0:06Hello, everybody. This is The Current. I'm Clive Priddle and today I'm very happy to be joined by David Priest. David is the COO of Lawfare,
0:14which is a non-profit that is a broadcaster and a publisher in areas of national security and the rule of law.
0:22Uh he's also an author and specifically the book that we're really going to talk about today uh is his book called How to Get Rid of a President. David, welcome.
0:31Thank you. It's good to see you again and to be able to chat about this.
0:37Uh going back a few years now, I think we both knew that this book would be timely during this administration, but I'm not sure we knew exactly how much so many parts of it would become relevant during the course of a few years.
0:52Yeah, the irony, of course, is that you wrote this book as a history of um of American presidents uh and and the various means by which presidents have been replaced.
1:05And you were pretty careful not to talk about um the person in the Oval Office, uh Donald Trump when when you wrote the book.
1:14We we thought it might be an interesting theoretical issue,
1:17but we didn't want to get ahead of the news.
1:20News now is all around us, so I think we're we're it's fair game to talk about the situation that we're in.
1:23But before we get to that, um just just give us a terribly quick price of some of the ways in which um the American people,
1:33or the American uh administration has uh got rid of previous presidents.
1:37Yes, you'll you'll recall that
1:38when we were chatting about this, uh, we wanted to take a different cut at this.
1:42Because so many books do look at how presidents get into office, and then there have been some very good books that have looked at particular slices of how presidents leave office.
1:50That is impeachment has had a couple of very good books.
1:54Um and some recent updates based on current events.
1:57But also, you know, they take a very narrow view of doing that and the problem there is you don't get the wide sweep of all the ways that presidents leave office.
2:07And all of them have, except for one.
2:09Uh, we always have a current one, but all of the previous presidents have, by definition, left office.
2:17So I took a look at all the ways that that that was possible.
2:21Uh one way that's the simplest and most direct, of course, is an election.
2:26You vote them out.
2:28And hasn't happened much recently, but it used to happen very often that incumbent presidents would run again and would lose.
2:33But you have many other methods if you don't want to just vote the person out.
2:38You can impeach and remove the president for uh certain particular things.
2:45You can invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, which allows the president to temporarily transfer powers to the Vice President,
2:54and therefore be removed from the powers and duties of the office.
3:00You can actually wait for the president to die.
3:05Uh that was an interesting one to look at, but in some cases, like Franklin Roosevelt,
3:11it was the only way that political opponents could get him out of office.
3:16Um there are more nefarious ways,
3:18of course, and we're not recommending them, but they did happen.
3:22Uh we've had four presidents removed from office due to assassination.
3:28We have had presidents who have been undermined so severely while in office that they were effectively removed,
3:33even if they still held the title.
3:39Um such that they were constrained by by opponents,
3:44or even people in their administration in a sense taking on the powers and duties themselves,
3:50and not giving the president the full power of the office.
3:54Um and then of course, the most nefarious means of all that we explored here was removing a president preemptively.
4:02That is finding someone who is so imminently qualified for the office, so likely to become a president that will be hard to dislodge,
4:12that opponents make sure they never get there in the first place, often by foul means.
4:19And a few case studies came up in this,
4:21and we left it up to the readers whether or not Hillary Clinton in 2016 was on that list,
4:27due to the Russian information warfare against the election.
4:32So, you mentioned Hillary Clinton and um
4:35she is uh she's definitely on that list of uh,
4:39you know, the presidents that we never had.
4:43Um and there's been a lot of commentary about that.
4:46The other thing that strikes me as you go through all those various different ways uh in which presidents can be removed is the number that that cluster around uh Donald Trump.
4:56Uh given that we only have to remove a president once, here we have a president who has uh attempted to be impeached,
5:02uh which failed.
5:04Um Nancy Pelosi is currently waving talk of the 25th Amendment around, um although that may be for theatre,
5:12but she's she's brought it up.
5:14Um and I can't remember when last that was seriously brought up,
5:19um as a as a serious suggestion for getting rid of a sitting president.
5:22Uh we'd be worried about his health, um you know the president was hospitalized,
5:26and for a brief moment, it was it was possible that he might actually be seriously ill in office.
5:32Um and then I think uh a lot of Donald Trump's supporters would say, um that one of the things he's experienced in this presidency is being undermined from within.
5:45Um I think uh there there they would look to parts of the establishment that seem to have array themselves solidly and consistently consistently against the Trump presidency,
5:53um and uh seem as though the majority of people in those places would like him to go.
5:58So he's a remarkable character for the topic of your book, for how to get rid of a president.
6:04And in some respects, it's amazing that he's made it through four years.
6:07Yeah, it's certainly been an adventure.
6:12Because each of these slices of how presidents are removed from office or could be removed from office, all of them have some history of the attempts,
6:26or the actual cases where it's happened.
6:29But there's no way to predict the future and know whether that's going to be relevant in the near term.
6:36And sure enough, in the past couple of years, one by one, almost every chapter has been checked off as something that has led the news on a particular night or for a particular week or month.
6:46Uh we did have the impeachment of the president.
6:49It was a successful impeachment because he was impeached.
6:52Um but he was not removed by the Senate.
6:57We have had plenty of talk about disability, most recently with COVID-19, but even before then, there was a lot of chatter about,
7:06were the Vice President and the Cabinet considering removing him for being unable to exercise the duties of the office?
7:15Um and then of course, we've had all kinds of issues related to how he came into office in the first place.
7:26So it has been the gift that keeps on giving in a sense,
7:31which is every time something comes up involving the president and whether he is unable or unfit or unpopular, there's something in this book that that has the history of it.
7:44So people don't have to pretend that it's the first time it's ever happened, instead you can look back at the cases in history when it's happened and said,
7:52what can we learn from those?
7:55Whether you want to speed the president out of office or whether you want to prevent that from happening, there was something in American history that we can bring forward and use to illuminate the present moment.
8:10So the the one of the differences that struck me is thinking about uh about the Obama era and the Trump era.
8:16Um now of course, there were there were serious people who alleged that Obama should not be president either, usually on the grounds um that he was in some way not an American citizen.
8:25Which we know to be spurious.
8:28But that that chatter was continuous.
8:32It never completely went away.
8:35There was part of the electorate that believe that in some way the Obama presidency was illegitimate.
8:43Um but still it continued through that eight years there was never a serious moment where you thought one of the two houses was going to actually,
8:56you know, invoke this process and do anything against the president.
9:01The difference with Trump is that some part of this conversation was there even before the man had left Trump Tower and New York and got to Washington.
9:06So, counter intuitive though it may be to a lot of people,
9:10and indeed perhaps to my personal feeling and yours.
9:14Um was Trump a little bit hard done by?
9:16Did we did we start invoking the getting rid of this presidency prematurely before the man had really had a chance to even sit behind of the desk?
9:25And and um has it been has it now got to a point where we run the risk that nobody is going to be ever allowed to be a legitimate president.
9:40That's a fair point.
9:42And it wasn't just Trump, if you remember back to the summer,
9:47and the fall of 2016,
9:51there were people calling for the impeachment of Hillary Clinton before she was elected,
9:59and there were people calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump should he be elected.
10:05So it did cut both ways.
10:09There's certainly has developed in the past few decades a a trend in American politics,
10:22and some people just call it hyper partisanship or hyper polarization.
10:30But I think it's something more than that.
10:35Um we've developed this, if you will, demonization of the presidency.
10:44And that's not to say that all periods of American history were about, you know, meadows and unicorns and rainbows and rivers of chocolate.
10:54It wasn't glorious political contest.
10:56For people loved one another, there were some pretty vicious contests in the past.
11:03But they were usually restricted to to the margins.
11:05And it wasn't entering the mainstream political dialogue that not only is this candidate a bad choice politically, but this candidate is fundamentally unfit for office,
11:17in a way that that makes them instantly disqualified.
11:21Um even if they're elected.
11:24That has really evolved.
11:29Um I started seeing it more in the 1990s than in any other recent time in modern history.
11:35Uh perhaps it had been quelled by the Cold War and the perception of an outside threat.
11:43But certainly the the release after the Cold War, certainly led in the Clinton administration for people in mainstream media to to release much more hatred toward the person of the president.
11:58Then we had seen as the average going back through Eisenhower and Carter and Reagan and and even Bush 41.
12:05Um that certainly continued with Bush 43.
12:09Um regardless of what you feel about his policy choices, there were some people who were calling him names that uh I don't recall even Ronald Reagan being called.
12:18And then of course, with Obama and Trump, the acceleration has has gone on.
12:26I'm not sure that genie can be put back in the bottle.
12:32Uh I think once you get used to the fact that the President of the United States isn't a person, but is is a demon if you don't agree with them,
12:41and therefore you can use dehumanizing language about them.
12:46Um that's a nasty thing to go down and it takes a real national conversation about,
12:55how do we want to be?
13:00How do we want to treat people with whom we disagree?
13:04Uh when we say we are better than this, do we mean it and are we going to act in that way?
13:11Or are we deluding ourselves and we're saying we're better than this, but we only mean it towards people we agree with?
13:19That's a fundamental choice I think we have to make as a society,
13:22and it's not just about the politician.
13:24I feel that when it comes to the demonization of the presidency,
13:30this is where I think Donald Trump's personal style has certainly added to people's willingness to demonize and you know, he's brought on himself.
13:40If he if he isn't reelected, and we're having this conversation when we have no idea what's going to happen in the election, although Biden is at the moment solidly ahead in the polls.
13:52But if he if Trump is not reelected, um then some of that uh feels like um uh poetic justice,
14:01um because his language uh and his divisive language for the for the country as a whole uh has been part of his um strategy for government it seems.
14:09Um I'm so he would be a president where he uh not to be reelected, who only serves one term.
14:17And as you point out, that's that's not all that common these days.
14:20The last time I think that happened was George H W Bush.
14:23Right.
14:24So, um, so this is bizarre.
14:27George H.W. Bush is probably the last president that most of the country actually now thinks they liked.
14:34Um
14:35and how is it that we managed not to have a bit more of him, but to throw him out prematurely?
14:43And instead of which, you know, we start this kind of wild partisan swing between the Clintons and then the Bushes and then the Obamas, and now this.
14:50Yeah, here here's my speculation, and it's it's only that.
14:55Because I haven't delved into the political science research and and other elements to prove that I'm right.
15:03But but it's a hunch.
15:06That when Bush got us through, and and he did as Americans, Bush got us through the end of the Cold War without shots being fired in anger.
15:17And no one would have predicted that decades earlier.
15:21It certainly didn't look like the Soviet Union would just crumble and the United States would manage the process with its European allies in such a way,
15:35as to prevent absolute destruction from happening as at least a correlative to it if not core to the very issue of its of its collapse.
15:44When when Bush managed to do that, I think there was some sense,
15:49perhaps not even conscience, conscious in the American people,
15:57that, you know what?
15:59We can exhale now.
16:02We can we can let our guard down a little bit.
16:06And yes, we happened to have in office George Herbert Walker Bush, one of the most qualified people for the presidency in all of American history.
16:14Um, but there's this cool guy who who goes on late night talk shows and plays the saxophone.
16:21And he makes jokes.
16:24And he kind of winks at the camera when talking about the fact that he hasn't always been a good husband.
16:28And you know, that's kind of fun.
16:30Maybe maybe we need an entertaining president instead of a fully competent one.
16:35And I know that's a caricature of them.
16:37But there there is some element of that in the public perceptions in 1992.
16:44And I think Donald Trump is really the extension of that.
16:48If you're going to go for a president who is more entertainment than substance, Donald Trump is the poster child.
16:55Um he's someone who is in the public consciousness mostly,
17:02um because of his self-promotion in the 1980s in New York.
17:07And then due to a TV show more recently,
17:10he he takes that trend to a new level.
17:13But you raise an interesting point.
17:15If he is a one-term president,
17:19which would be the first time since George H.W. Bush,
17:23um coming on the heels of three successive two-term presidents, that's Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama all being reelected to a second term.
17:36For only the second time in US history, you have to go all the way back to Jefferson,
17:40Madison and Monroe for that to have happened.
17:45If Donald Trump is rejected for a second term after this feeling of the power of incumbency in the presidency,
17:57um that is a stern rebuke to much if not all of what Trump stood for.
18:05And in fact, it could be an awakening moment of people saying, yes, we've given the presidency a lot of institutional power.
18:12And yeah, we kind of like being entertained, we can't look away from the TV when things are going wrong for the president.
18:20But we really didn't want it like this.
18:22This is too far.
18:25Let's let's go back to the norm at least somewhat,
18:31and be a little bit prouder of the person we put in the Oval Office,
18:38instead of looking just for some kind of morbid entertainment.
