“Just Don’t Commit Crimes, Mr. President”

Donald Trump unloaded on Congressman Jamie Raskin on Truth Social with a stream of insults and called for him to be removed from Congress. Raskin, who taught constitutional law for a quarter century, responded coolly with an introduction to the Constitution!

There is a way of responding to an opponent that reveals more about the person responding than about the opponent. Donald Trump demonstrated it on his platform Truth Social. Congressman Jamie Raskin, he wrote, is a loser in life who spent the first term obsessively trying to impeach him and failed miserably while wasting the country’s money and time and every effort, and who will surely try again despite all the greatness of one of the most successful presidencies in history.

In the post, Donald Trump attacks Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin personally and with unusual intensity. He describes him as a failure, accuses him of unsuccessfully pursuing impeachment during his first term and wasting the nation’s money and time in the process. At the same time, Trump claims Raskin will once again attempt to launch impeachment proceedings against him.

Trump also ties his criticism to serious allegations: he portrays Raskin’s political conduct as improper or unlawful, claims without evidence that only a pardon from Joe Biden kept him out of prison, and, referring to conservative commentator Mark Levin, essentially calls for people like Raskin to be removed from Congress. He concludes by once again using the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase he frequently uses to portray political opponents as irrational or driven by hatred.

What follows is a small gallery of insults. The last person who pursued him through impeachment, he wrote, was a pathetic soul named Al Green who had just lost his election by a huge margin to someone unknown who, in Trump’s view, had more talent than Raskin. Raskin had wasted his time on that January Sixth committee, which Trump calls the committee of political enforcers and thugs, and failed there just as he had with impeachment and with many other things. If Biden had not pardoned him, he would be sitting in prison today. Something had to be done about people like that who did bad things and harmed the country but always ended up losing because of their unlawful or dishonest conduct. He agreed with Mark Levin, who said they should throw the bum out. With people suffering badly from Trump Derangement Syndrome, that madness directed against him, and voting purely out of hatred, Congress could never be great. Beneath it, in large letters, the signature: President Donald J. Trump.

Raskin, who taught constitutional law for a quarter century before entering Congress, responded without agitation. There is a very simple way not to get impeached, he said, stop committing impeachable acts and stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Do not go to war and seize from Congress the power to declare it, because that authority belongs to Congress. Do not spend money differently from how Congress appropriated it and do not impose unlawful taxes and tariffs on the American people without congressional approval.

The president needs an introduction to the Constitution, Raskin added. There are many lawyers around him, but he should find one who actually understands what the Constitution says. One has to picture the scene. A man calling a former constitutional law professor a loser is handed a reading list by that same professor, politely, almost kindly. And the one accused of taking powers away from Congress demands in the same breath that the congressman making that accusation be thrown out of Congress.

The elegant thing about Raskin’s response is that every one of his prohibitions contains an accusation. Anyone advising not to wage war without Congress is saying that someone did. Anyone advising not to spend against appropriations and not to impose unlawful tariffs is listing what has happened. In this way, a series of recommendations becomes a catalog of allegations without ever raising its voice. Impeachment, which the Constitution created for precisely such situations, appears in Trump’s writing not as an instrument of law but as personal persecution. It becomes hatred, even an illness to diagnose and then remove.

That is the real difference between these two voices. One responds to an accusation with a name, the other responds to a name with an accusation. One writes in capital letters and calls for expulsion, the other speaks quietly and points to written law. There is an old suspicion that the volume of a response is inversely proportional to the strength of its arguments, and rarely has it been so easy to test. A president who declares those reminding him of the Constitution to be insane and demands their removal provides the strongest proof that the reminder was necessary. The only question is whether, amid the noise, anyone still hears the quiet sentence that the easiest way not to be impeached is simply not to do the things for which impeachment exists.