What would happen if it turned out that the president had bought a million dollars worth of call options for the S&P 500 index just before announcing a “pause” on most of his “Liberation Day” tariffs?
That’s no idle hypothetical. Some unknown person or persons did buy a bunch of those options on Wednesday about 10 minutes before the White House canceled the global thermonuclear trade war it had just launched. Markets predictably launched into orbit on the news, making said person or persons tremendously wealthy in a blink.
The coincidence in timing suggests the purchase was either a freakish stroke of luck or one of the most brazen acts of insider trading in American financial history, as various Senate Democrats are now alleging. Almost certainly, one or more people close to the president knew what was about to happen and cashed in.
“Someone’s going to prison,” an outraged observer huffed afterward. I assure you, no one is going to prison. Not to federal prison, anyway, and not to state prison either if the “lucky” investor(s) happen to reside in a red state. We all understand, or should understand, how Republican-run government works now. Don’t make me tap the sign.
Back to the hypothetical. Imagine if it were Trump himself who bought those options, either by placing the order from the Oval Office or by tipping off confidants to place it. Imagine further that he copped to having done it when asked, which isn’t unlikely. The fact that so much of his corruption takes place in broad daylight has always worked in his favor, convincing gullible Americans that his behavior can’t truly be scandalous if he’s not trying to hide it.
Insider trading by the president, right out in the open. Would that be an impeachable offense?
Not to be too Clintonian, but I’d say the answer is that it depends on what the meaning of “impeachable” is.
If by “impeachable” we mean an act that warrants impeachment and removal, of course it is. By profiting off of his own market manipulation, Trump would be guilty of having abused the authority of his office to enrich himself. An autocrat by nature, he’s never understood why the powers of the presidency shouldn’t be used to serve his personal interests. This would simply be the latest example.
But if by “impeachable” we mean an act that might plausibly result in impeachment and removal, then of course it isn’t. There’s no such thing as an impeachable offense after January 6. A Republican-led Congress that’s too frightened of Trump to repeal his tariff powers as he embarks on an economic arson spree would surely be too frightened to remove him from office altogether even if he confessed to insider trading. One Dispatch colleague told me he’d set the over/under on how many Senate Republicans would vote to convict in the scenario I described at 1.5—and that he’d take the under.
I would too. Lisa Murkowski would flip, presumably, but Susan Collins? She has a Republican primary coming up, you know.
There’s no such thing as an impeachable offense after January 6 and Trump knows it. Which is how we arrived at the ominous spectacle that played out in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon.
Retaliation.
Lost yesterday amid the public jubilation over being liberated from “Liberation Day” was the signing of two new executive orders, one aimed at Chris Krebs, the other at Miles Taylor.
Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term, placing him in charge of, among other things, detecting and preventing any tampering with America’s election technology. The president fired him on November 17, 2020 not for doing his job poorly but for doing it honestly and well. Krebs insisted repeatedly after Election Day that there had been no security breaches involved in Joe Biden’s victory. That qualified as insubordination in the Trump White House.
Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security during the president’s first term and published a famous op-ed—anonymously—in 2018 titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” After leaving DHS in 2019, he turned it into a book (also published anonymously) arguing against Trump’s reelection before revealing himself as the author in October 2020. Even before then, he had begun giving interviews to the media on the record about the more hair-raising presidential episodes he witnessed while working for DHS.
The two men embarrassed a president who believes he has a mandate for “retribution.” Retribution came yesterday in the form of executive memoranda.
Trump’s new memorandum on Krebs accuses him of various offenses, including “censoring” conservative viewpoints, but the true nature of his grievance is right there in the text: “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
That’s nakedly retaliatory, just like the executive orders targeting law firms that caused legal trouble for the president in the past. Once again, Trump’s corruption is right out in the open. But I believe this is the first time he’s gone as far as to officially penalize someone for rejecting his conspiratorial nonsense about the 2020 election, a position shared by a large majority of the American public and even by some of his own Cabinet nominees. Or former nominees, anyway.
The memorandum on Taylor, meanwhile, accuses him of having disclosed “sensitive information” by revealing what he saw while working in the first Trump White House. Get a load of this:
Where a Government employee improperly discloses sensitive information for the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and Government effectiveness–-all ultimately designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government—this conduct could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act, and therefore makes such employee ineligible for access to national secrets.
Ignore the heavy breathing about “treasonous” behavior or the idea that Donald Trump, of all people, might earnestly fret about someone “sowing chaos and distrust in Government.” Instead, savor the spectacle of a guy who turned a Mar-a-Lago restroom into a second National Archives pretending to care about behaving improperly with sensitive information. The Signalgate fiasco, for which neither Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, nor anyone else has been disciplined, was less than three weeks ago, for cripes sake. Insider trading on the tariff “pause,” which was pretty darned sensitive information and led to an awful lot of enrichment, happened literally yesterday.
It’s not the hypocrisy that makes targeting Krebs and Taylor one of Trump’s most sinister acts of retribution to date, nor is it the fact that in this case he’s zeroing in on individuals instead of organizations like law firms. What’s sinister is the penalties he ordered. On top of rescinding the two men’s security clearances, the president commanded the Department of Homeland Security to investigate their “activities” as government employees—and in Krebs’ case directed the Justice Department to join that investigation.
Doomsayers like me worried that his “retribution” mindset would lead him to sic government agencies on his political enemies and harass them whether or not they’re credibly suspected of wrongdoing. Well, here we are. It took less than three months.
Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious Soviet secret police chief, once supposedly boasted of his ability to discredit and/or imprison anyone disfavored by the regime by saying, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Yesterday, Trump showed Krebs and Taylor to federal law enforcement and told them to show him the crime.
An impeachable offense.
I could be convinced that this is the single most impeachment-worthy thing he’s done since returning to office, although the competition is stiff.
It’s not the most destructive thing he’s done. That distinction belongs to “Liberation Day,” but stupidity, even tremendous stupidity, isn’t a high crime or misdemeanor. If anything, it’s just deserts for an electorate that listened to him flap his gums endlessly about tariffs during the campaign and reelected him anyway. Plus, by Trump standards, he’s on reasonably firm legal ground in wielding his power to tax imports: Congress chose to cede some of its authority on that subject to the president in the past and now we’re all suffering for it.
It’s not the most outrageous thing he’s done either. Absolving his foot soldiers on January 6, including the most violent ones, from having to pay for their crimes is even more quintessentially fascist than what he’s doing to Krebs and Taylor. But the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has granted presidents carte blanche from criminal prosecution for corrupt pardons, and that makes it hard (although not impossible) to argue that an impeachable offense was committed. Especially when the Democrat whom Trump succeeded in office was pretty darned corrupt in his use of the pardon power too.
Neither is it the most distressing thing he’s done. That would be his hasty deportation of hundreds of supposed Venezuelan “gang members” to a gulag in El Salvador without due process. Three-quarters of them reportedly have no criminal record, and at least one seems pretty clearly not to be a gangster. But Trump has a legal fig leaf there too and will insist that any errors made in trying to protect Americans from dangerous foreigners are a case of overzealous good intentions in a noble cause. Which would be untrue—his intentions aren’t good—but it’s a solid political defense to impeachment.
It’s not even the shadiest thing he’s done. This is a man who, shortly before being sworn in, launched his own cryptocurrency and has continued to hawk it despite the fact that his own administration is in charge of regulating it. But it’s impossible to imagine him being impeached for his memecoin conflict of interest because, frankly, relative to all of his other civic sins, it feels de minimis. Americans knowingly reelected a convicted felon who had three other criminal indictments pending against him; imagine how silly it would sound now to demand that they get indignant about the president using his office to fleece his own fans.
The people wanted a grifting con man. By what right does Congress deny them their heart’s desire? Which, incidentally, is also the logic that will get Trump off the hook in case he really does turn out to be the mystery buyer of those S&P 500 index options.
What he’s doing to Krebs and Taylor isn’t the worst thing he’s ever done or ever will do. But it’s an unusually stark example of him abusing his authority to settle a personal grudge, not merely by canceling federal privileges (as he did to John Bolton) but by commandeering the power of federal law enforcement to intimidate and impose affirmative hardships on his enemies.
Bill of attainder.
It’s in the spirit of a bill of attainder.
A bill of attainder is when the legislature singles out a disfavored person or group by proclaiming them guilty of a crime and ordering them punished, without trial or other judicial protections. The Constitution forbids such things, but Trump’s memoranda will achieve something similar with respect to Krebs and Taylor. In this case, the process itself is the punishment: Despite there being no hard evidence of wrongdoing against them, the two are now formally and publicly suspected by the executive branch of malfeasance during their stint as government employees. Being investigated by DHS and DOJ may force them to jump through legal hoops like subpoenas, depositions, and audits, requiring them to hire attorneys and bear that cost. Prospective employers will keep their distance from them, not wanting to make themselves targets of presidential retribution by associating with a disfavored person.
Krebs and Taylor will sleep less soundly at night, not knowing how much further Trump might go to satisfy his vendetta against them.
And there will, assuredly, be some sort of proclamation of “guilt” at the end. The two will probably never end up in a courtroom, but it’s unthinkable that Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem would disappoint Trump now that he’s shown them the man and demanded that they show him the crime. To embarrass him by absolving Krebs and Taylor of wrongdoing would be “disloyal” in the extreme; some form of misconduct, criminal or not, will be alleged even if the allegations need to be, ahem, trumped up.
Citizens are being smeared and punished with harassment by the machinery of the state when there’s no reason to believe they’ve done anything wrong except offend the president. That’s a straightforward abuse of power in a garish authoritarian way, particularly in Krebs’ case since his “crime” was to bravely and honestly vouch for the integrity of the 2020 election. Seems like a decent example of a high crime or misdemeanor, no?
Here’s an interesting question, meanwhile: Why these guys?
Why not launch the Beria phase of the Trump presidency by targeting Liz Cheney or some much higher-profile target? Krebs and Taylor are minor characters from season one of The Trump Show. No one remembers their subplots except hardcore “fans” like me.
“It’s because Joe Biden pardoned Cheney,” you might say. But that can’t be it. Trump believes those pardons are null and void, remember?
I think it’s because Krebs and Taylor are comparatively unknown that Trump began with them. Had he begun with Cheney, his lesser enemies would have assumed that they’re a low priority by comparison and therefore need never worry about being persecuted. The White House will be too busy hassling major antagonists like Mark Milley, the January 6 committee, and the Republicans who voted to impeach and remove him after the insurrection to get very far down its enemies list.
Starting with Krebs and Taylor is Trump’s way of signaling that no one is too insignificant to be a target. He hasn’t forgotten or forgiven those who’ve crossed him, including those who did so in the increasingly distant past. If you’ve caused the president any trouble, you too should sleep less soundly at night, even if you’ve caused him considerably less than others have. Accusing Taylor of mishandling “sensitive information” underlines the point, as if Trump is warning critics that the fact that he’s guiltier of a particular sin than they are won’t save them from being punished for it.
No one is safe. You can’t have a proper culture of fear if no one outside the Cheney family has reason to worry about their lives being ruined.
He ran on this, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on Tuesday, explaining why Congress won’t step in to take Trump’s tariff gasoline and matches away from him. That logic will also supply the excuse for congressional Republicans not to proceed with impeachment as the president’s pseudo-bills of attainder grow more aggressive and outrageous. Americans voted for a Beria presidency and, well, we all believe in honoring the will of the people, don’t we?
Congressional Democrats will face a dilemma if they retake the House next fall, though. To impeach or not to impeach?
There’s no such thing as an impeachable offense after January 6, at least not one that stands a chance of attracting the 67 votes needed in the Senate to convict. And since impeaching Trump twice in his first term did precisely nothing to chasten him or his party, there’s a case to be made that Democrats shouldn’t bother next time around. Besides, how could they begin to settle on a list of high crimes or misdemeanors to accuse him of? New ones come along as regularly as city buses do.
I think they’ll have no choice, though. Their base, having delivered a victory in the midterms, will want to see Trump rebuked morally for his abuses of power, and that’s all impeachment is anymore—moral censure, with zero risk of tangible consequences from the Senate. When the day comes and the articles are drafted, I hope Democrats remember to include what’s happened to Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” is beneath the dignity of the United States even in its embarrassing diminished state.
