Trump Must Resign

And everyone should say so.

Trump has disgraced his office and spews a firehose of daily high crimes and misdemeanors from his orange mouth orifice on the White House lawn like so much red, white, and blue bile. The examples are so manifest and prolific that it seems futile to even try to list examples, but just for starters

—he has been held liable for sexual assault and has been credibly accused of raping a 13-year-old

—he presided over and cosigned a mass genocide in shutting down USAID that is expected to kill 14-25 million people

—he launched an illegal war of aggression in Iran and is illegally murdering people on fishing boats in the waters around Venezuela

—he has created an armed, reckless, unaccountable right-wing militia which is terrorizing American cities and murdering their residents

—he regularly launches disgusting personal attacks on those he considers his enemies, mocking their deaths, targeting them for racist smears; and using the full weight of the federal government to terrorize and immiserate them

—his regime is an orgy of corruption and self-dealing

Again, I could go on almost indefinitely. Trump is a moral black hole, a fascist, a would-be dictator, a determined ignoramus, and a greedy piece of shit. He demonstrates every day that he sees the presidency not as a sacred trust or as an opportunity for public service but as his personal piggy bank and grievance abettor. He is grindingly incompetent and grindingly malevolent, and he has no place near power of any sort.

He should resign. And everyone—the public, the media, Democrats, Republicans, people who see him on the street—should demand that he do so.

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Resignation is a better than impeachment (for now)

When you say “Trump would resign,” the immediate reaction is likely to be, “yeah, but he won’t, so what’s the point?”

It’s true that Trump is very unlikely to willingly step down. But calls for resignation can be powerful in themselves if repeated consistently and forcefully. More, demanding Trump’s resignation solves a number of tactical and messaging problems which have divided and confused the broad opposition to MAGA in unhelpful ways.

Democrats, and opponents of Trump in general, sometimes struggle to articulate a critique or a rejection of Trump that feels adequate to his abnormality and cruelty. Denouncing his policies or his statements, or casting votes against him, or doing any of the other things that you do in opposition in a democracy, all can feel like weak tea when the president is attempting to destroy democracy and the Constitution all day every day.

In an effort to meet the moment, people in and out of office have cast about for various remedies. On social media you’ll often see Trump critics demanding the implementation of the 25^th Amendment, which makes provisions for removing an incapacitated president from office. Many on the left—and some in congress—have also called for Trump’s impeachment.

There are difficulties with each of these approaches. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, the 25^th Amendment simply was never intended to remove a president who was alert enough to contest the removal. It’s supposed to deal with a president in a coma, and if your president isn’t in a coma, it’s pretty much useless.

Impeachment, in contrast, is designed to deal with a president who keeps attacking the Constitution. But in a partisan era, it’s a dead letter if the president’s party controls Congress, as they currently do.

Some argue that the Democrats should keep putting forward impeachment articles anyway to highlight the president’s crimes. Others believe that repeated failed impeachment attempts will simply embolden the president and make Democrats look weak without restraining him in any way.

I’m more on the “let’s keep trying to impeach him” side. But I think you can disagree in good faith on the tactics here. The problem is that this good faith disagreement then becomes its own fight, and one where much of the attention gets shifted away from the guy whose evil you are supposedly trying to highlight.

When Democrats don’t bring impeachment articles—or when they do and impeachment fails—many people are going to end up excoriating Democrats for being weak, or feckless, or insufficiently committed to defeating Trump. And I’m not against criticizing Democrats. But if the goal of impeachment is in part to highlight the unique, terrifying danger of Trump, and you spend all your time talking about how bad the Democrats are, then things have gone awry.

Calling for Trump’s resignation, however, solves all these problems. Demanding a Trump resignation is the right thing to do, and it’s an easy thing to do. It requires no procedures, no legislative battles. It just requires stating the truth—that Trump should resign because he is an evil, cruel man who hates the Constitution. The responsibility to resign and show minimal respect for the Constitution is on Trump and only Trump—and every day he does not resign shows once again how much he hates America and all the people in it.

“Trump must resign” is a clear moral statement, and it puts the onus to respond entirely on the most powerful, most evil person in the country, who refuses to fulfill any of his obligations, including the obligation to remove himself if he refuses to fulfill his oath. It’s straightforward; it’s clear; it’s a demand and an action that meet the moment.

But will it work?

Demands for resignation can provide a moral clarity that unites the opposition rather than dividing it. As a practical demand, though, is it just symbolic? Trump’s not actually going to resign, right?

The answer there is that of course Trump won’t resign…unless he does. It’s worth remembering that no president has ever been removed from office by the impeachment process. But one president, Richard Nixon, did in fact resign in disgrace because of public pressure.

Part of that pressure was from the impeachment process itself; Nixon didn’t want to face the House and then the Senate because he thought he would lose. For this reason, and many others, Democrats should definitely pursue impeachment if they have control of the House and/or (god willing) the Senate, because impeachment can put great pressure on the President. They should hold hearings into Trump’s misconduct (including the horrific accusations of rape) for the same reason.

Demands for resignation, speculation about resignation, and framing resignation as the correct response to weakness and/or misconduct can also have their own logic, though—a logic which can rationalize and connect other criticism and create its own momentum.

This is what happened with Joe Biden, whose low approval ratings powered calls for him to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, while those calls for him to drop out, and speculation that he might, fueled negative stories about his presidency, robbed him of support, and probably damaged his approval. Similarly, the New York Times’ relentless campaign against Harvard President Claudine Gay was focused on explicit calls for her to resign—the will she/won’t she question helped fuel more press coverage and more pressure, finally forcing her from office.

Trump is a lot more powerful than the president of Harvard, and—unlike Biden or Richard Nixon—he’s largely indifferent to the fate of and the views of his own party. Pushing him to resign would be very difficult and would be a long and brutal campaign.

But that’s all the more reason to start working on it as soon as possible. Whenever Trump does the awful thing of the day, Democrats, the media, random passersby, should all point out that this is more evidence that he is unfit, is violating his oath, and should immediately resign.

What about J.D. Vance?

One final concern for many might be that if Trump did resign, that would leave ghoulish Vice-President J.D. Vance in charge. Vance is a misogynist Nazi piece-of-shit. Trump is awful; how can we be sure that Vance would be better?

The thing about Vance is that he was a vocal Trump critic until he realized that Trump was the route to power. He then abased and debased himself in praise of the Orange One.

I think Vance’s conversion to evil was sincere in some respects. But his flexibility also suggests that he is able and willing to adapt to the political environment in a way that Trump is very much not. A world in which Trump has been forced to resign in disgrace is a world in which Trump’s presidency and policy program is widely recognized as a massive toxic failure. Vance in that situation will be pretty eager to distance himself from Trumpism and MAGA.

This isn’t to say Vane would be a good president. He would be a horrific president. But when you win, you win, and political actors tend to have to adapt themselves to that win. Forcing a Trump resignation would be a massive win. The world and the country would be a better place for it, whatever awfulness Vance then brought to the table. It’s worth pushing for victory because (a) sufficient to the day is the evil thereof and (b) the evil thereafter is an evil which has to deal with the fact that you’ve crushed one evil already.

And, you know, one big virtue of resignation is that everyone can do it. You can call for Vance to resign; you can call for RFK to resign; you can call for Sean Duffy to resign. They should all resign. We should say so, because it’s fun, because it’s righteous, because it’s true, and because it can, in fact, make the fascists cringe. Sometimes, even, maybe, it might make them resign.