HIGH CRIMES

Donald Trump likes nothing better than to double down: First, he solicited Russian help in gaining office, then tried to extort Ukraine to assist his second run by withholding military aid. The result was impeachment. Write award-winning journalists and longtime Trump watchers D’Antonio and Eisner, given “Trump’s extraordinary need to create a fantasy self who occupies the center of a fantastical story that he demands that others accept” and seeming belief that he is above the law, impeachment was the only option. The authors provide a comprehensive account of the process of impeachment, support for it steadily growing as more evidence was revealed—and that accelerated with such events as Trump’s sacking of the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was dedicated to the cause of battling corruption. “Take her out,” Trump ordered, which “sounded like something a movie mob boss might say.” In this account, like in countless others, Trump emerges as an inveterate liar and bush-league gangster, if one ever quick with a lame excuse: Mueller had it in for him, Trump complained, “because of a long-ago dispute over a charge at a Trump golf course”; of course, the charges against him were all witch hunt and hoax. His incompetence, they add, would be underscored by his handling of the pandemic. That the impeachment charges were narrow and specific meant that many impeachable offenses did not enter into discussion, such as committing perjury under oath and illegally diverting funds to build the border wall; omission of these “high crimes and misdemeanors” may well have been a strategic error that doomed the enterprise. The end of their account deems the impeachment, though seemingly forgotten a year later, “the inevitable product of the dangerous experiment begun when a demagogue who had made corruption and impunity part of his public identity gained the presidency.”

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