John G. Stewart

Guest columnist

While campaigning in Iowa in January 2016, Donald Trump boasted that he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters." This generated a lively response from the audience, so Trump began making this boast frequently.

Since then, the Trump base has never faltered, no matter the lies he tells or outrageous behavior he exhibits. Consequently, the conventional wisdom that Trump could never be impeached or indicted has taken root. The Senate would never cast a two-thirds vote in support of conviction if the House voted articles of impeachment. Or so say most pundits who monitor such matters.

I wonder how many of these pundits have taken the time to read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” a best-seller that bears directly on what 2019 may have in store for Trump and all the rest of us. If you haven’t read “the Tipping Point,” you should, but in the meantime, here are several key insights discovered by Gladwell that bear on the supposed imperviousness of Trump’s support.

Beliefs can be contagious in the sense that what often starts as an isolated case has the power to multiply rapidly, expanding outward in geometric fashion just like the flu virus. Think of the rapid adoption of cellphones or the belief that smoking kills and should be restricted in public spaces. A critical spin-off of this phenomenon is the reality that big changes can follow from an accumulation of small events — once they become contagious — once the tipping point is reached. Think of the tipping point, Gladwell suggests, as a critical mass, the threshold or the boiling point.

This is precisely the chain of events that drove an American president from office not that long ago. I was still working in Washington when it happened. Indeed, the Watergate burglars broke into my office at the Democratic National Committee where I was working as communications director. The break-in happened in mid-June 1972.

In the subsequent months, evidence began to accumulate that Richard Nixon's re-election committee and the White House were somehow involved. But this didn’t keep Nixon in November 1972 from winning re-election as president in a true landslide. Months and years passed. The Senate’s Watergate Select Committee began its work. And even though high-ranking White House staff members were fired, along with the Watergate special prosecutor and the attorney general, Nixon loyalists in Congress stood firm.

Donald Trump, Richard Nixon and Watergate: What's the same and what's different?

Impeachment of the president, widely discussed, was seen as an impossibility. Even if the House of Representatives voted articles of impeachment, there weren’t two-thirds of the senators willing to convict.

And then the U.S. Supreme Court, on July 25, 1974, ruled that Nixon had to turn over to the Watergate Select Committee the tapes of his Oval Office conversations that he had withheld claiming executive privilege. In the days immediately following this decision, the House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment. Then Nixon released the so-called “smoking-gun tape’’ that made clear his direct complicity in the cover-up of illegal Watergate-related activities.

A delegation of senior Republican senators, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, immediately traveled to the White House to inform Nixon that his once solid support had evaporated. He was given the choice to resign as president or face certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate.

These dramatic events — from Supreme Court decision to resignation — consumed all of 11 days. The belief in Nixon’s criminality — once established — became contagious and spread rapidly. The accumulated illegal actions of the prior two years suddenly coalesced. The tipping point had been reached. Nixon was gone by Aug. 4.

There is growing evidence that we are headed down a similar path with Trump. We don’t yet know the precise event or disclosure that will take him to the tipping point. But given the extent of his troubles and the number of investigations underway, it seems highly probable that it’s only a matter of time.

As Nixon’s fate so clearly demonstrated, once this critical mass is reached, the impregnable edifice of Trumpism can crumble almost overnight.

John G. Stewart is a former executive with TVA.