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In this podcast, Dr Paul Monk and Nick Fabbri discuss the impeachment and acquittal of President Donald Trump, the role of impeachment in the US Constitution and examples of it occurring throughout history, and the differences between the liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes.
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Paul Monk
Melbourne
Monday 10 February 2020
Paul Monk on Donald Trump, Impeachment, and the U.S. Constitution
00:00 Nick: Welcome to Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything. I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Monk who is an Australian public intellectual and historian whose most recent work, Dictators and Dangerous Ideas, concerns power, liberty, constitutions and freedom of speech.
00:16 I'm talking with Paul today about the political impeachment and acquittal of president Donald Trump and the implications for the United States and the world. Paul, it's a pleasure to be here with you today.
00:26 Paul: Yes, likewise, Nick. We haven't done a recording for a while and this is a particularly topical and interesting issue.
00:32 Nick: Indeed. So, little more than 18 hours after the November 2016 election, you wrote a piece for The Australian entitled, 'US election: like Rome and Athens, the great republic teeters', in which you outlined a series of constitutional concerns you had following the election of Donald Trump.
00:49 Since then, he's obviously been impeached by the house and more recently, acquitted in the senate at the political trial. But nonetheless, there remain deep divisions within the American polity, and it seems as though Trump may still win the 2020 presidential election.
01:05 So, in simple terms for our listeners who might not be particularly familiar with the whole ongoing saga in the last couple of months with regard to impeachment but more broadly Trump in the White House for the last 3.5 years, could you outline what's happened in his recent impeachment and acquittal?
01:23 Paul: Yes. I think the simplest way to sum it up is that Donald Trump was accused first of all under the Mueller inquiry and then with the more recent proceedings of colluding with foreign powers for personal and political gain. In the first instance, and this was the subject of course of the Mueller inquiry which went on for quite a period of time, it was alleged collusion with the Russians to win the election in 2016.
01:52 Robert Mueller concluded his inquiry by saying he did not have sufficient evidence to indict the president, but a number of Trump's circle were in fact charged and convicted of having improper relations in the context of the election with the Russians. That of course led to a great deal of rancour and public debate.
02:15 Subsequent to that, the charge was brought against Trump and this became a subject of the impeachment proceedings that on an altogether separate basis, he approached the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and asked him for a favour. Asked him to initiative an inquiry into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and their alleged corrupt activities.
02:44 That was something that might under slightly different auspices have been okay. They would not normally have been something a president would ask another foreign leader.
02:56 The problem arose essentially because he said unless Zelensky initiated such an inquiry, he, Trump, would withhold $391 million of military aid that was due to the Ukraine under a standing agreement in order to help it defend itself against Russian aggression.
03:13 So, the charge brought against him was that he was in this instance expressly colluding with a foreign power in a way that would compromise the integrity of the electoral process of the United States…
03:23 Nick: ... because Biden was potentially his main political rival.
03:25 Paul: Biden was his main political rival. At the moment, it's not clear that he will be as it turns out, but that was the basis for what then became the impeachment proceedings.
03:35 Now, obviously we have a situation in the United States by common agreement in which this is probably more polarised than it's been - people sometimes say since the Civil War. I would say well you could go back to the 1960s, I mean, with the Vietnam War and the race riots and so forth in the US. The US was pretty divided then, but it's clearly deeply divided now.
03:56 So, the operative question really is was the impeachment of Donald Trump warranted? We know that when it went to a senate trial, he was acquitted. Was the acquittal justified or was that partisan? Was the impeachment itself justified or was it partisan? That's a question that's well worth discussing.
04:17 Nick: Just to come back to first terms for our Australian listeners, what is impeachment and what role was it designed to play in the US constitution?
04:26 Paul: Well, this is a very good question to ask and it is germane to the piece that I did write back at the time of the 2016 election. It has to do with a fundamental aspect of the constitution of the United States.
04:37 In 1787, the founders of the United States who had been debating at great length and it must be said, very intelligently, how do you build a republican government that will not slide into dictatorship, that will not return to monarchy of the kind that they had rejected? They had rejected a British monarchy and established an independence only a few years earlier.
05:03 One of the codicils they inserted in the constitution was the power of congress to impeach the president of the United States. Now, they didn't want this done on a cavalier or partisan basis. It was only ever intended to be a kind of last resort in the event that you had a man in the white house - or we would say these days, a woman, but they don't seem to have envisaged that in 1787 - who was deemed to either have engaged in treason or in bribery in a way that undermined public trust and/or what were termed by the founders, 'high crimes and misdemeanours'.
05:39 One of the interesting points about it is that they debated for some time what language to use there, but specifically they didn't say if the president has committed a statutory crime, and this became relevant in a couple of subsequent cases.
05:54 In the case of Donald Trump, the argument has been put - and I would say on not simply a partisan basis - that whatever one makes of the Mueller inquiry, the approach to Zelensky was something that met the description of high crimes and misdemeanours. It was a violation of public trust. It was an attempt to make electoral political gain for himself, not for the good of the public, and exposed him one might add to potential blackmail which would have further compromised the White House, and that was sufficient to deem that he should be removed from office.
06:31 The debate of course naturally then centred on whether in fact that offence had been sufficiently serious, and that then brings us to the question about well, under what circumstances would any president be impeached and has this ever happened before?
06:45 Nick: Yeah, and some of our listeners on that note will recall the political impeachment of president Bill Clinton, the downfall of Richard Nixon in 1974 as well. So, have there been other cases by which presidents: 1) have been impeached or perhaps even been driven from office by the broader impeachment process, and I suppose finally whether anyone has been found guilty in the senate political trial and removed from office by that means?
07:10 Paul: Yeah, and the short answer to that last question which in a sense is pivotal is no. So, there has never been a US president who has been impeached, brought before the senate for trial, deemed guilty and removed from office.
07:22 Does that mean that the impeachment power is nugatory, that it doesn't really matter? I don't think so. I think it shows the fundamental health of the US constitution, that it's never been so necessary to remove a president from office that has gone all the way.
07:37 That’s an important point to come back to when we talk about Trump and the presidency right now, but to go a bit deeper. There were four precedents for this. One might just in passing make this parallel that there's also been a small number of cases of American presidents being assassinated but probably the only one that sticks in the popular memory is John F. Kennedy, but there were others in the past.
07:58 Similarly with impeachment procedures, the first was all the way back in 1842 when John Tyler had succeeded to the presidency early. He had been vice president and inherited the presidency when the elected president died.
08:14 Impeachment procedures were initiated against him but it was deemed that they weren't grounded in the constitutional principles enunciated by the founders and so they didn't proceed. It was an abortive attempted impeachment.
08:27 Something similar but a much closer call occurred after the American civil war when president Andrew Johnson who had succeeded Abraham Lincoln was impeached and it came down to a vote in the senate. So, this was a closer call than a Trump impeachment but Johnson again was acquitted.
08:48 What's significant is essentially he was acquitted on the basis of one man, a senator from Kansas called Edmund Ross. Ross was not a partisan of Andrew Johnson. He didn't like the man. He wasn't a member of his political party. Why did he in a sense have the casting vote?
09:06 It is because he said in a way similar to what had happened in the Tyler case, that Johnson was a bad president. He was doing bad things but not, said Ross, in the way that the founders of the constitution had deemed grounds for impeachment. Therefore, it should be left to the voters to decide and on the basis of that one vote, Johnson was also acquitted.
09:34 The fact that he was acquitted of course - and this is important - didn't mean that he was a good president and people were saying, "No, he's just fine." They didn't like him, you know, and he came within a whisker of being removed from office, but he wasn't.
09:46 That didn't happen again then for 100 years and famously in the case of Richard Nixon, he faced possible impeachment but he wasn't actually impeached, and why did he face impeachment?
09:58 Well, at the most fundamental level because a group of dubious characters hired by members of his White House staff burgled the democratic national headquarters in an effort to bug it to find out more about his political rivals.
10:15 Nixon didn't personally authorise that. He was astonished and appalled actually when he learned that it had happened. He said it was the dumbest thing he could imagine, why did this happen? But he was faced with the mess. He was the president and his staff had organised this. That's when he made his fundamental mistake really because he attempted to cover it up.
10:38 When journalists started to discover - the US having a free press unlike China (it's worth remarking in the context of the current Corona virus) - when the press started to investigate, they found leads back into the White House and they kept asking questions.
10:53 Nixon got deeper and deeper into trying to cover things up and finally this became a major political issue. Ultimately what brought him down was not that the Watergate incident had occurred so much as that he engaged in a cover up and was finally charged with obstruction of justice. He was trying to stop the inquiry. He was trying to withhold evidence.
11:15 The significant thing is that well into that process, his party colleagues - the Republicans - did not believe that the indictment of the president was warranted. They didn't want to see him removed from office but in the end, it was Republicans, not democrats, who went to him and said, "You are facing impeachment. You have gone beyond the bounds of constitutional propriety. You probably will be voted out. We recommend that you step down to avoid that, to avoid that disgrace."
11:43 Significantly, Nixon did. You know, he was shattered by this and arguably, there were political ramifications that are worth reflecting on but he did face the prospect of impeachment. He was advised by his own party colleagues to step down and he did. Many people - I'm certainly one of them - believe that showed that the US constitution was working because he didn't stage a coup. He didn't arrest people, right? He didn't defy them and barricade himself in the White House. He stepped down and his vice president, Gerald Ford, succeeded him.
12:16 Then Bill Clinton was facing impeachment and this time, the Republicans were going after a democrat, rather than the other way around. But in that case, similar to both Tyler and Johnson, what happened is ultimately it was deemed that he had perjured himself. He had behaved improperly and he tried to in a sense cover up his traces as Nixon had done, but the offence was much less serious than Nixon's in the eyes of the public certainly and in the eyes I think – more or less both side of politics and ultimately, it was decided he acted improperly but he did not commit high crimes or misdemeanours. You know, he wasn't colluding with a foreign power. He wasn't doing bribery, etc.
12:52 So, that case also was dismissed. So, the gravamen of all that is that Trump being impeached was a very rare event in American political history. That it actually went to a senate trial is a very rare event in political in history. That in the end he was acquitted is actually pretty much the norm in America political history and that's with reminding ourselves rather than saying, "Oh my gosh, he got off," and if you're anti-Trump, that's shocking. No, it's pretty much what normally happens.
13:19 I think what that shows us is to be impeached and voted out and forced from office actually does require an unambiguously high crime, misdemeanour or treason and the power is there for that. It's been tested in this case. You know, it was available and the senate rendered judgement and Trump is still in office.
13:42 Nick: I'm interested in why you've compared the assassination of a president to the impeachment process and in some ways, how they're both answers to the same problem of imperial or tyrannical overreach or abuse of office by a president.
13:54 This is something that's deeply rooted in American society and it's constitution and balance of powers, given it's history, particularly the American Revolutionary War with England.
14:03 Paul: Well, it is and I would say in response to that point three things. The first is that when the founders were debating this, it was Benjamin Franklin, a very well-known founding father, who said, "If we don't have an impeachment process available to congress and we do end up with a dubious character in the White House who is disregarding the constitution, what options does that leave?"
14:25 Well, the historical tradition is in that case you end up resorting to assassination. He was thinking of course of Rome and most famously, there were many emperors who were assassinated. It was Julius Caesar who had essentially put an end to the republic, who was assassinated precisely for that reason.
14:43 The American founding fathers were steeped in their Roman history. You know, they knew of that antecedent and they wanted a republic, not an empire, and they didn't want to have to resort to assassination, and that's why they put in the impeachment process.
14:57 So, given that there have been a number of American presidents assassinated but they haven't been assassinated...
15:02 Nick: ... because they were tyrannical.
15:03 Paul: ... because they were tyrannical. I mean, Abraham Lincoln was a model president in so many ways and the people who assassinated him were a small group of unreconstructed confederates who were aggrieved because he had defeated the confederacy and put an end to the slave regime.
15:22 John F. Kennedy was assassinated despite the prevalence of conspiracy theories not by the military industrial complex, not by the mafia and not by the Russians or the Cubans, but by Lee Harvey Oswald. And Oswald was an unstable, minor character who had his own agenda.
15:41 Similarly with other presidents. You know, William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. It was not the other party. It was not a revolution.
15:49 But I think it's important if while we're at that, to remember that in current circumstances, more - I think it's true to say than in the case of Clinton or Nixon or Johnson or Tyler - there has been an edginess about the whole political process. There has been the fear that violence could occur in the United States.
16:15 Specifically, I think this is...
16:17 Nick: Were Trump to be removed, you’re saying...
16:20 Paul: Well, that's a specific thing that was raised as the impeachment process was getting under way. There were people in the United States saying that if he was found guilty, if he was impeached in the full sense of the word, people would take up arms.
16:36 Now, that's deeply disturbing. So, what we now have is a situation where because Trump was acquitted, we don't face an immediate prospect. What we do face however is the distinct possibility that in the election that's approaching in November, there will be angry rhetoric about the democrats who tried to remove this man from office.
16:57 Nick: ‘a coup’ – it’s used in military language even.
16:59 Paul: This has been used for some time and this means that instead of the election being, as at least in theory it's supposed to be, a vigorous but peaceful and thoughtful process to select a national leader, it could be even more partisan and tense and possibly violent. That's a serious worry.
17:17 Nick: Yeah. The other point that I was thinking about as you were speaking before was the fact that okay we could maybe, by looking at this impeachment and subsequent acquittal of president Trump, say that perhaps he has been found innocent of the charges that were alleged against him but it almost seems like there's been a derogation in the actual authenticity of the impeachment process as laid out in article two, section four of the US constitution, because you have this sort of a hyper-partisan protection almost of their republican president by the republicans in the senate and only one senator, Mitt Romney, dissenting from the majority political opinion.
17:59 But secondly, the fact that as a sort of a political strong-arming tactic, Mitch McConnell and others in the senate did not allow witnesses who might have provided further context as to Crump's - oh, Crump's! - Trump's conduct with president Zelensky which could have raised reasonable doubt in the minds of republican senators as to the conduct of the president.
18:23 Paul: Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I think this is a terribly important point. When you consider that in the Nixon case, it was republicans, not democrats, who finally went to Nixon having changed their minds about the merits of the case and said you need to step down in order to avoid this going to a senate trial, in order to avoid the opprobrium of that, in order to avoid the political ructions that might generate. We appeal to you to step down and Nixon did.
18:52 We're in different territory at the moment because the process didn't have that degree of integrity it seems to me and that's a worry. But that brings us, as you implied, to the specific question of Mitt Romney's stance because we said a little earlier that Edmund Ross stood out in 1868 and said ‘simply as a matter of constitutional principle, I do not believe that we should be indicting Andrew Johnson. Don't like the man, don't think he's a good president, but a constitution made specific grounds for impeachment and I do not think that those grounds are present in this case.’
19:29 Nick: It's a case study for courage, isn't it?
19:31 Paul: It is. In fact, John F. Kennedy wrote a book called, 'Profiles in Courage’, and among the people he heroized you might say in that little book was Edmund Ross, a very obscure American political figure whose one moment of glory was that moment.
19:47 That brings us to the question of Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney took a similar stance. He risked opprobrium. He risked and probably has incurred the end of his political career, right? Why did he do that? He did it because, like Edmund Ross, he said, "I considered the constitution. I considered the grounds. I consulted my conscience and I believe I have taken an oath before god to act impartially and according to my conscience, this matter and that's what I'm doing."
20:16 It's worth reflecting, right, that he specified in that speech not simply a stance, not a final judgement only, but the grounds for that judgement. He precisely itemised the three grounds on which White House counsel defended Donald Trump. Those grounds were that an impeachable offence has to be a statutory crime, that the Bidens conduct justified the president's actions in his communication with president Zelensky of Ukraine and that judgement of the president's actions should be left to the voters.
20:44 It's important it seems to me to understand that none of these three grounds is valid. In other words, the White House counsel defended the president on three fallacious grounds. Romney makes this point in his speech but let's just summarise that the grounds were that an impeachable offence needs to be a statutory crime. It doesn't. The constitutional grounds for impeachment are treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanours. This has to do with political and constitutional offences, not statutory or civil crimes.
21:15 Secondly, even if the Bidens were indeed acting corruptly, the president's actions were directed at his personal gain to the prejudice of his office, not a judicial processes as regards to corruption.
21:29 Thirdly, that the judgement of the president's actions should be left to the voters is precisely not relevant because impeachment is in the constitution to avoid a president abusing his power to influence the voters.
21:43 That's what was being alleged against Trump, both in the Mueller inquiry and as regard to the Zelensky matter. So, it's worth listening to Mitt Romney's speech on all three heads and his explanation of why he chose to vote for conviction of Trump.
21:59 Mitt Romney: So, the verdict is ours to render under our constitution. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfil our duty. The grave question the constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanour. Yes, he did.
22:26 The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The president's purpose was personal and political.
22:47 Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust. What he did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values.
23:06 Corrupting an election to keep one's self in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine. We have come to different conclusions, fellow senators, but I trust that we have all followed the dictates of our conscience.
23:26 My vote will likely be in the minority in the senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.
23:42 Paul: That's a principled stance and it's open, he admitted for people to disagree with him and he didn't speak in rancour. He spoke it seems to me with integrity. Then Trump was acquitted.
23:54 I still think that while one can debate that case and people differ quite strongly about this, we have again in an important sense at least seen the American republican system work. Trump hasn't been assassinated. There hasn’t been violence in the streets. Mitt Romney wasn't dragged from the podium or beaten up, right? He was able to speak his piece. The newspapers were able to cover this according to their lights. That's what a republic is about, a democratic republic.
24:22 Now it will go to the voters. I think the probability at the moment is that he is likely to win that election. People will continue to debate and disagree about whether they are comfortable with him being president, how he is conducting himself as president, but so long as that debate can go on and so long as the constitution is upheld which means that even if he wins this next election, he's got one term left and then he's gone, alright? Then the republic endures.
24:52 Nick: So, what's striking though is when you wrote that piece, you know, ‘like Rome and Athens, the Republic Teeters' back in 2016, you sort of foresaw a lot of these constitutional strains and stress tests which have actually eventuated in the subsequent 3.5 years, but what are we actually meant to make of the health of the US constitution and the republic overall when although a lot of it seems shaky, this is exactly how the constitution was designed to work, to sort of resolve problems of precisely this nature, you know, were a questionable figure like Trump - or whoever else - in office and abusing power. It’s sort of resolved itself. So, what are the broader lessons we're meant to draw from this whole thing?
25:32 Paul: Well, I think that the issues about which I expressed concern in 2016 are very much still on the table. But it's worth reminding ourselves that the decline of the ancient republics was not something that happened in a few years. It didn't happen with one political figure.
25:49 When I wrote that piece, I wasn't saying that the election of Donald Trump meant the end of the American republic. I just said it troubles me that such a man could be elected and it troubles me the rhetoric that he's using and the nature of some of his supporter base, that anger and deep division were appearing in the United States.
26:09 I compared him with Sulla who most people these days won't know of. Sulla was not the man who overthrew the Roman republic. He was a conservative. He was a self-made man. He was a dictator. He tried to reform the constitution to stabilise things and ultimately, he didn't succeed. It was several decades later that Julius Caesar, having won a civil war, made himself dictator of Rome. That's when the Roman republic fell.
26:36 Its process of gridlock and then unravelling took place over many decades. In the United States, it's still conceivable and one certainly hopes this will prove to be the case, that whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, he serves out his time, somebody else is elected, there's deep debate and reflection about where the US is heading. There are some reforms, some new political changes and the republic endures and even flourishes.
27:03 So, I wouldn't despair but I did at that point express concern about where this could be heading and I still feel those concerns.
27:10 Nick: My final question for the interview is to try to broaden things up on a global scale. The removal of Nixon from office, although he wasn't impeached, he was removed through the impeachment process, had massive global ramifications. For instance, with the Vietnam war, the perceived strength and durability of the relations at that executive level between Nixon and China for instance.
27:35 You know, you mentioned China and the Coronavirus for instance before and the way in which there wasn't a free press which was able - or there wasn't the sort of separation of powers by which these sorts of political issues could be played out - but it taps into that debate about the differences in systems between and often chaotic and violent bear pit US politics or any politics in the western liberal democracies verses the sort of new emerging model of authoritarian, you know, dictatorships of the mould of, you know, China or Xi Jinping's China or Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin's Russian, whereby you don't have this sort of ostensible instability and yet...
28:15 Paul: You certainly have abuses of power.
28:16 Nick: You certainly have abuses of power, yeah.
28:18 Paul: So, it's worth saying just to pick up your first point about Nixon. First of all, yes, the fact that Nixon was forced from office - and forced is a strong term because he accepted the advice of his republican colleagues and he stepped down. I mean, he wasn't arrested. He didn't resist arrest. There was no violence. It was a constitutional procedure. That's very important.
28:38 But the reaction in both Beijing and Moscow was incredulity. They didn't understand how this was even possible and they said how would Nixon permit this to happen, as if he was the dictators. He was a strong man like them and you don't let this happen. You can't impeach Mao Zedong. You can't impeach Leonid Brezhnev, you know? What's going on? They didn't understand this political system.
29:04 Given the Coronavirus, apart from anything else, if China had say a British or Australian style parliamentary system, it's very easy to imagine that his popularity in the polls would be plummeting, that the press would be hammering him and there would be a vote of no confidence in the Chinese parliament.
29:20 None of that is happening because there's no free press. There's no parliamentary politics, alright, and you don't pass a vote of no confidence against a guy who will just throw you in prison for doing it or trying to organise it, right? That's the difference between two systems and if I had to choose between Trump's America as a governance process with all it's ruptures and that of China, there's no hesitation on my part. It's the American republic every day of the week because people like you and I and I would imagine our listeners get to think for ourselves. We get to read different accounts. We get to criticise political leaders. We get to vote them out of office if we so choose. Not in China. Not in China.
29:59 But to pick up the substantiative point you made about Nixon and the Vietnam war. He had been trying amid growing controversy to engineer a situation which south Vietnam could survive on its own merits and the US could get out, and it was an enormously difficult process. There were people saying cut and run, just get out. Stop, we should never have been there.
30:18 One could make a case for that but his concern and that of Henry Kissinger was if we do that, then many of our allies who are afraid of communist aggression or insurrection internally will lose confidence in us. They'll say, "Oh, the US can be beaten and won't stand up and this a third-rate state, this is a third world tin-pot dictatorship."
30:38 Nick: ... tin-pot dictatorship, yeah.
30:40 Paul: "And it's beaten the United States?" You know? Nixon was tormented by this, you know? He described the US as a pitiful giant, you know, that felt hamstrung because of it's principles and it's constraints.
30:55 There's no question it seems to me that his departure from office and a subsequent congressional action to say well now that he's gone, we're in control and we will not give any further aid or support for the south Vietnamese regime with a key component in it collapsing in 1975.
31:10 Nick: South Vietnam?
31:11 Paul: South Vietnam. So, that prompts the question - let's just imagine hypothetically that Trump had indeed been judged guilty and removed from office. What then happens?
31:23 Well, the first thing is that Pence steps up, becomes president from being vice president. Are there consequences internationally? Well, it would depend in some respects about what Pence did, but what we can say is that the US is not currently engaged in a Vietnam war. Trump is not fighting a war. In fact, he has by and large been trying to do what Obama did which is to limit America's involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere.
31:48 He's taken various limited measures like assassinating Soleimani or imposing sanctions on Venezuela but these are a long way short of war.
31:57 So, it's arguable that if Trump had been removed from office, there wouldn't have been a dramatic consequence of the nature of what happened with the Vietnam war when Nixon went.
32:07 But it might on the other hand be seen as a signal by the powers that be again in Beijing and in Moscow and in elsewhere, I imagine in Ankara, that this is another sign of the weakness and decline of the United States.
32:19 Nick: Indeed, yeah.
32:19 Paul: So, their confidence goes up and they think, you know, the American's can't even keep their act together, right? So, one has to ask that question because when the Roman republic was in difficulties, its enemies did at times take advantage of that, alright?
32:34 Nick: Yeah.
32:34 Paul: So, it is important. You always need a sense of proportion and this may, to be charitable at least to republicans, have been one reason why they thought, "We don't think that it's going to serve the country to say nothing of us and the party, well, to remove the president on this specific charge.
32:55 One could go further and say that had the actions of Trump been more unambiguously self-serving or treasonous even, that enough of them might well have walked across the aisle and said, "No, he's got to go." Alright?
33:11 So, I think we've seen an interesting test in the nature of the US constitution. We've seen vigorous debate in public. We've seen due process, even if it was a bit constrained and not altogether in good faith. We've seen a distinguished politician, a notable politician in Mitt Romney make a stand on principle which you can only do in a free republic because otherwise it's not just the end of your political career, you go to jail, you get killed. All these things should actually give us some heart.
33:39 Nick: Yes, in that this process, as ugly and as concerning and strange as it might seem to watchers of US politics, this instantiation of the impeachment process actually might be a sign of the republic's inherent strength and capacity for self-renewal, rather than another, you know, example of the decline of the US which has been talked about for decades, relative or outright decline.
34:00 Paul: Yeah. Well, if they, as I hinted before talking about China - if there was a genuine democratic system in place in China or in Russia - let's take Russia. There are good reasons to believe that Putin would long since have been impeached. If there was in China, Xi Jinping would be in significant trouble right now, even if he wasn't necessarily removed, because we see this happening in western democracies all the time.
34:24 It's not allowed to happen in dictatorships. We don't have a dictatorship in the United States. Trump is not a dictator. Whatever as we said happens in the election this year, it would take an enormous upheaval in the US for him not to end up leaving office in 2024 or 2025 if you like, right?
34:45 So, that's the way a more or less healthy republic works. What's necessary and what's available to citizens of the United States as to citizens of the other western democracies is to say we have concerns, we can and we will vote according to our concerns, we can join a political party, we can attempt to found a new movement, we can write in the press, we can read what we choose, we can change our opinions. That's what you do in a free state. That's what's at issue and that's still available. That hasn't been removed. Despite all the concerns about fake news and rancour, alright?
35:16 The fake news in China comes from the state. The fake news in the US is multiple different groups, right, not just one power.
35:25 Nick: Dr Paul Monk, thank you very much for your time tonight. It's been a pleasure.
35:29 Paul: Excellent. Thanks, Nick.