Chair of the Department of History. His books include FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish History, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.Lichtman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Case for Impeachment, and reported the following:
I wrote the case for impeachment because every American should be concerned about our constitutional order, our liberties, and our national security under President Donald J. Trump. The book transcends politics and punditry to provide an analysis of past impeachments, the process of impeachment, the prior history of Donald Trump, and the record of his early administration. It is our responsibility to arms ourselves with the knowledge to protect our great nation and keep alive its most precious traditions.Visit Allan J. Lichtman's website and Facebook page.
Already millions of Americans have risen in protest against the dangerous presidency of Donald Trump. These many robust demonstrations will be like smoke through a chimney unless, like the protests that led to the Revolutionary War, they are put to a purposeful end. If investigations uncover traitorous collusion with the Russians or Trump continues to clash with the law, the Constitution, the environment, and the nation’s traditions and its security, the American people must demand his impeachment. In addition to mass protests, they should engage their representatives through petitions, e-mails, letters to newspaper editors, tweets, town hall gatherings, and face-to-face meetings, directed to the goal of impeachment. If Republicans in Congress remain recalcitrant, voters should be swift to dismiss them from office in 2018. Justice will be realized in today’s America not through revolution, but by the Constitution’s peaceful remedy of impeachment, but only if the people demand it.
Page 99 refers to Trump’s unique, inveterate proclivity for lying, which could lead to his impeachment if he lies under oath in one of the civil lawsuits pending against him or lies us into a national crisis. Donald Trump has insisted that President George W. Bush should have been impeached for lying America into the war in Iraq. Lying will also destroy his credibility if Trump faces impeachment on one of the seven other grounds that I detail in the book. The page reads in part:In just six months, Trump’s many falsehoods earned him the independent fact-checker PolitiFact’s annual “Lie of the Year” award for 2015. “In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s,” the PolitiFact staff wrote of his misstatements. “But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.” In evaluating all presidential candidates of both parties at the end of the nominating process, PolitiFact found that Trump had more Pants on Fire ratings than all 21 other candidates combined. Pants on Fire is the fact-checker’s rock bottom designation, reserved for the most outrageous of calls.
These findings show that Trump is an outlier, that his lying far exceeds the normal tendency of politicians to stretch and sometimes even break the truth. It is this extreme, nearly automatic propensity to lie that shreds his credibility and makes him more vulnerable to impeachment and removal than any American president since Richard Nixon.
The Page 99 Test: FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman.
The Page 99 Test: White Protestant Nation by Allan J. Lichtman.
--Marshal Zeringue
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