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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Can Trump Survive?
00:25:54
Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the perils facing the presidency after the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, May 12th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On Tuesday, Donald Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election. Yesterday, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senator Angus King of Maine. Asked about the Russia inquiry yesterday, a.
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Senator Angus King
White House press spokesman said that this is one of the smallest things on the plate of the FBI. Is that an accurate statement? Is this a small investigation in relation to all the other work that you're doing?
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White House Press Spokesman
Sir, we consider it to be a highly significant investigation.
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Senator Angus King
So you would not characterize it as one of the smallest things you're engaged in?
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Evan Osnos
I would not.
- [02:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
McCabe also contradicted Trump's assertion that Comey had lost the confidence of the FBI. Evan Osnos joins me to discuss how Trump's firing of Comey will continue to damage his presidency. Hi Evan.
- [02:24]
Evan Osnos
Hi Dorothy.
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Dorothy Wickenden
On Tuesday, just days after Comey had asked the Justice Department for More resources for the Russia investigation. Trump sent him a letter saying that he was being terminated and removed from office effective immediately. What has happened since then at the White House that's actually thrown more fuel on the fire?
- [02:44]
Evan Osnos
Well, over the course of the next couple of days, the explanation for why Comey was being fired changed several times. And that's important because as we begin to try to understand what the legal consequences are for firing James Comey, the intent, the frame of mind, the motive begins to be very important. So you remember, as you mentioned initially, the explanation was that Donald Trump fired James Comey at the recommendation of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General. And the White House press staff also reiterated that in their comments. But then Donald Trump himself gave an interview to NBC News in which he said, actually, no, he contradicted that. And he said, and I'm reading here, cuz I think the words are so important. He said, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. So what he's saying is he was doing this because he was dissatisfied with the Russia investigation, which after all, is an investigation of his associates and their potential collusion with Russia during the election.
- [03:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
But the other key thing here is that he completely contradicted the statements that all of his aides and the Vice President had made about the reason for the firing. So Pence was out there saying, let.
- [04:10]
White House Press Spokesman
Me be very clear, that the President's decision to accept the recommendation of the Deputy Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General to remove Director Comey as the head of the FBI was based solely and exclusively on his commitment to the best interest of the American people. President Trump provided the kind of strong and decisive leadership the American people have come to be accustomed from him.
- [04:37]
Evan Osnos
There's a couple of major political problems that have been created over the course of the last week. The first one is what is. You know, we can generally describe it as a. And people are doing so as a crisis of credibility. And Donald Trump, in fact, on Friday morning came out and actually tweeted that his own spokespeople cannot be expected to have accurate statements about his actions because he is doing so much. That was what he said on Twitter. And that's an amazing thing to say. What he's basically doing is undermining the existence of a White House press operation.
- [05:12]
Dorothy Wickenden
He also tweeted this morning, james Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he start, starts leaking to the press.
- [05:19]
Evan Osnos
That is, I think, a legally significant moment, threatening somebody who is likely to be a witness in an investigation of both the Russia case itself and then also the circumstances around the firing of the FBI director. But I think that gives you a feel for just how really bizarre this is right now. For every mention of a criminal standard here, we have to add the following, which is that when presidents do things, it's not exactly the same same as when ordinary citizens do things, as Trump.
- [05:52]
Dorothy Wickenden
Likes to tell us.
- [05:54]
Evan Osnos
As Trump likes to tell us. And in some ways, Trump deeply believes that it is almost a Nixonian belief that when the president does it, it's not illegal. But it is also important because there is a legitimate legal argument about whether or not the president has broad latitude to fire the FBI director for. For any reason at all. So, you know, even within the last couple of days after this happened, Alan Dershowitz, serious legal scholar who has been fairly generous to the president, but he's come forward and said, look, you need to have both an unlawful act and you need to have a criminal state of mind in order for this to constitute obstruction of justice. Then I will add, however, that other Harvard colleagues, Larry Tribe, who's a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, has said, no, obstruction of justice is not a simple criminal. It doesn't have to be that you killed a witness who was going to testify against you. It can also be this much larger category in which you are trying to impede the fair adjudication of a matter of public interest. And that, after all, was the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon, that he used the powers of the office and that he obstructed justice.
- [07:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan, it strikes me that one aspect of this crisis has not gotten enough attention, and that's the role that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has played in apparently pushing for the firing of Comey after recusing himself from involvement with the Russia investigation because of his undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador during the election. So what about that?
- [07:35]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, I think this is going to be a growing story, which is that Jeff Sessions, after all, made a big public point about saying that he was now going to away from the Russia investigation. This was essentially the deal that he made with Congress in order to keep his job. He said, look, I get it. I made a mistake by not disclosing my contacts with Russian representatives. Therefore, I will have nothing to do with that very important investigation. Now, by Donald Trump's own narrative and by the White House's description, Jeff Sessions was deeply involved in the question of James Comey's future. James Comey was the man in charge of the Russia investigation. So it's now impossible to say that Jeff Sessions recused himself. So then the question is, are there consequences for that? But, you know, part of the problem here is that at a certain point, Jeff Sessions is, after all, the nation's top law enforcement official. He has, even in having recused himself, he still casts a large shadow over the decision about what the rest of the government investigates and how. It's very possible that this is the kind of issue that will sort of sit and hibernate until the point at which, if Democrats gain control of one of the houses of Congress, they then suddenly have much greater ability to start investigations, to start to produce documents that will really show the level of involvement that Jeff Sessions has had. And if it in fact, turns out that he was playing a role in this process that was beyond what he had publicly stated, then there could be pressure on him that there isn't. Now.
- [09:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
In Trump's letter to Comey, one of the key things he said was, while I greatly appreciate you informing me on three separate occasions that I am not under investigation, and that comes up, and people are citing this again and again. So what about those three occasions that Trump is referring to and his account versus what we understand to be Comey's account?
- [09:24]
Evan Osnos
It's not entirely clear what Donald Trump was referring to. I mean, one of the explanations that's been put forward is that James Comey may have said to him, you are not a target of the investigation, which would be a formal designation to say, no, we are not, in fact, legally identifying you as a target of the investigation. But the broader point is pretty clear, which is that the president was asking repeatedly his FBI director whether or not he was being investigated. And that in itself raises a legal question about whether their relationship was improper, whether he was applying undue pressure, whether he was badgering the FBI director to take a turn in the investigation. So all of it is the kind of material that now will expand this investigation rather than try to narrow it or shut it down. And that's really the sort of, I think the most remarkable effect of this very unusual week in American politics is that Donald Trump thought that he was short circuiting the Russia investigation, when, in fact, it has now clearly entered a new phase that is wider and more perilous for him.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And look now at the people he has fired. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, US Attorney Preet Bharara Comey, also National Security Adviser Flynn. That aside, the other three, these are people widely known for their integrity. And the effect of these firings has to raise questions about Trump's integrity and to reinforce even critics, especially of Comey, reinforce their faith ultimately in his own integrity.
- [10:55]
Evan Osnos
There's a unifying fact among the three people that Donald Trump has fired, in addition to his national security adviser, I will say, you know, he has sort of defended his national security adviser and sort of puts him in a separate category. Michael Flynn, he says he's a good man. And so on. The three that he just fired, James Comey, Sally Yates, and Preet Bharara, all of them, in one form or another, were investigating the relationship between Trump's associates and Russia. Sally Yates had gathered intelligence about Michael Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador. Preet Bharara was investigating Russian finances in New York, which is his jurisdiction. And also there were reports that he may have been broadening his investigation to look at more elements of Trump's activities. And then, of course, James Comey was overseeing the FBI's investigation. So there is a pattern here. And now the question will become whether or not those actions, in and of themselves, the firing of these three constitutes an offense of its own.
- [11:57]
Dorothy Wickenden
I want to talk about your piece, which is in the current issue of the magazine, how Trump could get fired. And, of course, it predated this week's controversies. You do raise the question of the impeachment process and how it works. What has changed since then, aside from some of the details we're talking about here? Is he closer to the potential of that unfolding now?
- [12:18]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, he is. I mean, it is actually sort of coincidental, in fact, that we had published this piece shortly before he ran into the biggest legal problems of his presidency. I mean, when I wrote that story, or sort of as we worked on it, it was based on a couple of key facts. One was that he was conducting himself generally in a way that was outside the norms of ordinary presidents. He was obviously saying things that were constantly generating controversy, but more importantly, he was profoundly unpopular. He had the lowest popularity of any newly elected president. And he was also the first president to come into office at the surrounded by an FBI investigation and four, congressional investigations into his campaign. And the two major things that have changed just in the last 10 days are, number one, the Republican Conference pushed through the House of Representatives a very unpopular healthcare bill. Unpopulari mean by any. By any objective standard. And as a result, it has continued to chip away at the Republican Party's favorability. They have lost seven points just in the last three or four months. Every individual member of Congress, particularly the Republicans, are getting up every day and trying to make a decision about whether or not their own personal interests are aligned with Donald Trump's interests. And what we're seeing now as a result of this, of the James Comey controversy and scandal, and also as a result of the unpopularity of their healthcare bill, is that they are forced to recalculate whether or not they're going to be reelected in 2018 and beyond. And that's the crucial measure here. The Cook Political Report, which is nonpartisan and is really sort of considered the gold standard in Washington about how you can predict what is likely to happen in upcoming races. They have already recalculated to say that they think that the chances of Democrats taking the House of Representatives is now as high as 50%. That means that individual Republicans are really under enormous pressure to either stay with this president or begin to distance themselves.
- [14:23]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [14:26]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Coloursy, Wired's director of consumer Tech and Culture.
- [14:30]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [14:39]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [14:49]
Evan Osnos
Right. So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [15:00]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [15:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
It feels as though now we're closer to the point where pressure is on Republicans to agree to an independent council or at the very least, an independent commission.
- [15:18]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, I think there are sort of two processes underway. One process is that there is this short term political pressure that is building to address the problems associated with Comey's firing. And that could be the appointment of, for instance, a select committee, which it would be up to Republicans themselves, particularly Republican leadership, Mitch McConnell in the Senate, to decide whether they would create a special committee, sort of along the lines of the committee that was set up to investigate Benghazi. There is the possibility of creating a special prosecutor that would really rest in the hands of the Justice Department themselves. But, you know, all of those decisions are going to depend on how the Republicans in Congress decide how much pressure they want to apply to the president. And that's why public opinion matters, because it shapes the opinions of Republicans in Congress and Republicans in Congress then shape the legal pathways that Donald Trump is facing.
- [16:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
And as you point out in the piece, this was something that the Clinton administration understood when the impeachment proceedings were underway against Clinton. Could you talk a little bit about that and the lessons of that episode?
- [16:29]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, that's a key piece of the history here is, you know, something that Richard Nixon didn't fully appreciate, and therefore Bill Clinton had that lesson available to him, is that public opinion matters hugely. Richard Nixon made a fateful miscalculation. He believed that he'd been reelected by this enormous margin in 1972, and therefore, his people, his base, would never really go along with the allegations. They would never really believe that he was involved in Watergate or covering it up. And therefore, he was. He was kind of willing to try to slow down and impede the investigation. But ultimately, over time, it chipped away at his authority, it chipped away at his popularity. And by the time that he was impeached in 1974, he had lost that huge public dividend. His popularity was way down. And as a result, Republicans turned against him, and that was the moment when he couldn't be saved. Bill Clinton's legal team said to me, we took that lesson very explicitly, and what we understood was we had to maintain the support of Democrats in Congress and Democrats around the country. And so they were really adamant about going out of their way. The Clinton legal team was in making sure that Democrats felt that their president was being unfairly targeted, that the things that he was accused of didn't rise to the level of what the Constitution imagined as impeachable offenses. That, you know, covering up an affair with a White House intern was not what Madison and Hamilton had in mind. That was the case they made over and over again, and it worked. By the time Bill Clinton was impeached, he, in fact, had one of the. The highest levels of public approval he had ever enjoyed. It was up into the 70s. You know, that is the lesson here, is that the popularity or unpopularity of Donald Trump is a politically almost legally meaningful fact, because it means that he doesn't have the kind of support that he needs from fellow Republicans in order to fend off this growing set of accusations.
- [18:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
And that's where the press comes in, too. And I am struck this week by the discipline of the press in covering this story. You can see in the tweets this morning that it is unnerving Trump, and you can see his frustration that he has lost his ability to drive the story. It's one of the things that really helped get him elected. When all of the headlines that people are seeing, undemocratic contempt for the law, obstruction of justice, cover up, that's when Trump's voters are going to begin to lose faith.
- [18:54]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, this is a cumulative process, and I think we often underestimate that. You know, when something happens to a president, you sometimes assume, oh, well, okay, the endgame has begun, and this will all happen very efficiently. It's not often the case. I mean, it was two years between the break in at Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It took years for Bill Clinton and for the Whitewater investigation to morph into the Monica Lewinsky investigation and ultimately for that to lead to impeachment. The process is slow, but over time, it chips away at the public image of a president. Over time, voters simply say, enough is.
- [19:28]
Dorothy Wickenden
Enough, but it doesn't. The process does not feel slow right now. Is that because we are members of the media and we're in the midst of this feeding frenzy, or are things really moving along at quite an alarming rate?
- [19:43]
Evan Osnos
I really wonder that a lot these days. Whether or not it feels as if history has sped up simply because we now consume our information 24 hours a day, or whether in fact the processes are happening faster. I think we don't know is the answer. You know, this may sound like an odd reference, but I'm reminded of the experience of, you know, covering authoritarian countries for a long time where oftentimes what happens is before things happen. It's very hard to see, well, how is it, you know, all of these pressures are going to resolve themselves. When the Soviet Union collapsed, people all said, well, the signs were all clear. They were all obvious that there was no way that the situation could hold. But in advance, it's almost impossible to predict when or how it ends. And as odd as that may sound as a comparison to Donald Trump, I think we're dealing with something similar where it's really difficult to know what is going to sort of be the piece of the puzzle that is the most catastrophic for him. But what we know is that he has a set of political risk behaviors that make him extraordinarily vulnerable.
- [20:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
I actually want to pin you down on that because you do get into this in your piece, and it's something people are just dancing around anymore. They are overtly asking questions about the President's mental state. And as you saw, as we've been saying this week, the instability is striking. So could you talk a little bit about the 25th Amendment and when that possibly can come? Into play and the difficulties in invoking it.
- [21:12]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, the 25th amendment was created after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when basically people realized that they were facing a very serious scenario, which is, what if Kennedy had lived and was wounded but was still alive? They had no way to transfer the powers of the presidency away from a president who was essentially incapacitated. So they came up with the 25th Amendment, which was passed in 1967. And there's basically two ways that the 25th Amendment could be used. The first way is that the Constitution allows for. For the vice president and then members of the Cabinet to declare in writing. That's all they would have to say, is that they no longer feel that the president is capable of discharging the duties of the office. If a majority of the Cabinet secretaries, that would be eight of them, if they agreed on that, and if the President doesn't object with that declaration, then he would be removed. If he objected, it would go to the Congress, and the Congress would have to buy a two thirds majority in both houses, would have to conclude that the president was, in fact, unfit, and then at that point, he would be removed and the vice president would step in. Now, look, it's worth saying this has never been used. The 25th Amendment was designed to be a very rare tool. That's why they set this very high standard of 2/3 in the Senate. And there's a lot of reasons why it would cause problems. I mean, people, the public would probably look at it with bafflement. They would say this looks like a coup. And for a long time, nobody really took the 25th amendment all that seriously as a possibility of removing a president who was unwell. But the truth is that there are now people in Congress, members of Congress, who are talking about the president's mental health in very serious terms. It's not the kind of thing that people laugh about. They really do say, this person is in charge of the nuclear arsenal, and we have to be thinking very seriously about whether he's. Whether he is not stable. And so there have been at least two bills that have been introduced in Congress since Donald Trump was inaugurated by Democrats who say, based on his behavior, that they want to create a more formal process for assessing the president's mental health, either using physicians or former heads of state. So presidents, for instance, would basically have the power to say, we think that our successor is not well. Those bills are probably not going to pass at the moment, obviously, because the Republicans control the House of Representatives, and they're not going to bring those up for debate.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And just one addendum to that. The sense of seclusion and isolation and these being danger signs for a president. Obviously we saw it in Nixon in his second term, but we're only four months into this presidency.
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Evan Osnos
This was one of the things that came through very clearly in the reporting among Trump's friends and advisers was that he has responded to this pressure by withdrawing, by sort of turning inward. Some presidents, in moments like this, they go public. I mean, there's a whole body of political science that is around the fact that when presidents face scandal, that sometimes what they do is they go out on the road. You know, so when George W. Bush, for instance, knew that he was unpopular when he had just entered the presidency, having been awarded the office by the Supreme Court, what did he do? He went out. In the first hundred days, he traveled to 23 states, states. Donald Trump has done something very different. He has sort of turned inward. He rarely leaves the White House and Mar A Lago, he has traveled only to about half the. Half the number of states that George W. Bush has. He has never spent the night anywhere except Mar a Lago or the White House since entering the presidency. He is operating in what one of his advisors described to me as, quote, fortress Trump. You know, he really is avoiding unpleasant information. He doesn't like people who disagree with him. One of his friends, Chris Ruddy, told us that he is averse, Donald Trump is averse to receiving unwelcome news. And therefore some of Trump's aides have tried to go outside the White House. They've gone to Ruddy himself and they've said, look, the President needs to hear this. Can you tell him that is a toxic environment? Anybody who's worked in a White House will tell you that one of the most important things for a chief of staff or anybody else who works for the president to do is to give them bad news, because that's what helps them make smart and self protective decisions.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And of course, his legislative agenda right now is at a complete standstill. You know, Trumpcare is stalled in the Senate. He's not going to be able to build the wall. The travel ban is blocked by the courts. It just doesn't look good.
- [25:40]
Evan Osnos
This problem of his own creation, the way in which he dismissed James Comey, has now blotted out the sun, really. It's sort of taking all of the energy in Washington and is focusing it on Donald Trump's legal and political risk rather than on achieving anything in Congress. And that then puts him at risk to those voters. Who I think of as the performance voters, the ones who wanted him to do things, to create jobs, to do all these. And he's just simply not going to be able to do that. Now. I think it might be worth adding one other point here, Dorothy, which is kind of easy to lose sight of in the midst of all of the drama that goes on these days in Washington, which is that any fair reading of history tells us that the president is likely to serve his full term. And we have to say that because history, you know, history says that, that out of 44 presidencies, 34 of them have gone the distance. You know, eight of them have died in office, two of them have been impeached, but neither were ultimately removed from office, and one resigned. And so, you know, the forces that are arrayed to keep Trump in office are substantial. And I think I sort of like to say that partly because I believe that it really is the reason why Trump is probably on firmer ground than we might naturally assume looking at him at any moment in time. But it is also worth pointing out that he is very different from his predecessors in such critical ways. That means that that comparison is no longer a simple comparison. We can't simply say that because most presidents fulfill their terms, that this president will fulfill his terms.
- [27:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thanks, Evan.
- [27:15]
Evan Osnos
Thanks, Dorothy.
- [27:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos is a staff writer and the author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the political Scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scenes on itunes. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron and Jill Dubeuf for newyorker.com with help from Daniel Wenger. I'm Dorothy Wickenden. America is changing, and so is the world.
- [27:59]
Evan Osnos
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [28:07]
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I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [28:10]
Evan Osnos
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
- [28:15]
Evan Osnos
From this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
From.
- [28:27]
Evan Osnos
PRX.