What to expect now

Anyone who thinks an impeachment inquiry is helpful to a sitting president has never worked in a White House where the boss is under the constant threat of removal from office. Fewer challenges are more unhelpful.

It is easy to forget now, but 20 years ago, President Bill Clinton was in real danger of being removed from office. He had been accused of lying under oath about an extramarital affair.

For that, Republicans decided to impeach him and try to remove him from office. After he narrowly survived that test, it soon became conventional wisdom that the experience had benefited the president as well as the Democratic Party.

If only. Clinton’s impeachment contributed to George W. Bush winning the White House in 2000. As for Clinton, he was able to survive thanks mainly to his abilities and a high-functioning administration supported by an integrated and sophisticated legal and political operation.

During the dark months of 1998 and early 1999, impeachment hovered over those of us who worked for Clinton every minute of every day. It factored into every decision we made. Reporters, fairly or unfairly, put all our words and actions through an impeachment filter. Ignoring it was impossible.

After three years in power, is there any indication the Trump White House has the moves, the skills, the instincts to cope with this?

Remember, there was never ever any formal decision-making in what passed for the “normal” part of the Trump presidency. Nor is there a lot of legal brainpower on call. While impeachment is at its core largely a political battle, you cannot win without a sound legal strategy.

It is probably difficult to imagine this, but when you are in the middle of impeachment, most of the White House staff has only the thinnest understanding of the facts of the case. The lawyers might know the whole story, or large parts of it. But the people who make the presidency work day to day know little more about the real facts of the case than the rest of the country.

As Clinton aides, we learned to trust but verify everything we were told. Nothing was ever what it initially appeared to be. We only found out what Clinton was going to say to the grand jury an hour or two before he appeared in August 1998.

As we go deeper into the impeachment process, the interests of the vice president, current and former Cabinet officials as well as those of Trump’s outside advisers and political allies will be increasingly at odds with those of the president. We are already seeing these splits becoming public.

All this means that Trump’s control of his own destiny is decreasing. He is entering a world where new facts come out every day, weakening his position. The law of unintended political consequences takes over.

In this environment, Trump is dependent on others for his political survival. And this is not the environment that a sitting president wants when beginning his re-election campaign.