THEY'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, SAID HE
Terry Rex Duling responded to my Friday afternoon post by asking what would happen if Trump simply fired Mueller, disbanded the investigation, and pardoned everyone he cared about. “Would we,” he asks, “be able to successfully handle what happens next without the wheels truly coming off?”
I think there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance that Terry’s scenario will happen. A variety of things could happen next, including the wheels falling off. But that isn't inevitable.
First, Trump’s timing is crucial. The longer he waits, the better. Not long ago, I was impatient for Robert Mueller to finish his work. Now, I’m happy that things will come to a head closer to the 2018 midterms. The fresher the scandal is, the more likely it will be to help Democrats take back the House and Senate.
Second, I hope that Trump (like Nixon before him) discovers that it’s not as easy as he imagines to find someone willing to go down in history as the person who fired Mueller and disbanded the Special Counsel’s team. The more principled people there are, the worse Trump will look. At this point, it appears that Trump’s immediate target is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (appointed by Trump himself), whose replacement would then supposedly fire Mueller. The more people Trump has to fire, the better.
The third crucial factor would be who Trump decides to pardon. I wonder what legal advice he’ll be getting. I have the sense that Don McGahn is already heading for the exit. If Ty Cobb and John Dowd have any sense, they’ll quit before they’d allow their names to be forever tied to such a world-historic political scandal. Michael Cohen is Trump’s fixer, a guy who helps Trump settle business lawsuits and divorces. He’d be in way over his head on matters of constitutional law. I’m sure Trump will find someone with a law degree to give him the advice he wants to hear. I hope it’s one of those fake Fox News “experts.”
If and when Trump decides to issue pardons, he’ll have a choice to make. He could pardon everyone even remotely connected to the scandal, but that would mean pardoning dozens of people, and the sheer numbers might be embarrassing. But this is Trump, who has no conscience, so a mass pardon is still in play. Or he could pardon a much smaller group of people he actually cares about (primarily his family and himself), and let everyone else – especially those he suspects of betraying him – twist slowly in the wind. His instinct would probably be to save his family and screw the traitors.
For a pardon to be valid, it must be accepted, and accepting a pardon is understood to amount to a confession of guilt. That wouldn’t bother Trump’s hard-core Kool Aid drinkers, who will hang in there with him through porn stars and election rigging. Richard Nixon, after all, still had a 24% approval rating on the day he resigned in disgrace. But Trump – and congressional Republicans who support him – would pay a heavy price with independents and swing voters.
And that leads us to the last big question in this hypothetical scenario, which is whether any significant number of congressional Republicans would turn on Trump if he fired Mueller and began issuing pardons. Right now, there are 238 Republicans and 193 Democrats (with 4 seats vacant) in the House of Representatives. Are there 23 Republican House members who’d turn against Trump and join Democrats in voting articles of impeachment? I wouldn’t bet money on that outcome, but it’s not impossible. That would be the best-case answer to Terry’s question – a bipartisan impeachment in the House.
More likely, in my view, is that all but a handful of Republicans would stay loyal to Trump, which in my view would cost them control of the House in November. The new Democratic majority would be sworn in next January, and one of their first orders of business would be impeachment. If the Senate is also in Democratic hands, I’d bet on a deal between Trump and Pence – resignation in return for a full pardon (just in case the courts decided that a self-pardon wasn’t kosher).
A Trump-Pence deal could happen even if Republicans narrowly hold onto the Senate, because there are a handful of mavericky Republican senators who just might be willing to join Democrats in voting to convict Trump if the House sent a bill of impeachment their way in 2019.
Finally, just because Trump has the power to pardon federal crimes doesn’t mean that he and his co-conspirators would be home free. The Trump and Kushner financial empires are located in New York, where NY AG Eric Schneiderman is waiting for them. There’s a good article in American Progress (link below) that features this quote: “A close look at the record suggests that The Trump Organization arguably behaved a great deal like the organized crime syndicates, which have been targeted as criminal conspiracies in the past.”
I lived through Watergate, and there were many times I thought Nixon would get away with it. It took a while, but the posse finally caught up with him and rode him out of town on a rail. I believe that the same dynamic will play out with Donald Trump, who isn’t nearly as smart as Nixon was.
In the meantime, what we can do is remember the (paraphrased) words of Joe Hill: don’t mourn – organize. Our most important job is to make sure that Democrats take back the House in the November elections.