 To think-tech, it's the one o'clock block here on a given Thursday, and our special guest here on Global Connections, Historical Connections, in a way, is John David Ann. He is a history professor and a historian in the fullest sense, okay, at HPU, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Jay. I'm glad to be here once again, yes, definitely. Once again, we're glad to have you, and, you know, we agreed to talk about impeachment today. The title of the show is, Impeaching Mr. Trump, a Comparative Analysis. It was historical perspective, and so just in the way of, you know, prologue, you know, I think a lot of people are concerned, including in Congress, that this president is pulling the government apart. He's reeling us, rolling us back for decades and decades, taking all the, you know, the advances we've made and just destroying them in the name of some peculiar, you know, constituency out there, and I'm not sure that they're, I know they're not the majority, and he's losing it for us in many ways. This is a, may I say, using his term, he's a loser president. His popularity is way down. What he's doing to our allies is shameful, and what he's doing to our social safety net is worse, and an environment is worse. I can't think of anything good here. You know, his initiatives on health care are scary, and tax reform, which is a euphemism, that's not tax reform at all, also scary. So going forward, it just looks bad. You know what they say? It's going to get worse before it gets worse. Sean, you look at this from the point of view of an historic. Where are we in the possibility of getting him impeached? I mean, soon. Yeah. So it's hard to judge, of course. These things are very fluid, and you know, there are new revelations every week, so that's kind of disturbing, and that certainly has brought about the discussion of impeachment. But if we use history as a guide, then impeachment, you know, when you look at impeachments that happened in the past, there were actually two impeachments in the House of Representatives. No president has ever been fully, been removed from office after having been impeached by the House, which means, essentially, the House of Representatives does the initial inquiry and votes to impeach, and then the Senate does the removal, and the Senate has never— This is a trial. That's a trial. That's correct. It's a trial, and that's—the Senate has never gone that far. So in the previous two impeachments, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, then the Congress was controlled by the opposition party. I think that's quite significant. In 1867, when the Republicans controlled the Congress, and Andrew Jackson, who was a Democrat, was the president, then the House of Representatives voted to impeach him. It's a complicated story, but it's just the kind of a short summary of it is the House—the Congress had passed a law in 1867 intended to put handcuffs on the president, not literal handcuffs, but to handcuff him in terms of removing appointees, in particular, the Secretary of War, who was himself a radical Republican, had been appointed by Andrew Johnson early on in his administration. Johnson wanted him out because Johnson wanted more control over the military operations in the South that were ongoing in the late 1860s. And this was all sort of—trying to settle down after the Civil War. That's correct. What's settled yet? That's right. The Republicans had voted to send the military back into the South after Johnson had allowed southern states back into the Union, and the Republicans revoked this. They turned the South into five military districts and sent the army back into the South. They were angry. They were angry, and Johnson didn't like this. So he wanted to get control over the Secretary of War and end this. And so this gambit, which is going back and forth, then the Congress passes a law called the Tenure of Office Act, in which they handcuff the president. They said, you cannot remove one of your appointees without the approval, the consent of Congress. And so Johnson—and there was a clause in here that said a president can remove an appointee during a recess, but then the Congress has to come back after the recess and approve that removal, right? He has other guys gone already. That's right. So Johnson does this. He removes Stanton during a recess, and then the Congress came back. They were outraged. They refused to grant approval to the removal. And then they looked into impeaching the president, and they started impeachment. You know, articles were passed, and, you know, it got very close. The House agreed to impeach. The Senate came within one vote of impeaching the president, of removing the president. Well, the grounds were that he had violated the law by trying to meddle in the affairs of Congress. When they came back in and voted to reject his Stanton's removal, then Johnson didn't recognize it. Johnson didn't know, no, no, I'm going to remove him anyhow. So in effect, he was violating the law. The executive of Congress is going to announce it. That's right. Yeah. And he was violating this law, and the truth is the law was later removed. Yeah. And it was revised even shortly thereafter. In fact, maybe. I'm not kidding. Maybe we do. I mean, you know, this is the age of the imperial president. The CIA, for example. Maybe we put some handcuffs on the president. So that's a kind of a strange one, but they're all strange, quite honestly. So Johnson was able to serve out his term, but he was a defeated man. He got nothing passed. Both houses of Congress were supermajority. So they had no problem passing stuff over his veto. And so it was a very contentious time, of course, you know, due to the Civil War itself and reconstruction. But so that was the first time impeachment was used. Yeah. So it— Put a note to that. What he had amounts to, though, is they took his wings off for the rest of the term. He ignored them? OK, they're going to ignore him. They ignored him and essentially reduced his power. Yes. And query is a very interesting question proposed now. Query, if Congress did that—and I'm not saying it would, because it's all Republican right now—but if hypothetically Congress did that, these days, with the power of the presidency, they wouldn't be able to remove much of his power now. The thing is the power of the presidency, but, you know, California, the state of California has passed laws on climate change that Trump doesn't agree with at all. Oh, yeah. But so the issue of these emerging sovereignties, state sovereignties, is this is something that's relevant in a way that it wasn't a couple of decades ago. Agreed. And also, you know, the problem with Trump is he's this terrible minority president. I mean, terrible—I'm using the word terrible to define minority. He might be a terrible president. He might not. You know, most people, I think, at this point, think he's not a very good president. His ratings are really low. His ratings are very low in the 30s. But so the problem is that—or maybe the possibility is that Congress does take more power. I mean, the budget that Trump has—the Trump administration has put out is—as it stands, it's pretty much DOA. Yes. The Republicans don't like it. I mean, one of the head of the Freedom Caucus said, Trump proposes eliminating meals on wheels to senior citizens. That doesn't work for me. Get serious. So the problem is that Trump has defined himself with this minority of voters and continues to do so. He is a minority president in a very severe way. You know, remember, we talked about this before. Can Trump become a national president instead of appealing to this— It looks less and less like that's possible. No, at least in the short term. He is not in any way. In fact, he's become more and more of a minority president. In battle now. That's right. So it's possible that we might be seeing the erosion of the imperial presidency. And Congress might want to take more power. We'll have to see about that. But in terms of impeachment, then you have—of course, you have the second case. So we have to move ahead quite a long period of time to the 1990s. And then after we get done with Clinton, we'll skip back to Nixon and talk about Nixon, because Nixon was a case where he would have been impeached. And so, Bill Clinton. So Clinton is accused of obstruction of justice and perjury, lying to a grand jury. And I think— And to the American people. Yeah, I think, in fact, he probably did, on a technicality. Right. What he said was, I never had sex with that woman. That's right. Which is interesting. As a technicality, that was true. But in fact, he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. So, but the House of Representatives votes yes on two articles, perjury and obstruction of justice. It goes to the Senate. The Senate has to vote in two-thirds majority in order for removal of office to take place. Fifty senators voted for obstruction of justice, and 45 senators voted for perjury. So it wasn't really close to the two-thirds. It was disturbing, I think, to the country to see that impeachment was being done over something which seemed to be a technicality, almost like an entrapment. And so—but in doing so, the Republicans, I think, opened the door, because what's interesting about this—and we'll get back to Nixon in a second—what's interesting about this, when you look at public opinion polling in the succeeding administrations, Bill Clinton steps down in 2001. The Bush—George W. Bush administration, 30 percent of the voting poll, the poll population, thought that George W. Bush should have been impeached. This is quite high, I think. Yeah, that's extraordinary. Was there a crime there? Well, not necessarily, but this is the nature of a country divided between Republicans and Democrats. It's almost like recall, you know? Right, but the thing is, the impeachment of Clinton opened the door to this possibility to the other side. Sure. I think that's part of why you see that 30 percent. It was in play. That's right. The Republicans put it in play in a way which I think was not impartial and not objective in a constitutional sense. It was partisan. Yeah, that was too partisan. You can't eliminate the partisanship, but you can certainly not let it get out of control like the Republicans in the 1990s. So then, when Barack Obama took power in 2009, then 30 percent of the polling population believed that Barack Obama should be impeached. So this is an—unfortunately, the Republicans opened the door to impeachment as something other than what it was kind of intended as a constitutional remedy. And so I think we're going to continue to see this conversation about impeachment, even if Trump is not impeached. Now, let's go back to Nixon for a second, if that's okay. So Nixon is the third case, and Nixon was not impeached. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. How far did it go before he resigned? There were—the Articles of Impeachment were passed by the House Judiciary Committee, and that's when Nixon said, I'm gone. Before a vote by the House. That's correct. There was never a— It's early in the process. There was never a full vote by the House. Yeah. And so Nixon— But he would have been impeached, don't you think? Oh, yes, yes. So once again, opposition party is in power of the Congress. The Democrats were in charge of Congress, and I think they were preparing to impeach him. But not over—okay, I'll make a comparison here and maybe a judgment, but the Bill Clinton impeachment, trivial compared to the Nixon impeachment possibility. Nixon actually broke the law in several different ways. Now there is this question, how much did he actually know or direct personally? But he broke the law several times, and he also obstructed justice very severely. It's kind of there's some things about— Substance of level. That's correct. At a national initiative level. That's correct. He wanted his attorney general to fire the independent prosecutor who was looking into it. His attorney general refused, and he fired his attorney general and the so-called midnight massacre. And so he was definitely trying to obstruct the process of justice in this case. Now is Trump trying to obstruct the process of justice in firing Mr. Comey in the midst of the FBI investigation? It looks like it's possible. Okay, we'll know more when James Comey testifies in front of Congress, in front of the Senate. Well, he's trying to escape that characterization. You know, when it first happened, I think he wasn't fully aware of that characterization and how risky that was in light of Watergate. But now he's trying to back off that and create what he always creates, a distraction from the point of law. Right, right. But so—but it's going to be hard. Honestly, his attempts to create distraction—Trump's attempts to create distractions have almost always led him into further trouble. We saw this in the campaign as well. This is a guy who steps on himself all the time because he can't seem to stop talking, to stop showing his cards. So this is a real problem. So Nixon, of course, the whole Watergate scandal, the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters, et cetera, et cetera. But what's interesting about the Nixon case, because it might be the best comparison to the current case, because Trump has already maybe obstructed justice, just like Nixon did. So the people, the American people actually—so Nixon wins reelection in November 1972. By May 1973, there are actually Senate hearings on the Watergate issue. And millions of Americans, estimated 73 percent of Americans watched the Watergate hearing. It's astonishing. This was really played in Middle America, you know. It must have been Dan in no way. Well, I don't know. Maybe it was the sudden or Sam Irvin, right? He was a hero. He was charismatic. Let's take a break for a minute, John. That's John David Ann. He's a history professor at HPU. We're examining the historical perspective of the possibility of an impeachment from Mr. Trump here on Global Connections. Think tech away. We'll be right back after one minute. You'll see. Aloha. My name is Stephen Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Foundation for a Better Life. Not to watch the polls, but Congress does. They know. OK. OK, we're back. And I just want to, you know, John, talking about impeachment in both the Nixon situations and the Clinton situations. But recently there was a, you're going to love this. Recently there was an article in The New Yorker by a columnist by the name of Barowitz there. Barowitz is a funny guy. And I caught this on somebody sent me this article and I was reading it. It was something about impeaching Trump. And it was an interview with Trump. Some reporter suggested to him that he might be impeached. And his response was, you know, I might be impeached, but it'll be the best impeachment you ever saw. I will have the best ratings for my impeachment. My impeachment will be like no other impeachment in American history. Yes. I don't know if you saw that. And I read this article and said, my God, you know, this happened. It's so real. Come to find it was all tongue-in-cheek. OK. But I mean, you know, it's tongue-in-cheek, but things are funny because they're essentially true sometimes. Right, right, right. And I think that's the way he sees it. I mean, he doesn't, he doesn't, he's not bothered. In fact, he sees it as ratings and popularity. He'd like to occupy the newspaper every day all day. Right, right. And an impeachment would give him the chance to do that. It's a perverse moment. OK, let's hope this moment moves, you know, that we need to move on from this moment of kind of, you know, this kind of Kim Kardashian of politics being in the presidency. You know, we don't need any more reality TV stars to be president, in my opinion. It's not serious enough. They're very serious matters, and we need to take it more seriously. Well, it is indeed. I was telling you in my perception that the country is, like, a little depressed about this whole thing. They don't see a good future here. And they wonder who's going to resolve this, who's going to step into the job, who's going to make it right, who's going to return us. Talk about making America great again. How about making America the way it was a few years ago under Obama? That would be better. Well, so the thing about impeachment is that this could go on for a while. That's part of the lesson of the Nixon impeachment process, is it took a long time. But what would it be on the basis of, you know, there's a few things here, the three things that come to mind. Number one is, substantively, what happened with Russia? Yeah. You know, we've got all this distraction, one thing after another, from sessions on, sessions confirmation hearing at the outset. Right. You know, and now we have all kinds of other distractions. But the main thread here is, what happened in Russia? Yeah. Because all the connected dots at times had an article laying out the evidence they knew. Right. All the evidence that we know about suggests there was really, you know, fire under the smoke. Yeah. And there was something there. So one possibility, he's going to get caught red-handed somehow. It's possible that he was using Russia to influence the election in his favor. Yeah. Second is, as you mentioned, obstruction and lying about things. Yeah. That's interesting. It's not the same thing as the substantive approach. Right. Second is, general unpopularity, because of other things, other reasons, other decisions. Yeah. Well, poor leadership. Yeah. Things have gone from bad to worse to worse in this White House. And it's just, he doesn't seem to be able to escape it. So, but the thing is, I think, and I'm no legal scholar, but I think the obstruction of justice could potentially be the thing that undoes him. Whether he's impeached or not, it just, it's one of the articles that Bill Clinton was impeached under obstruction of justice. The test for obstruction of justice is pretty severe. It's pretty strict. So, Comey would have to have more, probably, than he'd say so. If he's got a memo, if he has his own tape, that would be damning. Even the memo. Even the memo. Not quite as much, but it would be damning. No, the memo's certainly something written. We're going to find out in a few days. We are indeed, yeah. So, you know, the thing is, Nixon re-elected in November 1972. It's August 1974 before this whole thing ends. So, and again, this could go on for a long time. There are some Democrats who, of course, who have signed on to an impeachment goal for Trump. But there are many Democrats, especially in the Senate, who say, wait, wait, wait, wait. You have to go through the process. We have to find evidence here. We've got to, you know, this is going to take some time. It's not going to happen overnight. So, we're just going to have to wait on this. But you know, this is going to be different. It's going to be different than Johnson. It's going to be different than Nixon. It's going to be different than Clinton. I mean, for other reasons. One is he's really becoming very unpopular. Every day he gets more unpopular. People really can't tolerate that, even the ones who voted for him without thinking about it. And then, you know, the other thing is that he's not going to take this lying down. He's not going to walk away to the helicopter, you know, the way Nixon did. He's not going to do that. He's going to fight. He's going to, you know, wring all his guns in and fight everything right along the way. And I think, you know, the other part of it is a joke with Barowitz. But the fact is he'll be in the press every day. This will be a national contortion for as long as it takes. If they find something, you know, substantive that happened with Russia and, you know, hand in the cookie jar kind of thing, I think it will be quicker. Yes, I think absolutely. Because that's, you know, that's very bipartisan, OK? That's an easier case to make. And it's not just bipartisan. It's also national security. I mean, we can't protect the security of our elections if we've got our own leaders conspiring to tilt the elections. Right. You know, colluding with a foreign power. Wow, wow. That would be every sensibility. I mean, if Trump wants history, that will make history. Yeah. OK. That will make him an infamous figure in the annals of history. I will be talking about Trump in my lectures from here on out if that's the case. There will be no blip on the screen. So, but we'll have to see about that. That's not clear yet. Yeah. But it will be different. And it's so interesting to predict how it would roll out. I mean, you know, John, even though it might take two years to finish, it might start pretty quick. Now that he's back from Europe, now this investigation is proceeding. Now the special counsel is involved. I think the thing is, so you have to get some folks to start spilling on this, right? You have to get somebody to actually start telling what actually happened. We haven't gotten that yet. Maybe Michael Flynn is going to do that. To me, Flynn is the key to the Russian connection. But now we find that— Kushner. Yes, Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, is deeply involved in this connection. He was trying to create a back channel after the election. Can I kind of offer this thought, though? Yeah. You know, it's—yes, just like Watergate, it's the question of who comes forward? Who is the deep throat? Yeah. Who is going to reveal all? Because somebody out there knows in detail what happened. Yeah. You know, the time of Watergate and maybe, you know, most times, there's a certain loyalty to the president. Yeah. There's a certain, you know, you don't want to bring him down. Right, right. You don't want to be the guy who changed history in a negative way. Right. So, you know, you keep your mouth shut. Yeah. But now he's alienating all the people around him. They're bailing out of the White House. They won't come into the White House. No, that's right. And Trump is singular in his ability to alienate both friends and folks. And it's unbelievable how quickly he has just, you know, gone down the path of just alienating everyone. So—and the other thing to think about is, you know, the thing is, Trump has this kind of populism, but you think about Nixon in 1972. Nixon won a landslide election, you know, 67 percent of the vote. So it—you know, even the mighty can fall, and even those with strong populist kind of base can fall. So, yeah, I think we have to stay tuned. We'll see what happens here. But look at the larger picture. We only have a couple of minutes left. Yeah. And then how is this—historical point of view, how is this affecting our country? How is it affecting the relationship of John Q. Citizen with the federal government? Yeah. Well, you know, there was, of course, tremendous alienation against Congress and against the government in general before the election, and Trump has simply enhanced that. I mean, there are people who now, you know, they don't like Trump anymore, but they hate the government. Trump becomes the government. They hate Trump. So left, right, center, people are becoming more alienated from the government. You know, it's—you know, if it's a post-national moment or if it's post-national America, where we don't really—we can't find a consensus, we can't come to agreement, then Trump has just pushed us further down the pathway to alienation. And, quite frankly, so domestically, I think you see this continuing erosion of national—the possibility of a national consensus. I mean, it might not ever happen again. And can a country function well in that I think the founders established a system because of the state's sovereignty, because of the federal system where states have power, enumerated powers, the federal government has other powers. I think you could see a time where the government can function more effectively from the states than from the center. It's happening now. Yeah. In California, as you mentioned. That's right. And in other places. And like all of the West Coast is involved in that. That's correct. Without a schism or a secession, this secession talk is nonsense because we're so tightly knitted together economically. Yeah. So I think it's possible that you could see that, that the nation could adjust to this kind of more—you know, we had this before the 20th century, where the states had more power and the federal government less power. One wrinkle this points out is that, you know, people assume the federal government will keep on. You know, then I think their confidence was shaken when they found that we went to the cliff every year and trying to get it funded. Right. Right. But now, it seems to me that the government is in convulsion. Yeah. And many, many of the agencies don't have heads yet. Right. FEMA, for example, doesn't have a head. Right. My—you know, we expect some bad weather this year without a head at FEMA. This is risky business. Yeah. So, you know, it raises a question as to whether the government is properly—can properly operate with all these, you know, problems around Trump and perform its function in a time when we needed to perform its function. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing is, Trump has—of course, he's alienated the bureaucracy. Right away, he's alienated. They didn't like him from the start, but he's further alienated them. And yes, there's going to be very little leadership out of the White House. But I think he hasn't done much to actually destroy bureaucracies yet. So, I think the bureaucracies in the short term can continue to function to make American government function, you know, to the—to some satisfaction of the American people. So, but it's—this is short term, okay? We haven't had a budget fight in the fall yet. We haven't had, you know, a lot of executive orders, which might mean something down the road, but don't necessarily mean anything right now. So, we'll have to wait and see as to whether or not this, you know, causes a—not just a crisis of governing, but a crisis of the American system. Yeah. The American federal system. It's a—it's a historian's delight. Yeah, well. Everything that's happening is changing. We live in interesting times. Yeah. Thank you, John David. Sure. That's great to have you here. You've got to do it again. Okay. It's so much more to come. Yeah, yeah. Fine, Jay. I'm glad to do it. Thank you.