A Democratic victory on election day should free us from the chaos of the Trump presidency. But that is far from guaranteed
By all measures, the president was a malicious demagogue with a “taste for public performance”, reviled for his “swaggering vanity”. Many considered him incompetent and unfit for office; some called him mad. He impugned the character of the country’s most famous war hero but was, himself, “exquisitely sensitive to slights, real or perceived”. He inflamed racial tensions and embraced the cause of white supremacists. He liked to “humiliate, harass, and hound” his enemies, real and imagined. Heedless of consequences, he “baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people”. A leading senator lamented that “he has introduced the most fearful system of corruption and demoralization into any government in modern history”. The hostilities between Congress and the president became so great that impeachment was all but inevitable.
Sound familiar? Yet much as this may sound like a portrait of the current inhabitant of the White House, it is in fact Brenda Wineapple’s description of Andrew Johnson in her immensely readable book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Johnson, as we recall, was the first president in American history to be impeached, and like Donald Trump survived removal by the Senate – in Johnson’s case, by a single vote.
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