close. But the Dirty Harry metaphor is a good one. In the end Trump walks off. Back to the golf course. Back to New York. Back to the TV career.

The Democrats, if they are to win, need to focus on what happens in a sequel that they, finally, have the power to write.

This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether.

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Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

Last week’s sudden decision to call for US troops to step aside and allow Turkey to attack the Kurds of northern Syria, a staunch US ally in the fight against ISIS, has divided Trump’s most prominent Christian supporters. Some, like Perkins, have stuck by him. Another Christian ally, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., explained away the Syrian move as President Trump “keeping his promise to keep America out of endless wars”.

At the other extreme, Pat Robertson, one of the founding fathers of the Religious Right, said on his Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump was in danger of losing the “Mandate of Heaven” for abandoning the Kurds. In less harsh but still clear criticism of the President, Franklin Graham asked his followers to pray for President Trump to reconsider his decision, lest he endanger both the Kurds and the Christians that they’ve been protecting.

Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”.

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By Justin Webb

During President Trump’s Values Voters speech, he painted impeachment proceedings as part of a witch-hunt against conservatives, an idea that found a strong reception among the audience. As his speech lurched from topic to topic, covering everything from the Second Amendment to late-term abortion, Barack Obama and “crooked Hillary,” he got the usual reaction from this crowd; cheers, chants (“four more years!”) and interjections (“that’s right!”) that would be typical of a Pentecostal church service.

But the energy changed after the president told an extended story about receiving the bodies of fallen soldiers and comforting grieving families. This tale, which he’s been using all week, was a preface for addressing the elephant in the room, and what followed was an extremely disjointed defence of the Syrian withdrawal, throwing out a host of different, sometimes contradictory justifications for abandoning the Kurds: that the US has sacrificed enough in the “never ending” wars of the Middle East; US involvement in the region has been based on “the biggest mistake” of the 2003 Iraq invasion; “The Kurds are fighting for their own land” now, not US interests; maybe the Kurds will see that they’re outmatched by Turkey and simply retreat; the US has already defeated ISIS; and Middle East involvement is distracting from other issues, including dealing with foreign policy concerns like China, Russia or building The Wall.

The cheers and applause that President Trump had been enjoying grew sporadic and muted as he talked about the Syrian situation. Even when he pivoted back to some applause lines — touting his record on defending (Christian) religious freedom, attacking Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as anti-American and anti-Semitic, highlighting his support for Israel — he never seemed to recapture the crowd’s earlier enthusiasm.

And that, I think, is emblematic of where his presidency as a whole is with Evangelicals.

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Evangelical Christians are not particularly inclined to champion the cause of a stateless Muslim ethnic minority in the Middle East, but the idea of abandoning one’s allies and allowing the slaughter of former comrades-in-arms and their civilian relatives sits the wrong way with many of them.

This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS.

By itself, disagreements over foreign policy wouldn’t be enough to break Evangelical devotion to Trump, but the Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry may be further straining that relationship. Normally (that is, the post-2016 “new normal” that Trump has initiated), Ukrainian impeachment would cause supporters to circle their wagons around the president, seeing him as a fellow victim of Left-wing persecution. To some extent, that has happened, and many attendees at last weekend’s Summit said they were doubling down in their support of Trump against “harassment” by Democrats and the so-called “deep state”.

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But as the impeachment inquiry has gathered steam, Trump appears to be reverting to one of this tried-and-tested tactics when faced with allegations of wrongdoing: throwing his subordinates under the bus. Trump has at various times deflected blame for the Ukraine fiasco towards a number of people, such as Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

More importantly for Christian conservatives, Trump also needlessly threw Mike Pence into the mix, revealing that the vice president also had similar conversations with Ukrainian officials and that these interactions were routine. Pence is one of several administration officials accused of having helped cover up the president’s true intentions regarding holding back aid to Ukraine, and the vice president may suffer political, and maybe even legal consequences if he toes the White House line of not cooperating with House impeachment investigations.

Trump’s unprompted inclusion seemed to some like a cynical move to undermine the potential for Pence to assume the presidency if impeachment was successful. This may be a clever tactic; congressional Republicans will be much less likely to support impeachment and removal if it meant handing the White House to Nancy Pelosi, next in line for presidential succession if both Trump and Pence go down.

Or it may simply be sour grapes: it was rumored that his running mate was once willing to go along with a scheme by Republican leaders to replace Trump with Pence as the 2016 Republican presidential candidate after Trump’s “Access Hollywood” scandal emerged, and Donald Trump is not one to ever let a slight be forgotten, however chummy he and his vice president have been since.

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How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

Swapping out Trump for Pence has not so secretly been a fantasy scenario for at least some Republicans, and surely many on the Religious Right have this idea in the back of their minds; why rely on Pence to push Trump in the direction of Evangelicals when they could just put the true Evangelical in the Oval Office? If the president becomes too politically toxic and Pence signals his willingness to step into the Oval Office, many Evangelicals could get behind such a move.

Protecting Christians abroad and keeping advisors like Mike Pence close were parts of the tacit agreement made between Donald Trump and conservative Christian voters, but the main goal of the Religious Right has for decades been to stack the judicial branch of government in order to reverse the progressive trends they so oppose. Donald Trump knows this; during his speech last weekend, he asserted that appointing judges was the most important job of a president and played up the over 150 federal court appointments and two Supreme Court picks he’s made so far.

Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.

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Of course, the holy grail for Christian conservatives is overturning Roe v. Wade, and that test has yet to come. If a major case concerning abortion rights is decided by the Supreme Court — and several are currently in the pipeline — Evangelicals may start to shed their support for Trump, regardless of the outcome. A ruling that overturns or significantly weakens Roe may give Evangelicals a sense that their mission has been accomplish, and allow them to cease the moral compromises necessary to follow Trump wholeheartedly.

On the other hand, if Roe v. Wade is upheld even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Evangelicals might fault Trump for not picking judges who were conservative enough, or they may be discouraged from their strategy of challenging abortion rights through the judiciary; either way, Donald Trump becomes less useful and more expendable.

A lot can happen between now and November 2020; perhaps these concerns will have been alleviated by then. And even if some conservative Christian leaders sour on Donald Trump, the Evangelical rank and file may continue to believe they “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” the President, as is asserted in a new book by Ralph Reed, one of Trump’s ardent Evangelical supporters.

But if Syria or the fallout from impeachment end up being the straws that break Evangelical’s backs concerning Trump, it will only be because of the other straws that have been piling up for a while now.

In 2016, American Evangelicals struck an ironically Faustian bargain: ally with Donald Trump, a man who represents everything they usually preach against, as their best shot of gaining the political and legal victories they sought at home and promoting Christians and their interests abroad.

For some, Donald Trump has not kept up his end of the bargain. And with the election just over a year away, Trump can no longer rely on the automatic backing of the Evangelical voters who came out for him in overwhelming force last time.

And you must make another decision. Do you drive to the polling station or do you leave it and go straight home? You backed Trump last time, you think he’s a bit barmy – you and your friends call him ‘a jerk’ – but you don’t like the Democratic candidate either. So do you head home or do you take the trouble to vote in a nation where 45% of eligible people don’t bother?

What helps with the decision?

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By J. D. Vance

Impeachment helps. It tells you that the folks in Washington who always think they know best are at it again. They don’t talk much about the economy (which has been booming for you: you’re tired because there’s plenty of work) but they go on and on incessantly about phone calls to Ukraine and how some foreigners don’t like the president. They clutch at pearls because he wants the next G7 conference to be held at his resort: hey, why not? You’d love it to be held at your house if it meant new garden lights on the federal dollar. Give the guy a break, you think.

So you turn off on your way home and take the trouble to park and to queue and to pull the lever for Trump. Without impeachment you would not have bothered. Impeachment reminded you, to steal the old Cold War adage, that Trump is a son of a bitch but he’s your son of a bitch. And he wins re-election because you and thousands like you did what I have just described.

This is the Democratic party nightmare. It is the reason why, until now, moderate Democrats in the House of Representatives have seen impeachment as a pretty clear trap –  a set of hinged steel clamps complete with red flashing lights and a sign saying THIS IS A TRAP –  that they would rather avoid.

But the trap has now ensnared them and in fairness what other course of action could they have taken? It’s almost as if Donald Trump did it deliberately. As if Steve Bannon, the dark artist of his first campaign, were back in the room, wondering how to mess with the heads of the president’s opponents.

That’s not the case of course: Bannon is well off the reservation and Trump lacks the discipline to think this through. But he has tipped the scales now: it looks as if his dealings with Ukraine, and the withholding of Congressional funds he had no business withholding, might amount to something so serious that a failure to take action would look like cowardice and weakness on the part of his enemies.

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What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

Where the Russia collusion case was always opaque and multi-faceted and ultimately too tricky for prime time, the Ukraine shenanigans have the feel of something crunchier. The Democrats, if the facts are revealed to be roughly as reported so far, would have to seize the moment.

With what hope of success? On the face of it: none. The Republicans have a 53-to-47 seat advantage in the Senate. Two thirds of Senators are required to confirm impeachment. Even if one or two (Senator Mitt Romney is an obvious candidate) decided to stick it to the Donald, it would not be enough. Mr Trump will not be removed from office as a result of this action.

Not removed from office, and with his base fired up. Yes: folks, it’s Bill Clinton all over again. Impeached in the House of Representatives, with the case thrown out by the Senate. And in the mid-term elections held during the Clinton circus in 1998: his party gained support. In fact the biggest loser was Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who fought hardest for the president to lose his job. Mr Gingrich, defeated in that aim, lost his.

An impeachment process might also involve collateral damage – by severely harming the chances of Joe Biden getting the Democratic presidential nomination, since part of the case would focus on his son’s work in Ukraine (something Trump wanted to have the new Ukrainian government investigate) and the murkiness of top folks’ kids lobbying around the world. Some Democrats would welcome this of course but it would not necessarily be the conversation the party would want to be having at the start of an election campaign with people tuning in and hoping for, well, something fresh.

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There is another outcome, though, and it’s more subtle than America’s bitter political arguments generally allow. It is possible that the Democrats could use the televised hearings that impeachment will bring about to persuade the nation that this is not a witch-hunt; that their actions are not governed by politics but by a gallant defence of The American Way. They wanted the Trump presidency to be successful, they would have to say. They understand why people voted for him and respect their decisions. But this corruption is not right. This is not American. And in your heart of hearts you people who voted for him last time know what is right. We trust you and we want to talk seriously to you. Impeachment, then, not as attack but as healing device. The denouement would be a loss of office in the time-worn way, at the polls in 2020.

It is quite a tall order isn’t it? It would take a degree of discipline that even the Democrats’ best friends might suggest is beyond the party. And yet it could work. Because, of course, not many people need to be persuaded for the election to be lost to Mr Trump. If that electrician in Pennsylvania, and his friends, decide that they are not being belittled and patronised by the Democrats any more and stay on the road and go home without bothering to vote on that November night next year, the president would lose. That state would revert to the Democratic party, where it has firmly been in recent years, and the narrow path for a Trump victory would become impassable.

An impeachment, well handled, could work for the Democrats. They need a firm message summing up why Trump has overstepped the mark. Congressional representatives who behave with restraint and decorum, even when they lose the impeachment case. Then a personable and convincing presidential candidate with captivating ideas about the future, selected at the end of an uplifting and positive set of primaries.

What could possibly go wrong?