We knew that this particular Presidential meltdown was coming. By the time President Trump ranted to the media on Thursday morning, shouting over the noise of his helicopter on the White House lawn, he had spent much of the previous day and night stewing over Robert Mueller. On Wednesday, for the first time in his tenure as special counsel, Mueller broke his silence to read some of the key points in the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report that relayed the findings of his investigation of the President and what he called Russia’s “attack” on the 2016 election. In a sombre monotone, Mueller pointed out that he had not cleared Trump of possible obstruction-of-justice charges, which was a conscious decision that reflected the facts of the case. “If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime,” Mueller told a roomful of reporters, “we would have said so.”
Back in March, Trump had insisted that Mueller offered him “complete and total exoneration.” But that was before the report was released, before Mueller spoke, before the assurances of Trump’s innocence offered by the Attorney General, William Barr, turned out to be one of the more breathtaking recent acts of political spin. Even on Fox News, Mueller’s statement was greeted as a significant blow to the President, with the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, telling viewers that Mueller had directly rebutted Trump’s claim of “no collusion, no obstruction.” So it was only a matter of time before the President punched back. Mueller was, once again, his target, and the President was back to tweeting that his investigation was “The Greatest Presidential Harassment in history.” In his shouts to the media before boarding Marine One on Thursday morning, his face more red than usual, Trump called Mueller a “true Never Trumper”and said that the special counsel’s staff was composed of “some of the worst human beings on earth.”
Trump’s insults, however, could not undo the import of Mueller’s words: the special counsel has presented serious and credible evidence that the President committed obstruction of justice, and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives will have to figure out whether to take up the challenge that Mueller has laid before it. Impeachment is an ever more real possibility as Party leaders begin to face increased pressure from their own restive, viscerally anti-Trump supporters. “Do you think they are going to impeach you?” a reporter asked Trump on Thursday. The President at first seemed confused about the basics of the constitutional system, averring that he “can’t imagine the courts allowing it.” Of course, it’s Congress, not the courts, that decides. But, with his muddled facts unchallenged, Trump plowed on. Impeachment, he added, “is a dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”
Before the cameras, Trump seemed both more enraged and more confused than usual, repeatedly turning to leave and then changing his mind and heading back to make another point. “He said, essentially, ‘You’re innocent,’ ” Trump shouted at the CBS reporter Paula Reid at one point, still seeking to spin Mueller’s verdict into something it wasn’t. He then launched into an assertion of the vast powers he holds under Article II of the Constitution, seemingly unaware that Article II also grants Congress the right to impeach and remove him from office should it find him guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” You would have to be a die-hard supporter to find much of what Trump said coherent, let alone persuasive. But, as Washington comes to terms with the idea that the fight over the Mueller report may be just beginning, Trump did make one point that perhaps most viewers could agree on. “It’s a very sad period,” he said, “for this country.”
As Mueller announced the end of his tenure as special counsel, on Wednesday, I happened to be observing another political crisis up close, in Jerusalem—perhaps the most pro-Trump capital in the world these days, thanks to Trump’s decision to officially recognize the contested city as Israel’s capital, in 2017. Just seven weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had claimed, with Trumpian zest, a “tremendous” victory in the national election, after his Likud Party and other right-wing factions secured the majority of seats in the Knesset. The victory was perhaps all the more impressive given that he is currently facing indictment by his own attorney general, on criminal charges stemming from his actions while in office. But, on Wednesday, Netanyahu ran up against a midnight deadline to form his new government, without having managed to produce a coalition. Under Israel’s complicated parliamentary system, Netanyahu had no choice but to dissolve the Knesset and call for a new round of voting, which will be held in September. In other words, he has now lost the election that he won. It is the first time in Israel’s seventy-one-year history that this has happened.
One factor, among many, that led to the week’s political drama was a law, introduced by Netanyahu’s party soon after the election, that would guarantee sitting ministers immunity from prosecution. Not surprisingly, this proposed act of personal protection for Netanyahu stirred widespread outrage in Israel, and even members of Netanyahu’s presumed coalition were said to be uneasy about going along with it. The former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman refused to sign up his party and its five Knesset members for Netanyahu’s coalition.
Even a late intervention by Trump, in the form of a tweet he posted on Monday, failed to help Netanyahu. The U.S. President, who is more popular in Israel than he is at home, repeatedly sought to boost Netanyahu during the campaign; two weeks before the election, he unilaterally recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which the country captured from Syria during the 1967 war. “Hoping things will work out with Israel’s coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever,” the President’s tweet on Monday read. “A lot more to do!” The sudden intervention was declared “unprecedented” by Israeli media and quickly touted by Netanyahu.
It didn’t work, however. Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, it was reported that Netanyahu had offered to drop his self-immunity bill if the leader of the Labor Party would join his coalition, an offer that was swiftly rejected. Netanyahu then had no choice but to proceed to the new election, which was swiftly dubbed “the Immunity Election” by at least one analyst. In one of the week’s many ironies, the new election may now result in the postponement, once again, of Trump’s long-promised Mideast peace proposal, which had been scheduled to be released sometime soon. The plan’s author, Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, even happened to be in town for the ill-timed political implosion. He was shown meeting with Netanyahu on Thursday, hours after the debacle. The two hugged warmly.
Whatever happens next, it is already clear that Washington and Jerusalem are facing twin crises, disputes over the reach of executive power in the face of scandal and investigation. As Merav Michaeli, a former member of the Knesset from the Labor Party, said minutes after Mueller had finished speaking, “Now you are living our lives. . . . The tempo of things is so crazy, every two seconds there is a new headline, a new scandal.”
She is right. Michaeli said this while I was appearing with her on a panel at a well-timed conference in Jerusalem on “democracy under stress,” which was sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Israel Democracy Institute. The threat of authoritarian tendencies is a well-established story for Israel after more than a decade with Netanyahu in power. Life in Washington these days increasingly resembles the endless cycle of scandal and news fatigue that Israelis have become accustomed to in recent years. But the larger problem isn’t just a matter of exhaustion, or the fact that politics have become a crude reality show. In the United States, as in Israel and many Western countries these days, the political debate is increasingly about basic questions of the rule of law and the independence and legitimacy of institutions that fall under assault by strong executives.
In Washington, Mueller’s decision to speak about his report was a reminder that Trump has made a breathtaking and, so far, unchallenged assertion of executive power, so sweeping that he can fire top law-enforcement officials and refuse to coöperate with investigations of himself. In Jerusalem, Netanyahu, facing indictment, has proposed to pass a law guaranteeing immunity for ministers from the sort of prosecution he faces—though the law has been delayed by the sudden, unexpected need for new elections, it could still be passed.
At a political inflection point such as this, it was striking to listen to two days of anxious discussions at the conference about what ails Western democracy. “I hate to use the word ‘unprecedented,’ ” the Israel Democracy Institute’s director, Yohanan Plesner, said. “It became meaningless because we use it every day.” U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who stopped by on a congressional-delegation trip to Israel, had a similar observation. “There are all kinds of things happening that, several years ago, could only be a figment of our imagination.” But there were moments when the subject of democracy under stress seemed almost too timely. We are living in a real-time seminar on democracy’s dysfunctions. Is it possible to analyze it when it is happening as we speak?
Of course, some conclusions are possible in this third year of the Trump Presidency. What is clearest, however, is that even those who seek to defend democracy do not agree on the nature and seriousness of the threat it is facing, or on what to do about it, or even on whether it is growing or receding. In Washington, congressional wavering over whether and how to pursue impeachment in the wake of Mueller’s report is but one example of this broader debate. Many analysts now view Trump and Netanyahu in the context of the rise of authoritarian-minded right-wing populists across the Western world. Is it a delayed backlash to the great recession of 2008? A revolt by the white working class? There’s still little agreement. Meanwhile, it’s hard to disagree about the effectiveness of many of the techniques employed by Trump, Netanyahu, and the other new populists who seek to weaken individuals and institutions that could serve as constraints on their power.
It can all seem overwhelming—too many little crises to keep track of. But what if Israel’s scandal fatigue and America’s are part of the same story after all? Crises are local, but they can be global, too. Whether or not there is anything to be done about it, the collapse of the liberal order is, in fact, happening. Freedom House has found that the number of democratic countries in the world has fallen every year for the past dozen years. This year, for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the group designated a country in the European Union—Hungary—as only “partly free.” Hungary is run by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who proclaims his ideology as that of “illiberal democracy.” Orbán is an ally of Netanyahu—and was just accorded a visit to the Oval Office by Trump.
It’s worth noting that this political tumult in both Washington and Jerusalem unfolded in the course of a generally disruptive week. After all, it was only last Friday that Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, was finally forced from office, after three years of failed efforts to settle the terms of her country’s departure from the European Union. Over the weekend, E.U. parliamentary elections confirmed that the right-wing populism that fuelled Brexit and political discontent across the continent remains a potent force; populist parties received the largest share of the vote in four of Europe’s six largest countries. That’s just this week’s news. Tumult is the new normal. Next week will bring more. As if to underscore the point, when I was leaving my hotel after the conference, Netanyahu had just arrived for an event inside. On the street, a loud anti-Netanyahu protest had materialized. Protesters shouted, “Bibi quit!” And then they added, as a refrain, “Democracy! Democracy!”
