What I'm Really Afraid Of

[LittleRaven]

If the President is found guilty and manages to sidestep all criminal liability by stating the President cannot be held accountable. Then we should move to remove him by force.

I suspect there are two different issues being conflated here.

It's never been formally tested, but most constitutional scholars agree that a sitting president is more or less immune to criminal prosecution while in office. State courts have no (practical) jurisdiction, and the President can simply pardon himself of any federal crime. So the president can't really be found guilty of anything by any court and CAN and WILL sidestep all liability while in office, but it's always been this way and that is certainly not worth ripping the country apart over.

But that's not how a President gets removed anyway. Impeachment is not a criminal process, it's a political one. If the President gets impeached by the House and legislatively convicted by the Senate, then he's out. There's nothing Trump can do about that short of a coup, and he's not acting like someone who's planning on seizing power that way.

[TGLS]

That would be more like a constitutional crisis. A coup would be more like a general declaring that Trump has been incapacitated or removed from office and he's in charge now. Hell, an impeachment is closer to a coup.

[LittleRaven]

That would be more like a constitutional crisis. A coup would be more like a general declaring that Trump has been incapacitated or removed from office and he's in charge now. Hell, an impeachment is closer to a coup.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'that' in your first sentence.

A constitutional crisis is where we go outside the bounds of determined law on the constitution, and (potentially) have to turn to the Supreme Court to resolve something. New York inditing the President of tax fraud, for instance, would be a constitutional crisis, since we haven't technically ever done that before, although most experts think it would be a pretty open and shut one.

A coup is where somebody (often but not necessarily the military) seizes power by means outside of the established process. The closest we've seen in the Trump era is the 'unofficial resistance' op-ed, where an (alleged) group of senior advisers is supposedly doctoring the information given to the President and occasionally flatly refusing to obey his orders in the hopes that he later forgets them. That's not supposed to happen - we have a process for handling unfit Presidents, and that isn't it, although if it is happening, it's a 'soft coup,' since they aren't officially seizing power.

Impeaching has nothing to with either concept. The impeachment process is literally built into the Constitution. It's rarely used but well understood by everyone, and there's plenty of historical precedent.

[TGLS]

"Coup" is a fancy word for irregular change in executive. This is how Australia is coup capital of the democratic world. If Trump (or some future president) refuses to be removed from office and digs in his heels at the prospect, that would be a mess, but not a coup, given that the executive has not changed.

[Worffan101]

If he tries to coup and keep power after impeachment and conviction, Mattis will say "No, Donald, you're not President anymore", and remove him at bayonet-point.

Then Mattis will immediately resign and request to be tried for launching a coup, will be given a fair and speedy trial, convicted after confessing openly under oath to having ordered the military to remove Trump after his conviction and legal removal from office, and will be sentenced to time served.

Making Mattis SecDef was the best (for the country) and worst (for himself) mistake Trump ever made.

[clearspira]

How could he lose support considering people knew he was scummy at the start?

Its this inability for the anti-Trump side to comprehend why Trump has such mass support is the reason why mud never sticks to this man. I never voted for Trump because I am a Brit, but I can tell you as a Brexit supporter that if the Democrats do not address the main concerns of his base, namely the loss of jobs due to globalization and the influx of undocumented migrants, then he is still in bloody good standing for the next election. And no, we are LONG past the days when trying to shut down such debate with ''you're a racist'' still works. Many Hillary supporters already tried that and look how that worked out for her.

And it needs to be said here that impeaching Trump whilst he has this level of public support and when his supporters are statistically 2nd amendment devotees is a good way to start a very bloody riot.

[Antiboyscout]

If he tries to coup and keep power after impeachment and conviction, Mattis will say "No, Donald, you're not President anymore", and remove him at bayonet-point.

Then Mattis will immediately resign and request to be tried for launching a coup, will be given a fair and speedy trial, convicted after confessing openly under oath to having ordered the military to remove Trump after his conviction and legal removal from office, and will be sentenced to time served.

Making Mattis SecDef was the best (for the country) and worst (for himself) mistake Trump ever made.

Nice fantasy. want to come back to the real world where an impeachment is not a forgone conclusion?

[Nealithi]

If the President is found guilty and manages to sidestep all criminal liability by stating the President cannot be held accountable. Then we should move to remove him by force.

I suspect there are two different issues being conflated here.

It's never been formally tested, but most constitutional scholars agree that a sitting president is more or less immune to criminal prosecution while in office. State courts have no (practical) jurisdiction, and the President can simply pardon himself of any federal crime. So the president can't really be found guilty of anything by any court and CAN and WILL sidestep all liability while in office, but it's always been this way and that is certainly not worth ripping the country apart over.

But that's not how a President gets removed anyway. Impeachment is not a criminal process, it's a political one. If the President gets impeached by the House and legislatively convicted by the Senate, then he's out. There's nothing Trump can do about that short of a coup, and he's not acting like someone who's planning on seizing power that way.

See that is part of the problem. One group I speak with thinks the man is actively a traitor and may just wave his hand to pardon himself if he pulled a gun and shot someone on live TV.
While others point out that some of the things brought against him to try to impeach him were things previous Presidents had brought up and they paid a fine. My concern is there are too many vocal people in the former camp that will go off if the extreme of a guilty verdict were to come to pass and he waves it off.
But if they manage to keep the trial from ever happening or so subdued it seems a footnote instead of a spectacle. Then apathy will keep everyone from doing anything.
I am going to put my politcal opinion of the man out here. I am not a fan of what appears to be his character nor his policies. But, he is the President of the United States of America. He has not provably committed any crime to remove him from office. Until that changes he runs things as he chooses within the limits of his office.

[LittleRaven]

See that is part of the problem...

We are certainly suffering from an overabundance of passion and a dearth of knowledge. On both sides.

The thing to remember is that a President is not removed from office because he commits crimes. He might commit crimes - he might not. But it doesn't matter, because criminal acts are not what gets a president removed. A President gets removed when he loses political support. Committing crimes can certainly help with that - being tied to Watergate was what finally sunk Nixon. But it's no guarantee. Clinton most definitely committed perjury, but he never lost his support, so impeachment didn't stick.

And once a President loses political support, not committing crimes will not protect him. The Constitution says that the House can impeach a President for 'high crimes and misdemeanors" but never defines what that means, so it means whatever the House says it does. A President can be impeached for anything, but he almost never is, because a sitting President almost never loses enough support to warrant it.

Is Trump in danger of impeachment? We won't know until November. Obviously the Democrats want him out. But it's simply not possible for them to take enough Senate seats to oust him, no matter how big the blue wave is. At least 15 Republican senators will have to cross party lines to convict him.

That's hard to imagine right now, but if the blue wave is big enough, it IS possible. Trump is not particularly popular with many Republicans. They stay loyal because there is a perception that no Republican can cross Trump without ending his career, so they don't. But if they become convinced that their careers are over either way, the individual calculus for a fair number of Senators may change.

It'll have to be a hell of a wave, though.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

There's nothing Trump can do about that short of a coup, and he's not acting like someone who's planning on seizing power that way.

Says you.

*sigh*

Well this thread has utterly failed to make me any less scrotum-retractingly afraid, but the blame for that I guess will have to go to the electoral college. It's been fun ya'll.