It’s a weird spot we’re in when it comes to re-funding DHS: Even though leaders in both chambers and President Trump have backed a plan to fund the whole Department with the exception of ICE and the Border Patrol, which Republicans plan to instead fund through party-line reconciliation legislation, Republicans aren’t in a hurry to actually pass the deal. The shutdown remains in place, and House Speaker Mike Johnson hasn’t yet taken action to call the House back from its recess, which is currently scheduled to go until April 13.

Sam Stein and Will Sommer are going live at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube for MAGA Monday—don’t miss it!

Happy Monday.

Resistance and Impeachment

by William Kristol

“How are we going to make it through thirty-three more months of this?” a friend asked yesterday.

“This” is of course the presidency of Donald J. Trump. The query from my normally calm and composed friend was prompted by Trump’s Easter Sunday post:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

One might minimize the importance of this one post. Perhaps the president merely got carried away at his keyboard, as one does. But later in the morning, Trump told ABC News that if there were no deal immediately to open the Strait of Hormuz, “We’re blowing up the whole country.” He repeated to Axios that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.” And of course this post is merely one item in a long train of assaults on decency and sanity by the current president.

The simple fact is that we have a president who is irresponsible, reckless, and indeed unhinged. And he’s all the more dangerous because he is unconstrained by both his subordinates in the executive branch or by Congress.

What’s to be done? Let me offer two suggestions, one having to do with those subordinate officials in the executive branch, and one with Congress. I offer both of them in a spirit of tentativeness and as an invitation to further discussion. They may seem to be radical ideas—even desperate ones—but desperate times all for desperate measures.

The first proposal is that we think seriously about the case for internal resistance within the executive branch. When the head of the executive branch shows a repeated willingness to enrich himself, to lie to the public, to break the law, senior officials can appropriately recall that the oath they take is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They can remind themselves that they are obliged to obey the law rather than the illegal wishes of their boss or their boss’s boss.

In current circumstances, this means that serious people within the executive branch have to think soberly about what they can do every day to minimize Trump’s damage to the rule of law. Senior officials do have discretion. They can move quickly or slowly. They can act privately or more publicly. They can make life more difficult for their political masters who are seeking to engage in misconduct or abuses of power.

Even if such resistance doesn’t stop but merely exposes illicit schemes, it would be doing a service. And if conscientious public servants find they cannot stay in their positions, they need not resign politely and then keep quiet. They could—and should—rather force their political bosses to fire them for standing up against impropriety, and then should speak up about what they have seen inside.

Now any kind of internal resistance within the executive branch is obviously a complicated and delicate matter. And I’m aware that resistance is difficult, especially when you know you’re facing a vindictive administration that will use the media and the justice department against you. But such resistance has always been an important tool in the battle against authoritarianism.

Still, resistance from within the executive branch is necessarily piecemeal and limited in its effects. The bolder and more straightforward measure that ought to be put on the table for debate now is impeachment.

After two impeachments in Trump’s first term failed to produce convictions, there’s considerable reluctance to talk about impeachment once again: Been there, done that. But perhaps the third time will be the charm. In any case, the fact is that Trump deserves to be impeached and convicted for his behavior in his second term.

Impeachment is, as Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, the remedy in our system for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” The misconduct of Trump, in terms of his corruption and that of his associates, is unparalleled in our history. His abuses of power leave Nixon in the dust. A trial of impeachment would allow all the evidence of his offenses to be presented coherently in one time and place. Even if conviction doesn’t follow, an unequivocal alarm would have been sounded.

Impeachment and conviction aren’t in the cards today. But it’s worth beginning to make the case now, because it may well be necessary for the public good to proceed along these lines in the next year. I’m the last person who would welcome JD Vance as president. But he would present less of a clear and present danger to the nation than Mad King Donald.

Raising the possibility of these two measures may seem alarmist. For some reason, even though the alarmists have been right all along in their analysis of Trump and Trumpism, it remains unfashionable to be one. But we shouldn’t be slaves of fashion. And in fact it’s not alarmism, it’s sober realism, to doubt that we can make it safely through the next thirty-three months without considering measures like these.

Resistance and impeachment. There may be convincing arguments against resorting to either or both these expedients. And there a