A User’s Guide to Ending
the Trump Presidency
GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
Review of David Priess, “How to Get Rid of a President: History’s Guide to
Removing Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief Executives” (PublicAffairs,
2018)
Editor’s note: Although Lawfare does not
ordinarily review books by Lawfare editors
and staff, this book review was
commissioned and written prior to the
public announcement in November that
Priess had been hired as chief operating
officer of the Lawfare Institute, the
organization which publishes Lawfare.

is our 45th president. Forty-four previous
presidents have already come and gone.
How and why did they leave office? And do
any of their modes of departure bear on our
current
situation?
Answers to that question can be found in a
timely new book, “How to Get Rid of a
President: History’s Guide to Removing
Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief
Executives.” Its author, David Priess, is a
student of presidential history with a
background in espionage, having served in
the CIA under presidents Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush, and written a previous
valuable work combining both interests
that appeared in 2016, “The President’s
Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of
Intelligence
Briefings
to
America’s
Presidents.”

The first is the standard narrative,
according to which Russia interfered in the
2016 election with the goal of damaging our
democratic processes and discrediting the
likely next president, Hillary Clinton. At
some point along the way, as the campaign
progressed and their meddling seemed to
be having outsized effects, the Russian
effort to discredit Clinton metamorphosed
into an effort to help elect Donald Trump.
Trump and his campaign may have
colluded with this Kremlin effort, and
Trump’s
peculiar
relationship
with
Russian leader Vladimir Putin may be tied
to the supposed collusion. A major focus of
the investigation led by the special counsel
Robert Mueller is to determine whether
such collusion occurred. To those
Americans like me who believe that Donald
Trump is grossly unfit to serve as
president, the question we’ve been
confronting since January 2017 is how best
to remove him from office. The answer, of
course, lies in our history. Trump, after all,

Priess opens his guide with a survey of the
constitutional mechanisms devised by the
Constitution's framers to keep America’s
president from being too weak to govern
effectively or, alternatively, so powerful as
to evolve into a tyrant. To that end, they
included in their system of checks and
balances a limit on the length of each
presidential term. This was not universally
favored. Rufus King of Massachusetts, for
example, bruited the idea of unlimited
presidential service, subject only to the

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 A User’s Guide to Ending the Trump Presidency   G. Schoenfeld

legislature’s continued assessment of “good
behavior.”
Gouverneur
Morris
of
Pennsylvania, for his part, opposed the
proposal to limit the president to a single
seven-year term on the grounds that it
would “destroy the great motive to good
behavior, the hope of being rewarded by a
reappointment.”

government, or even by a president’s own
subordinates—maybe call this “functional
removal,” because, after all, it’s not “actual”
removal from office through formal legal
processes—Priess has in mind for this
category a whole slew of presidents who
have been, he says, effectively neutered by
Congress or, in some instances, their own
insubordinate lower officers in the
executive branch. That this in any
meaningful way counts as "getting rid of a
president," as Priess’s title promises,
however, is a stretch too far.

In the end, of course, the framers settled on
a four-year term that voters could renew
indefinitely. It was only in 1947, following
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four-term
presidency, that the 22nd Amendment set
its present two-term limit. That limit, of
course, will do us little good in confronting
Donald Trump. If this incendiary and
divisive personality remains in office until
2024, untold damage to the country and the
culture will ensue. What other ways are
available to dispatch him from the White
House?

Even so, Priess’s account of presidents
being checked and stymied while in office is
both historically informative and relevant
to the current office-holder. Playing along
with the author’s conceit, it’s clear (as we
know from accounts like that of the senior
official writing as Anonymous in the New
York Times and Bob Woodward’s “Fear”)
that some of Trump’s subordinates have
sought to rein him in, including by such
unorthodox means as surreptitiously
removing papers from his desk. But it’s also
clear as his presidency unfolds, that Trump
has not been brought under meaningful
supervision by the so-called “adults” in the
White House, whether by “orthodox” or
“unorthodox” means. Most of them, such as
H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, have in
any case already departed and been
replaced by Trumpian ideologues and
reliable yes-men. With outrage following
upon embarrassment following upon fresh
outrage—as I write the President of the
United States has addressed the incoming
chairman of the House intelligence
committee Rep. Adam Schiff with the
appellation “little Adam Schitt”—whatever
guard rails some have fancied would
restrain Donald Trump are proving to be
imaginary.

Priess organizes his survey according to
categories that run the gamut of
possibilities from the legal to the political,
some more obvious than others. Apart from
being ousted by voters, they include
presidents getting “rejected by their own
parties”; “removed in place by opponents or
subordinates”; “displaced by death”; “taken
out by force”; “declared unable to serve”;
and
“impeached
and
removed.”
The first of these, getting rejected by one’s
own party, was the fate of such 19thcentury forgettables as John Tyler, Millard
Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Chester
Arthur, and in our modern era, of course,
Lyndon Johnson. Will the Republican
Party deny Trump a second term?
Obviously, a great deal can happen in a
short time: an economic downturn or a
devastating report from the Mueller
investigation might radically change the
current calculus. But with Trump’s
approval rating among party members
currently hovering around 90 percent, it
seems
unlikely
as
of
now.

Being “displaced by death” or “taken out by
force” has been the fate of eight presidents
four by illness and four by assassination.
Priess walks us through these tragic cases.
Fortunately, they are exceptional. Despite
some recent spectacular lapses, the Secret
Service on the whole manages these days to

As for getting “removed in place,” whether
by political opponents, by other branches of

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 A User’s Guide to Ending the Trump Presidency   G. Schoenfeld

safeguard its principal protectee pretty
well. And while Donald Trump may eat an
unhealthy diet and be on the edge of
obesity, to all appearances he is quite
vigorous. Life-expectancy for the average
man his age is in the eighties.

but

dangerous

chaos.

As for impeachment, Priess walks readers
through the three cases of impeachment
proceedings in American history: Andrew
Johnson, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
He concludes, reasonably, that “a high bar
should stand in the way of removing a
merely
unpopular
president
by
nonelectoral means.” Trump, however, he
sees as an ambiguous case—not simply
unpopular, and not clearly impeachable for
high Crimes and Misdemeanors. He sees
Trump instead as someone who “manifests
an indifference toward, or inability to
discern, the difference between truth and
untruth” and is a “wrecking ball”
president.

That leaves the final two possibilities—
being declared unable to serve and, lastly,
impeachment. Woodrow Wilson is the
archetypical case of the former. “The
President is a very sick man…absolute rest
is essential for some time,” noted his
doctor’s bulletin one fine morning in 1919.
In fact, Wilson suffered from a stroke that
was kept hidden from the public for an
astonishing 519 days. Priess examines the
deficiencies of the Constitution’s original
clause in Article 2, section 1, for dealing
with presidential “inability to discharge
the Powers and Duties of the said Office.”
Repeated encounters with presidential
illness, including Dwight Eisenhower’s
heart attacks, were part of what prompted
the ratification of the 25th Amendment in
1967, designed to set up procedures for
removing an incapacitated president.

That peculiar disqualification is not
covered by any constitutional contingency.
In closing his book, Priess rather vaguely
suggests that, given that the framers’
solution to the problem of removal is
neither “flawless nor eternal,” some sort of
constitutional amendment might be
required to deal with the set of problems
confronting us today. But of course, for the
near term, fundamental change of that sort
is not in the cards. One puts down Priess’s
breezy yet analytical history with the same
sense with which one started. When it
comes to getting rid of this president,
history may be a guide, but we are
nevertheless deep in uncharted waters,
facing the potential shipwreck of our
constitutional democracy.

But how would the 25th Amendment’s
procedures be applied to a president with
borderline mental illness of the kind that
some say Trump suffers from? Richard
Nixon’s
alcohol
consumption
and
depression were never severe enough even
to provoke a discussion of the possibility.
That is not the case now, and discussion of
the 25th Amendment has not been confined
to pundits. If we credit the senior official
writing as “Anonymous” in the New York
Times, there were “early whispers within
the cabinet of invoking the 25th
Amendment, which would start a complex
process for removing the president. But no
one wanted to precipitate a constitutional
crisis.” Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein is among those reported to have
been engaged in such discussions. In
considering how such a process might
unfold (not in reference to Trump but in the
abstract), Priess sees it leading to nowhere

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the
Hudson Institute, is the author, among
other books, of “Necessary Secrets:
National Security, the Media, and the Rule
of Law,” and a member of USA Today’s
board of contributors.
Cite as: Gabriel Schoenfeld, A User’s Guide
to Ending the Trump Presidency, (Dec. 4,
2018) http://lawfareblog.com/users-guideending-trump-presidency/.

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