The nation’s jaws collectively hit the floor Tuesday when President Donald Trump doubled down on his earlier statement that there had been violence on “many sides,” throughout the Charlottesville protests and counter-protests that left one woman dead and more than a dozen people injured. “I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said at the runaway train of a press conference he held at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”
He was right about one thing. Nobody wanted to say that there is blame on both sides. Because there isn’t. One side was a group of white supremacists carrying torches and AK-47s in the streets, demanding Jewish blood, exclaiming that “We’re not non-violent, we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to,” and proclaiming the dominance of the white race. The other side was a group defying them and defending our Constitution, our nation, and our citizens. And in this one press conference, the President of our nation made it clear—again—that he does not believe all lives are equally important.
It’s time to impeach President Trump.
To ignore the distinct inequalities that people of color still face—on a daily, hourly, to-the-minute basis in this country—is worthy of disdain. But to claim that some of the men and women marching with their arms raised in the Nazi salute, bearing swastikas, and chanting “blood and soil,” are “very fine people,” like the president did, is to agree that the white race is the superior race. That seeing people of color and people of various faiths gaining a voice can only mean white Americans are under attack. That the president is unwilling or unable to hold to the promises he made to the American public to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
There are two main routes to impeachment. The first, which many people believe could be the result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s associations with Russia, was established at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. With a simple majority vote, the House of Representatives can call up articles of impeachment against a president for “malpractice or neglect of duty,” or “treason, bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” It takes two-thirds of the Senate to then “convict” the president, although such a conviction is not a legal proceeding akin to a court. In other words, the president might be forced out of office but he wouldn’t necessarily go to jail.
As technical as that sounds—and as difficult as it has so far proven to find concrete proof that the president committed any of those particular crimes—it’s worth noting that impeachment is a political process and does, in a sense, operate at the whims of Congress. If Congressional Republicans start to believe that he is too big of a liability for their party, they could choose to go forward with impeachment proceedings.
The other route involves the 25th Amendment, which was prompted by the unclear line of succession after President Kennedy’s assassination. The Amendment states that the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet can decide that the President is either physically or mentally unfit to serve. They simply notify Congress, and each chamber must reach a two-thirds vote to remove the President from office and replace him with the Vice President.
As The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos explains, when Alexander Hamilton wrote of “high Crimes,” “he was referring to the violation of ‘public trust,’ by abusing power, breaching ethics, or undermining the Constitution.” Trump has certainly abused his power. By not moving his assets into a blind trust he breached ethics from the very moment he assumed the presidency. And now, by defending domestic terrorists, he has almost certainly undermined the Constitution. Even those who served conservative presidents, like George W. Bush’s former ethics advisor, Richard Painter, have begun advocating for Trumps removal for these very reasons.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to any person who took even the briefest glance at the presidential election and the first seven months of Trump’s presidency. Some may have believed that the president was merely using grotesque language and policy (see: his Muslim ban, cutting funding for groups that work to de-radicalize neo-Nazis, drastically cutting back legal immigration) to show he hadn’t forgotten the promises he’d made on the trail. But with yesterday’s report from the New York Times that “members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private,” Trump has proven that he does not adopt these abhorrent stances for their shock factor. He tells people about them behind closed doors. He truly believes them.
This is not a partisan or political issue. Along with their Democrat colleagues, nearly every Republican official who maintains any iota of respectability (and even some who lost any respectability long ago) have denounced Trump’s rhetoric. Some of their tweets were far meeker than we’d like (Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t bring himself to use Trump’s name and indict him personally.) Now they need to put their money where their tweets are and move forward to remove this man from office.
It’s time to stand together and resist any calls from the GOP for “unity” with the president. Unity in favor of hatred and bigotry is not an admirable pursuit.
It’s time to call out anyone who remains silent about or defends the president’s vehement defense of white supremacy.
It’s time to listen to people of color and other minorities as they explain what they need.
This wasn’t a gaffe. The President of the United States has justified violence by those who wish to tear down any semblance of equality that we’ve reached. He has ignored the death of a woman at the hands of domestic terrorists and legitimized those terrorists’ agendas. He has proven he is not mentally fit to hold office. He has proven that he supports terror against his own citizens.
In a viral tweet yesterday, Resistance Manual co-creator Aditi Juneja issued the stirring reminder that we all need. “If you’ve ever wondered what you would’ve done during slavery,” she said, “the Holocaust, or Civil Rights movement … you’re doing it now. #Charlottesville” This is the moment for the citizenry to stand up and demand that we will not accept this man as our president. And it’s time for Congress to follow our lead.