A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

by Philip Rucker

As autumn bore on, the question facing the Congress and indeed the country was not whether Trump had done anything wrong. The emerging fact pattern plainly showed a quid pro quo with Ukraine and a White House scheme to cover it up. The question was who might enforce the Constitution. When Alexander Hamilton wrote the two essays in The Federalist devoted to the idea of impeachment, Trump was the kind of president he had in mind—a populist demagogue who would foment frenzy, pander to prejudices, feed off chaos, and secretly betray the American people in the accumulation of power—according to Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow. Two hundred thirty-two years after Hamilton put pen to paper, Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine forced a reckoning. Would the system the Founding Fathers imagined withstand the pressures of this moment? Or would Trump prevail yet again, another pursuit of justice stymied by his sheer political force and the fealty of his followers? As Congress considered impeaching President Richard Nixon in 1974, most Republicans defended their president’s claim that he was the victim of a political witch hunt. But the decision of one Republican congressman marked a turning point. Maryland’s Lawrence J. Hogan became the first Republican to side with the Democrats and vote for all three articles of impeachment against Nixon. He said he wished “with all my heart” he could say the president had not committed impeachable offenses, but he knew the truth was that Nixon ha...