Trump Jumps Into Impeachment Fray With Both Feet

The idea was to talk about relief for farmers hurt by tariffs, with a couple of them standing behind him in cowboy hats. But it did not take long Thursday for President Donald Trump to go off on “Crazy Nancy” and “Crying Chuck” and “treason” and the effort to “take me down.”

The last time a president was threatened with impeachment, he made a point of not talking about it. This one cannot stop talking about it. Where Bill Clinton tried to appear above the mud fight, leaving it to aides and allies to wage the battle for him, Trump is determined to get down into the mud himself and wrestle with his enemies at every turn.

Some advisers worry that the president is giving oxygen to a fire that otherwise might burn out or at least be left to crackle in the background. Others agree with Trump that he has been treated so unfairly that he should take on his opponents frontally.

As for his critics, they have been left scratching their heads, wondering if Trump is actually trying to goad them into impeaching him on the theory that it would help him politically.

Either way, out of strategic calculation or personal obsession, or both, the president has engaged in the battle with Congress so intensely that he has made it the all-consuming preoccupation of his presidency. He has tweeted or retweeted about the various investigations by Congress and others 59 times in the past week. Even when he stages events on other priorities like the aid for farmers, he ends up turning them into venting sessions about the investigations, ensuring they will remain at the forefront of the capital’s discussions.

As a result, in an era of divided government and multiplying congressional inquiries that are now spilling into court as Trump defies subpoenas across the board, it is safe to say that there seems to be little prospect for major legislation beyond simply keeping the government open. And even that might prove problematic.

“President Trump is quite willing to sacrifice his agenda to defend himself,” said former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who was the Democratic leader during Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999. “He believes that no one can do that as effectively as he can, and, for him, that takes priority over any legislative issue.”

In stalking out of a meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday after only three minutes rather than work on a plan to rebuild the nation’s bridges, highways, and other infrastructure, Trump declared that Congress could not legislate with him and investigate him at the same time.

He and his aides argued that the Democrats were the ones who were sacrificing the country’s interests in their partisan zeal to inflict “a thousand stabs,” as the president put it Thursday. They scoffed at the idea that he was putting his own job ahead of the people.

“That’s insane,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters on the White House driveway. “The president’s actually putting the American people first. It’s the Democrats that don’t want to do anything. The only thing they want to do is focus on attacking this president and trying to delegitimize his presidency.”

The White House mocked the notion that he should at least act above the fray.

“The Beltway media’s question to @PressSec about Democrats’ obsession with investigations: ‘Why not ignore it?’” the White House said on its official Twitter account. “You can only find that level of irony in Washington, D.C.”

For any White House caught in the media-saturated Washington whirlwind of scandal, investigation and partisan warfare, the idea of simply ignoring it might seem ludicrous. But Clinton concluded that he would fare better if he appeared to focus on the people’s business and tried hard not to get caught up in each day’s developments as the House moved to impeach him for perjury and obstruction of justice in a sexual harassment lawsuit.

“We felt the most effective way for President Clinton to maintain support to remain in office was to demonstrate each and every day that he was working on behalf of the American people and that the threat of impeachment was not distracting him as commander in chief,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was Clinton’s counselor at the time.

That did not mean it was easy. Behind the scenes, Clinton was consumed with the battle, much like Trump today, churning with anger over what he believed were his enemies plotting an illegitimate coup d’état against him. He was sometimes so preoccupied that he appeared lost in meetings. Aides spotted him absently moving things around on his desk or playing with old campaign buttons he kept in the hallway.

When the head of the World Bank left a meeting with the president, he later called a senior White House official to say, “It’s like he isn’t there.” While Clinton was in the Middle East, an aide noticed the president scribbling on a yellow legal pad: “Focus on your job. Focus on your job.”

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary for Clinton, posted a video Thursday of the 42nd president speaking on the day he was impeached by the House in December 1998, vowing to keep working on behalf of the American public and calling on everyone to “rise above the rancor.”

“I think playing the victim and putting your own grievances ahead of the people’s business is wrong and a terrible political strategy,” Lockhart said later by email.

But Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who was House speaker during the inquiry leading to Clinton’s impeachment, said one difference is that the current president faces less risk of actually being removed from office and may benefit more from the debate.

“Trump knows the GOP Senate will never convict him,” Gingrich said. “He knows every day Democrats focus on attacking him they lose ground.”

For Clinton, the strategy of staying out of the battle worked in the sense that, while he was impeached, his already high approval ratings went up, not down, persuading his own party to stick with him and guaranteeing acquittal in the Senate, where it would have taken a two-thirds vote to convict and remove him from office.

A similar strategy did not work for President Richard M. Nixon, who insisted that the Watergate scandal was not affecting his ability to govern. While there was not much legislation, he made landmark visits to the Soviet Union and the Middle East.

“Act like a president. Act like a winner,” he wrote in his diary in January 1974.

Trump will still have opportunities to show that he is pushing ahead with his agenda, whether with Congress or not. He leaves Friday for Japan, the first of four overseas journeys he will make before the end of summer, and he has leeway to operate in foreign affairs regardless of lawmakers, most notably in his trade war with China.

But that will not keep him out of the fray on Capitol Hill, no matter what the script says. Staying “presidential,” as Nixon and Clinton sought to do, might not work as well as it once did. And in reality, being “presidential” has never been Trump’s approach to the job.

“The president’s style is hands-on, and I doubt he would delegate this impeachment fight to aides and lawyers,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a friend of the president’s. “This is a man who in 2016 eschewed pollsters, campaigns staffs and advisers, running the campaign basically himself. He won, so that’s his playbook.”