Trump faces a brutal impeachment era and needs a lawyer as press secretary
Impeachment proceedings for President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are coming in the next two years.
That inevitability means President Trump would be well served by a superb young communicator who is a very smart lawyer as his next press secretary, especially if that person has demonstrated the extraordinary legal chops to have "Supreme Court clerk" on his or her résumé.
The duels with the White House press corps triggered by Trump-hunting in Congress, like those ahead with congressional committees, are very often going to deal with the extent of presidential powers. There is a lot of case law on that topic, and history is full of relevant precedents. A press secretary who knows those cases and precedents will be far ahead of the average journalist in the press room. If the new press secretary has to be briefed on Justice Robert Jackson’s famed opinion in the 1952 decision Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer , he or she will already be behind. President Trump cannot afford a spokesperson who is behind from the jump.
What President Trump and his advisers learned from the first impeachment circus of the next two years is valuable. The effort to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this week was led by outgoing Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. (Massie was booted out of his job of a dozen years in a May Republican primary, which Massie lost to Republican Ed Gallrein by nearly 10% — a stunning rebuke of Massie’s inveterate grandstanding.)
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Massie failed in his last act in Congress, but the attention he attracted in failing demonstrated again that an attention-starved congressman can always get some cameras on him or her via moves to impeach anyone, anytime. Democrats noticed, especially achievement-free members like Massie who want some attention.
The foolishness of the latest impeachment push was demonstrated by its target, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in a Tuesday morning press conference. Hegseth set an example of how to play offense against ridiculous charges: Speak in clear, crisp and detailed sentences. Reject in bold colors the antics of attention addicts. Then go back to work. Don’t get pulled into the weeds.
Massie is an attention addict, and he’s been contemplating the awful process of sudden withdrawal from his source of fleeting endorphins: Beltway journalists asking him questions as though he mattered.
Massie was first elected as a congressman from Kentucky in 2014 and will have warmed a seat there for a dozen years before he leaves. He could have actually worked on a particular issue and developed some valuable expertise. Instead, he became a kind of House moth, attracted to camera lights whenever they were turned his way.
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Massie’s "accomplishments," if there are any genuine ones, are unknown to many beyond his own inner circle. He gets credit along with a handful of others for the provision in the 2018 Farm Bill that removed hemp from the federal controlled substances definition, opening the way for commercial production nationwide. That is it.
Massie got hooked on those cable channel lights of television, so he moved on from hemp and got hooked on the Epstein files. Massie rode that particular horse very hard, never taking his eyes off his own weird goal of getting the entire file dropped on the public. He deployed a discharge petition to get a vote and lured three other Republicans into joining him — Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
All four will be gone by Jan. 3. The result of the release of those files? A few folks got gored, like former British ambassador to the United States Lord Peter Mandelson and former U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But there was nothing in those voluminous files that implicated President Trump in Epstein’s crimes. Massie got zero out of that stunt except a precedent for breaking the long-established practice of not releasing raw files from investigations.
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Discharge petitions are a break with party leadership and rarely end well. New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler forced a discharge petition on his own conference that required a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies. Three other Republicans joined Lawler in the stunt and only managed to embarrass his GOP colleagues who voted no on the actual bill. Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie all joined Lawler on that petition. All four lost last week.
Stunts are remembered mostly by those they hurt. The enormity of the blue tsunami should not obscure the fact that all eight Republicans who turned on their caucus will be out on their backs come January, right along with many other members of the "Knucklehead Caucus" who kneecapped then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October 2023.
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What all these rogue Republicans thought was "good politics" could not save them, and their demands for attention won’t be easily forgotten. Lobbying and public affairs firms are going to say "pass" if and when these types come looking for work. Which company wants to be represented by Massie et al.? If they would stab their own party, why would they stay loyal to their prospective new employers and clients?
Not that it matters to Democrats now. With their enormous majority, Democrats will call impeachment votes again and again, and they can count on near-unanimous support from their caucus.
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That means many hearings on many articles of impeachment, some of which will pass, and then hours, days, weeks and months of the Senate’s time will be spent on impeachment trials.
As with the idiotic demand from Massie for a vote on impeachment, so will it be with every impeachment proceeding in 2027-2028: lots of media attention for those who emerge as champions of the efforts to finally "get Trump."
They won’t succeed, of course. Even if they secured the necessary number of senators to vote for extended trials on every different impeachment article, enough GOP senators won’t vote for removal. It’s all a gigantic waste of time.
My unsolicited suggestion for President Trump: Get a list of Supreme Court law clerks from the past six years and interview those who are, in fact, (1) believers in Article II powers and (2) able to verbally battle with and best a White House press corps that will rival that of Nixon’s last two years in its collective combativeness.
President Trump is his own best defender, but a young, very smart, very articulate lawyer who knows the Constitution inside and out and doesn’t flinch from making arguments based on Article II powers is the ticket to at least getting his message out over the legacy media’s insatiable appetite for scandal and controversy as they gather their numbers for the last gasp in their 12-year war against Trump.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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