Truth was fungible. It could always be fixed through a touch of Photoshop, or a pliant attorney general. It was never about implacable facts that might hunt you down.

Accordingly, Trump chose to play Chicago politics with Ukraine, as if a sovereign nation at war on its eastern border with Vladimir Putin’s Russia was there mainly to be squeezed for his re-election campaign. He has trashed the press, judges, the Federal Reserve, members of Congress — anyone or anything that stood up to him. He has set up operations at the White House as a shambolic exercise in terror. His cabinet fawns, as Saddam Hussein’s once did, scrambling to find loftier expressions of adulation that might delay execution.

Just ask the White House operatives who wanted the American warship John S. McCain moved “out of sight” during Trump’s trip to Japan this year, or the National Weather Service hounded for dismissing Trump’s weird obsession that a nonexistent hurricane threat to Alabama existed. Never before in history have meteorologist come so close to being a bellwether of creeping autocracy.

I don’t know if the impeachment inquiry serves what must be the fundamental goal of Democrats: to remove Donald Trump from office as soon as possible. It will increase the political volume; Trump thrives on volume. It will further polarize the United States; Trump thrives on division, not unity. It has little chance of leading to his removal because, even if the House charges Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to vote to convict him. It may make life more difficult for swing-state Democratic representatives.

All of this worries me, but in the end I don’t care. The balance has been tipped. Nobody can accuse Pelosi of rashness. She has been deliberate. She said, “No one is above the law.” That principle must be cardinal.

Trump’s assault on truth, the press, institutions, civility, and the law has been relentless. His unfitness for office has been so glaring as to be breathtaking. As Stephen Burbank, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote , “There comes a time when strategic political calculations must yield to principle if pragmatism is not to entail complicity.” He continued, “The impeachment process is integral to the architecture our founders created for the preservation of democracy.” For Congress to ignore what Trump has done would be to set a dangerous example for future generations.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we have witnessed two men making audacious claims to power and suffering resounding rebukes from two separate but equal branches of government that made clear the executive is not above the law — in Britain from its highest court applying an unwritten constitution, in the United States from Congress exercising its constitutional prerogatives. An important lesson is this: It takes independent institutions to make the law meaningful and hold the executive to account. That is why dictatorships, or illiberal systems like Hungary’s, seek to suppress them.

Johnson is now in a very tight corner. His acts have been found to be unlawful; he should resign. He won’t. But if the gods of retribution have really awoken, he will be gone soon and Britain will yet avoid the national disaster, advanced by his lies, of exit from the European Union.

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