Getty Politics The Laws of Gravity Catch Up to Trump With Flynn's resignation, an administration set on blowing through every limit on White House power hits an early wall.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Breaking news: The laws of political gravity may still apply.

That may be the most significant revelation from the vertiginous descent of national security adviser Michael Flynn. After a year-and-a-half in which Donald Trump overturned just about every assumption about American politics—when a candidate lacking in every traditional attribute of past presidents won; when a string of blatant falsehoods, breathtaking conflicts of interest, a dozen once-disqualifying revelations proved irrelevant—it appears he must now reckon with the power of the same countervailing forces that constrained the first 44 presidents.


After his half-baked travel ban suffered a clear defeat at the hands of the federal judiciary, his national security adviser has departed, courtesy of a bureaucracy that seemed determined to put the White House in a clearly untenable position. A month before taking office, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions policy — in an apparent illegal conversation that Vice-President Mike Pence told a national TV audience didn’t happen. This week, just 24 days into his official tenure as Trump’s national security chief, Flynn was forced to resign after a series of leaks methodically stripped away every assertion the administration was using to protect Flynn’s position, much as a chess player deprives an opponent of every move except resignation.

“Flynn didn’t talk about sanctions with the Russian ambassador.”

“Yes he did.”

“It was only in passing.”

“No, it was at the heart of the conversation.”

“The White House didn’t know.”

“Yes it did, and it was explicitly told there was a potential for blackmail.”

In one sense, this is a story unique unto the Trump administration. If there’s another example of an aide finagling a vice president into offering false statements on national television, I can’t recall any.

But in a broader sense, it’s another reminder that presidents are not emperors, and don’t rule by decree. The Trump administration has tried mightily, railing against the media for holding it accountable, and against the judicial branch for getting in its way. The dispersion of power within the federal government all but ensures that there are limits even to the considerable reach of presidential power; and that’s especially true when a chief executive seems to overreach.

FDR was at the height of his popularity, coming off a 46-state reelection sweep, when he tried to pack the Supreme Court with extra judges. His own party in Congress killed that plan. Richard Nixon was only months removed from a 49-state landslide win when a conservative federal judge and the president’s own White House counsel stripped away the screens of a criminal conspiracy that brought the president down.

When President George W. Bush sought to breach constitutional limits after the Sept. 11 attacks, his own attorney general and the Supreme Court told him “no."

And in the present case, career officials inside the FBI and the Justice Department not only made it impossible for the White House to offer “alternative facts,” but ensured that a question of singular importance remains very much alive, even after the resignation: How could the White House keep Michael Flynn on when it had been told weeks earlier of what he had done, and the danger that his conduct posed? (Watching Kellyanne Conway trying to square that circle this morning was like watching one of those animatronic robots at Disney World talk when the circuits have fried.)

But if the bureaucracy has acted in accord with the laws of political gravity, a second question remains, one that may come to determine the fate of the Trump presidency. And that is whether the congressional wing of the Republican Party will begin to exert its role.

After resisting Donald Trump in an unprecedented manner—at one point, more than 1 in 4 GOP senators had refused to endorse him—the Republicans in Congress now appear willing to see Trump “instrumentally,” which means, so far, ignoring his misdeeds. They’ve essentially agreed to live with his peculiarities, and even his shakiness on some of their core principles, because he offers them a vehicle to achieve decades worth of aspiration: a conservative Court, lower taxes, regulatory relief, weakening of organized labor, and possibly even dismantling the social safety net as we’ve known it since the 1960s.

Now, they are facing facts that strike at the very heart of one of the core arguments of the GOP: that the Republicans are stronger on national security than the Democrats. At first blush, there seems to be little appetite for a serious congressional probe into what happened. Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which had investigated just about every Obama administration issue, save the White House mess menu, says Flynn’s resignation took care of any problem and, anyway, it’s the business of the Intelligence Committee. That committee chair, Devin Nunes, says the real issue isn’t Flynn, or what the White House knew: It’s who’s leaking the information.

Will this end the story? Not if the laws of political gravity keep tugging. Senators serve longer than presidents, and they take their roles in national security very seriously. It’s hard to believe that the Republicans who chair key Senate committees can look at the facts behind the Flynn resignation and say, in effect, “nothing to see here.” (And while they’re at it, they may have a few questions about an emergency gathering of top national security aides in the middle of a golf-club dining room in Florida.) A crack already has appeared on the Intelligence Committee: Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican committee member, said this morning that the Russia-Trump connection should be investigated “exhaustively.”

Much of Trump’s appeal—and much of the reason he was exempt from the normal rules of the game—was that he promised to disrupt, to break the china, to be unbound by the niceties of the bureaucrats elites, the business as usual way of political life.

But it turns out that those despised entities may still have the power to keep a disruptive force within bounds, even when that force occupies the Oval Office. What happens over the next few weeks and months will tell us much about just how true that is.