26 November 2019 — 1727 mst

Only four Presidents have been removed from office before
their terms ended; none was removed through impeachment

Impeachment clauses were inserted in our constitution to provide a way to remove a President through legal, bloodless, means that gave him a chance to defend himself. At the constitutional convention, writes Michael Gerhardt in The Federal Impeachment Process (3rd Edition), Benjamin Franklin:

Two centuries after Franklin delivered his argument for including an impeachment clause in the constitution, no President has been removed from office through impeachment.

Neither has any President been relieved of his powers as President through the invocation of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Two Presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were impeached by the U.S. House, but not convicted after trials in the U.S. Senate. Richard Nixon resigned before the U.S. House could vote on articles of impeachment, which would have been adopted. Whether he would have been given the heave-ho following a trial in the U.S. Senate never will be known. Donald Trump may be impeached, but at this point he’s less likely to be convicted by the U.S. Senate than Hell’s freezing over during global warming.

But four Presidents have been removed from office through assassination, the outcome Franklin was trying to avoid.

• Abraham Lincoln, shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate spy and conspirator, at Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, 14 April 1865. Lincoln died the next day.
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• James Garfield, shot by Charles J. Guiteau, an attorney and disgruntled office seekers, on 2 July 1881. Garfield died 11 weeks later.
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• William McKinley, shot by Leon Czolgosz, a steelworker and anarchist, on 6 September 1901. McKinley died 12 days later.
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• John F. Kennedy, shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin with a red flag past, on 22 November 1963. Kennedy died less than an hour later.

Moreover, there have been at least 16 attempts to assassinate a sitting President. None succeeded, and only one President was injured: Ronald Reagan, who was shot and nearly killed on 30 March 1981 by John Hinckley, Jr., a nut case trying to impress actress Jody Foster. Hinckley was released from institutional psychiatric treatment in 2016.

Lincoln’s assassination was political, an act of revenge by diehard southern traitors who lost the Civil War, and in their fury and impotence, also lost their minds and last vestiges of common sense and human decency. It was the initial act of a campaign of resistance by white supremacists that continues to this day.

The assassinations of Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, were personal (conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination abound, all unproved), the acts of men deranged by hatred and a sense of grievance.

The Constitution’s impeachment clauses serve to deter a President from going rogue only if he believes they constitute a credible means of removing him from office before his term expires. Because removing a President through impeachment and conviction has proven so difficult as to be politically impossible, the Constitution’s impeachment clauses no longer have a credible deterrent effect. A President now knows — Donald Trump knows — that unless he suffers a stroke and sinks into a flatline coma, only ballots (at the end of his first term) and bullets can remove him from office no matter how badly he behaves, no matter how much he injures the nation. As a practical matter, all that keeps a President from governing like an unaccountable monarch is his own good character and judgement.

This puts the nation in grave peril. And it increases the probability that someone, or a group of conspirators, will seek to remove Trump from office through assassination, especially if he is impeached, not convicted by the U.S. Senate, and re-elected with a minority of the popular vote, which is what I think will happen.