In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, one of America’s leading constitutional scholars exhibited classic signs of “PTSD”: Post-Trump Stress Disorder. Impeachment “should begin on Inauguration Day,” Harvard’s Laurence Tribe howled in December 2016. The next month, Tribe demanded Trump “be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other President in American history”—a land-speed record for somebody entering his second week in office. In the months that followed, the dean of con-law profs urged Trump’s defenestration for everything from emoluments clause violations to mean tweets.
Given that backdrop, when I opened Professor Tribe’s new book, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, coauthored with Joshua Matz, I was braced for an impeach-at-all-costs jeremiad. The last thing I was expecting was an earnest plea for “cool and evenhanded reflection, informed by the Constitution and lessons from history.”
