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A New York Times Columnist Makes the Case for Removing Donald Trump From Office
A New York Times Columnist Makes the Case for Removing Donald Trump From Office
“For the country’s sake, there is only one acceptable outcome.”
Jackie Flynn Mogensen
January 6, 2019 5:56 PM
In a scathing opinion column on Saturday, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt called for President Donald Trump’s removal from office, not just by impeachment—which “would probably rally the president’s supporters”—but by first conducting a series of “sober-minded hearings to highlight Trump’s misconduct” for the public to see. This, Leonhardt argues, would put Trump’s Republican allies, reliant upon reelection, “in a very difficult spot…
The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?
The easy answer is to wait—to allow the various investigations of Trump to run their course and ask voters to deliver a verdict in 2020. That answer has one great advantage. It would avoid the national trauma of overturning an election result. Ultimately, however, waiting is too dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than the cost of allowing this president to remain.
He has already shown, repeatedly, that he will hurt the country in order to help himself. He will damage American interests around the world and damage vital parts of our constitutional system at home. The risks that he will cause much more harm are growing…
The biggest risk may be that an external emergency—a war, a terrorist attack, a financial crisis, an immense natural disaster—will arise. By then, it will be too late to pretend that he is anything other than manifestly unfit to lead.
For the country’s sake, there is only one acceptable outcome, just as there was after Americans realized in 1974 that a criminal was occupying the Oval Office. The president must go.
The easy answer is to wait—to allow the various investigations of Trump to run their course and ask voters to deliver a verdict in 2020. That answer has one great advantage. It would avoid the national trauma of overturning an election result. Ultimately, however, waiting is too dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than the cost of allowing this president to remain.
He has already shown, repeatedly, that he will hurt the country in order to help himself. He will damage American interests around the world and damage vital parts of our constitutional system at home. The risks that he will cause much more harm are growing…
The biggest risk may be that an external emergency—a war, a terrorist attack, a financial crisis, an immense natural disaster—will arise. By then, it will be too late to pretend that he is anything other than manifestly unfit to lead.
For the country’s sake, there is only one acceptable outcome, just as there was after Americans realized in 1974 that a criminal was occupying the Oval Office. The president must go.
more...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/scathing-new-york-times-column-david-leonhardt-removal-president-donald-trump/
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