Learning What Is Enough

On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.

I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.

I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.

Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.

I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.

That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.

The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.

Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:

“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”

Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.

Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.

In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.

—rj


Why Wendell Berry Still Matters

I’ve been absent from Brimmings for nearly a week, recovering from a serious bout with the flu—the fever lingering for ten days. A chronic cough remains my daily companion.

That hasn’t stopped me from reading—slowly, attentively—six books already this year.

As I’ve previously shared, alongside my annual eclectic reading list, I’ve committed to a topical approach to reading as a way of resisting intellectual grazing and cultivating sustained attention (Topical Reading). I’ve begun with Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, now in his ninety-second year.

I didn’t want to one day come upon his obituary and feel the guilt pangs of having neglected an agrarian pacifist, a champion of the local, often described, without much exaggeration, as America’s “moral conscience.”

Berry has farmed a 125-acre hilly tract adjacent to the Ohio River at Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky, for more than forty years. Farming, for him, is not metaphor but moral practice. As he writes, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.”

Academically, Berry is no lightweight: a BA and MA in English from the University of Kentucky, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a Guggenheim that took him to Italy, he taught briefly at New York University before returning—against the counsel of colleagues who believed he was jettisoning a promising academic career—to rural Kentucky and the family farm.

They were wrong.

Berry has since written more than fifty books spanning essays, novels, and poetry. His great theme is stewardship—not management or control, but reverent care. “The idea that people have a right to an economy that destroys nature is a contradiction,” he writes, insisting that economic life must answer to ecological reality.

For the farmer Berry, stewardship begins with the soil: an antipathy to chemicals, a reverencing of the biosphere, and a life lived according to natural rhythms. He is deeply opposed to industrial agriculture, which he regards as a cultural as well as ecological calamity: “Industrial agriculture is not just bad for farmers; it is bad for land, for rural communities, and ultimately for culture.”

Among American environmental writings, the two most salient works I’ve encountered are Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Thoreau’s aphoristic brilliance lends itself to endless quotation: “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify,” while Carson’s prose approaches poetry. Her opening paragraphs of Silent Spring remain, to my mind, the finest in environmental literature, exposing the arrogance behind what she called “the control of nature, a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.”

I’m only in the early stages of getting acquainted with Berry, but he keeps distinguished company with Thoreau and Carson in his passion for preserving nature’s bounty and the pulchritude of a simplified life lived in fidelity to place and community.

In this sense, Berry reaches back to Thomas Jefferson, whom he quotes more than any other figure: “In my own politics and economics I am Jeffersonian.” Jefferson believed liberty was best secured in small, decentralized communities of independent producers, warning that distant power—whether governmental or economic—inevitably corrodes responsibility and freedom.

Though Berry was an activist who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and has voted Democratic, his politics resist easy classification. He has lamented that America’s two major parties have grown increasingly to resemble one another.

There may appear, at first glance, to be overlap with libertarianism—his opposition to big government, military expansion, and imperial intervention—but the resemblance is superficial. Libertarianism exalts the autonomous individual; Berry emphasizes communal obligation. “We do not have to sacrifice our economic well-being in order to act responsibly toward our land and our neighbors,” he writes. “Rather, we must do so in order to preserve our economic well-being.”

Berry has his critics. His suspicion of technology strikes some as untenable in a hungry, overpopulated world. Can an aggregate of small family farms feed a wired and burgeoning global population, particularly in parts of Africa?

I find myself grappling with his apparent parochialism. Only a tiny fraction of Americans now farm. What of the rest of us who earn our livelihoods elsewhere? And in an interconnected age, can the local truly stand apart from the global?

Berry would respond that the issue is not technology itself, but dependence. “There is a difference between being technologically advanced and being technologically dependent,” he reminds us—a distinction too often elided in contemporary debates.

Ironically, Berry would fit comfortably in an Amish community. He still plows with horses. He owns no computer, television, or mobile phone, and has no internet access. He writes first in pencil, then types. He uses electricity sparingly, supplemented by solar panels, and his writing studio is without electricity. He walks the talk, living a life rooted—quite literally—in the land. Thoreau would have approved.

An iconoclast, Berry remains well worth reading. Growth, he reminds us, is not synonymous with the earth’s welfare. Economies, like soils, can be exhausted. Big government and industrial systems, he argues, erode local responsibility, foster dependency, and inflame military and international tensions. Rural poverty in places like Appalachia persists, in his view, because urban prosperity has been purchased by the plundering of these regions.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal.

In 2015, he became the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

That same year, the Library of America published a boxed set of his work—an honor accorded to only two living American writers at the time.

Berry may be impractical. He may be impossible to scale. But he leaves us with an uncomfortable and necessary reminder: care, once abandoned, is not easily restored—and neither are the land, the culture, nor the communities that depend upon it.

—rj

The Discipline of Kindness

Anger has become one of the easiest responses to modern life.

What troubles me most is not anger itself, but how easily my emotions can be manipulated—by discourtesy, by noise, by global politics, by the ambient insensitivity of others. That reactive state isn’t who I really am, yet it’s one I’m repeatedly invited into.

I want to be kind, not reactionary; deliberate, not pushed into negativity. I want to remain self-governing. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”

Years ago, I came upon a short piece in Reader’s Digest titled “Do I Act or React?” I read it at exactly the right moment. Why should a discourteous store employee spoil my day? Or a waiter serving me something I never ordered? Or a driver that cuts me off?

These moments are trivial in isolation, yet corrosive in accumulation. As the Stoic writer Ryan Holiday reminds us, “Jerks abound everywhere. That’s their business, not yours.”

My wife once shared an encounter she had with a rude bank teller. Instead of meeting rudeness with rudeness, she simply said, “I hope your day gets better.” It was disarming—not passive, not superior, just humane. Too often, we carry our moods like open containers, spilling them onto others without noticing.

The distinguished novelist and essayist George Saunders suggests that literature can help us cultivate tolerance—not all at once, but incrementally, and therefore cumulatively. A practicing Buddhist, Saunders believes that reading fiction trains us in three essential truths:

You’re not permanent.
You’re not the most important thing.
You’re not separate.

Literature slows judgment. It places us inside other consciousnesses. It rehearses moral humility. In doing so, it loosens the grip of the ego—the very thing that insists on being offended.

Kindness, after all, isn’t mere niceness, which can look away from cruelty. Kindness sees clearly. It chooses understanding over reflex, restraint over retaliation.

So many of our perceived hurts come down to our desire to control others: their tone, their behavior, their awareness of us. When that control fails—as it inevitably does—we suffer. The antidote is not indifference, but proportion. We need to take ourselves less seriously.

Saunders doesn’t offer a list of recommended books, though he has often spoken admiringly of Grace Paley.

I return often to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a slender volume that rewards endless rereading.

One line, in particular, feels endlessly applicable:

“Is a world without shameless people possible? No. So this person you’ve just met is one of them. Get over it.”

Not resignation—clarity. Not bitterness—freedom.

The Moral Arithmetic of American Capitalism

Did you know that the average CEO compensation at large U.S. public companies now stands at roughly 280 times the pay of a frontline worker?

That represents a staggering shift from the 1960s, when CEOs earned 20 to 30 times what their workers made. Since the 1970s, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased by over 1,000 percent.

This divergence did not occur by accident. One pivotal change came in the late 1970s, when American corporations moved away from a model centered on growth, stability, and shared prosperity toward one focused on maximizing shareholder value. Executive pay was increasingly tied to stock price rather than the long-term health of the firm.

With the rise of stock options and equity grants, CEOs could reap enormous rewards without raising wages, expanding productivity, or strengthening the workforce. Compensation ballooned even when companies stagnated.

Tax policy amplified the effect. In the 1950s and 1960s, top marginal income tax rates exceeded 70 to 90 percent, effectively discouraging runaway executive pay. That restraint largely disappeared in the 1980s, as marginal tax rates fell sharply, making extreme compensation both legal and cheap.

At the same time, labor power collapsed. Union membership declined, offshoring and automation accelerated, and job security eroded. Productivity rose; worker wages did not. Executive compensation absorbed the gains.

Business leaders defend this system by claiming that outsized pay is necessary to attract top talent. In practice, this has produced a self-perpetuating escalation, as boards benchmark CEO pay against ever-rising peer averages. In a globalized economy, profits flow upward, not outward.

Yet America’s extreme CEO-worker wage gap is not an inevitable feature of advanced capitalism.

Consider international comparisons:

Typical CEO-to-worker pay ratios (large firms):

  • United States: ~250–350:1
  • Western Europe: ~40–90:1
  • Japan: ~15–40:1

In much of Europe, workers sit on corporate boards, restraining excess. In Japan, adopting the American compensation model would be seen as collective irresponsibility, not enlightened management.

Public anger is justified—especially amid persistent inflation and decades of wage stagnation. Can the old restraints return?

There are tentative steps. The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders among others, would raise corporate tax rates on companies whose CEO pay exceeds worker pay by extreme margins, beginning at 50-to-1. But meaningful reform would require broad coalitions and a substantial shift in Congress. Change, if it comes, will be slow—and uncertain.

Transparency may be the public’s strongest immediate tool.

What has happened in America is not merely an economic evolution; it is a moral shift. Accumulation has replaced public responsibility as the dominant ethic, not only in corporate life but across society. Its most vivid emblem is the twice-elected billionaire president, Donald Trump, whose politics celebrate wealth while dismantling social safeguards.

Since 1990, the number of U.S. billionaires has grown from 66 to more than 800, while the median hourly wage has increased by only about 20 percent.

This is not efficiency.

It is not merit.

It is not inevitability.

It is obscene.

—rj

The Shouting Silence

D.G. Chapman, Upsplash

Silence has always allured me, most often when it is bound to expanses empty of people—though not always. I can find it just as readily in a library, or even in my own home when left to myself.

It is not, I believe, a resistance to an oppressive environment—work, academics, trauma, peer pressure, or the quotidian churn of human caprice—what psychiatry terms “psychological reactance.” It goes deeper than that, perhaps rooted in my introversion, which inclines me away from crowds and constant social encounter.

I carry memories of three landscapes that produced instant rapture: a sense of detachment, of absence from time itself—something larger than me, and yet intimately felt.

The first occurred when I was a graduate student in North Carolina, visiting the hillside at Kitty Hawk where the Wright brothers first achieved sustained flight in their ungainly aerial contraption. I had gone with friends, who wandered along the beachfront below, leaving me alone atop the hill. There, history seemed to recede. The wind moved through the grass, the sky stretched open and unmarked, and for a moment the present dissolved, as though time itself had paused in reverence.

Then there was Arlington National Cemetery, its vast rows of symmetrical white grave markers extending beyond easy comprehension. The stillness there was not empty but weighted, a silence shaped by collective sacrifice. For a brief moment, the eternal peace of America’s fallen became my own.

Most memorable of all were Scotland’s Highlands. Driving eastward from Edinburgh, they rose suddenly and unexpectedly across the horizon—rugged, green, and seemingly untouched by human intrusion. I pulled over, stepped out, tested the firmness of their verdure beneath my feet, and listened to what I can only call their shouting silence. That moment remains my most cherished travel memory.

As an English major in college, I once took a course devoted entirely to Wordsworth—England’s great poet of landscape. I am, perhaps, a rarity in having read all of his several hundred poems. Among them, “Tintern Abbey” most fully captures my response to those landscapes:

“…that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul…”

Literary scholars describe this response under the notion of the sublime: the experience of being overwhelmed through intimacy with nature, a flash of clarity in which one intuits a larger coherence behind nature’s mystery. Wordsworth gives it further voice:

“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man….”

Psychology approaches the experience from another angle. One theory frames it as a sensory reset—the mind’s need to unburden itself from obligation and affliction, a release from the cognitive overload of daily life.

I am especially drawn to E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis, which proposes that humans evolved in constant contact with nature, calibrating the nervous system through millennia of hunter-gatherer life. In that context, a deserted landscape could signal safety—the absence of predators, permission to rest.

Another perspective, the Default Mode Network, suggests that quiet environments can trigger awe by suspending habitual rumination. Freed from constant external demands, the mind drifts toward reflection, memory, and imaginative connection. In such moments, the brain is allowed to hear the rhythms it evolved to monitor.

This makes intuitive sense. We live in a world saturated with anthropophonic noise—human-made sound without pause or mercy. Though nature is never truly silent—wind, water, and the subtle movements of life persist—these sounds soothe rather than assault. They restore rather than demand.

Wordsworth seems to anticipate this longing even in the heart of the city. In “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” he finds London redeemed by a rare moment of stillness:

“Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

Perhaps silence, then, is not an absence but a presence—one that returns us to ourselves, quiets the mind’s noise, and restores a way of listening we once possessed, and have not entirely forgotten.

Fifty Morning Pages: Showing-up to Read

The other day I posted on my Brimmings blog a new method I’ve devised to inspire myself to read more—specifically, to aim for 80 books a year, assuming an average length of 300 pages. That works out to 24,000 pages annually, divided by 365 days.

I didn’t linger long over the arithmetic. What mattered was putting the idea immediately into practice. I set a daily goal of 50 pages, read first thing in the morning. For me, any attempt at habit formation has to be anchored in time. Once the day’s interruptions begin, resolve alone is no match for contingency.

Experience has taught me that it takes roughly four to six weeks of daily repetition for a habit to take hold. Once anchored, the reluctance to break a streak becomes a force in its own right. Acquiring a new habit, I’ve found, is less about willpower than about showing up.

The results have been gratifying. In the past two weeks I’ve finished two books, one of them nearly 600 pages. Fifty pages a day takes me about an hour. I could read faster, but speed isn’t my aim. I underline, annotate, argue with the text. I’m not a passive reader; I want to engage—agree, disagree, extend.

At this pace, I’ll read roughly 18,250 pages a year. Divided by 300 pages per book, that comes to just under 62 books annually. Not 80—but what a start. If I can raise my yearly total from my long-standing average of 20–25 books, I’ll consider the experiment a success.

Quantity, of course, is not an end in itself. The real aim is access to the best fiction and nonfiction available, the works that challenge and enlarge the mind. Increasingly, I’ve been drawn to cluster reading, concentrating on subjects where I feel thin or want deeper understanding.

What excites me most is the daily result: fifty pages read before the day properly begins. The reward is immediate, and reward, as we know, is integral to habit formation. Each book brings with it a flood of ideas—fuel for writing, and an invitation into community with others who share similar intellectual and aesthetic appetites.

—rj

Convergence: Seeing Others as Ourselves

I’ve been keeping a list for some time of my favorite blogs. There are so many to choose from that discovering one capable of sparking genuine enthusiasm often feels like chance—like gazing nightly at the starry heavens and marveling at what lies beyond human reach. When such a blog does appear, it draws me back again and again, not out of habit but wonder.

Relying on that list, I came upon a short paragraph-poem this morning by Dr. Drew Lanham, the award-winning African American professor of environmental studies at Clemson University. Lanham confesses to being “a man in love with nature—a wanderer finding foundation in wild places.” What follows is both intimate and expansive:

Handle my life in your hands as if it were your own. Feel the heart beating—small as it may be—and imagine it in your own chest. Beating in syncopated time to become shared meter. That pulse, the breathing, is your rhythm. Your in’s and out’s, its in’s and out’s. Look close under
whatever warty skin or soft fur or gaudy feathers and see self. Its being is your being. Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow. Then, when the convergence between you is sealed, release that wild soul to free roaming as you would desire of your own.

What strikes me is the poem’s quiet tone: a persona grounded in kinship with the natural world, alive with empathy for the vulnerable. Applied beyond nature—to our fellow humans—it gestures toward something transcendent: a way of bridging difference, whether of creed, ethnicity, or race.

Such bridging begins only when we recognize our linkage, when we are willing, even briefly, to see ourselves in others—“Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow.”

Lanham wrote this poem after rescuing a frog from his cat’s pursuit.

Read Eighty Books a Year: A Reader’s Arithmetic:

Stephen King reads sixty or more books a year. I’m lucky if I reach twenty—and the disparity bothers me more than I care to admit. Not because I value quantity over quality, but because there are simply too many books I want to live with, too many voices I want time to answer back to.

Time flows from us like a running faucet. Time is our common currency granted daily. How do we spend it? It comes down to our priorities.

King has been candid about how he does it. He treats reading as a necessity, not a luxury, reading every day for two or three hours, sometimes more. As he puts it in On Writing: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

That rings true for me. When I write, it’s almost always in response to what I’ve read—to extend an argument, disagree with it, enthuse about it, or share it with others.

King refuses to slog through books that fail to engage him. He abandons them without guilt. Interest propels reading; boredom kills it. And he always has a book with him—reading while waiting, traveling, between tasks, or before bed. Those fragments accumulate.

The numbers themselves are demystifying. Suppose your goal is eighty books a year with an average length of 300 pages. That’s 24,000 pages annually. Divide by 365, and you arrive at roughly 66 pages a day. At a moderate pace of about 40 pages per hour, that comes to around an hour and forty minutes of daily reading.

That’s doable.

My final tip is one that has helped me most: read in clusters. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and commit to five or six books in that area.

Reading a single book from a wildly eclectic list can feel shallow; focused reading builds momentum, deepens understanding, and increases motivation.

This year, for example, I’ve chosen to immerse myself in Kentucky sage Wendell Berry—two biographies and three of Berry’s own books. Depth, it turns out, can be the best catalyst for volume.

—rj

Small Changes, Big Results: Lessons from Atomic Habits

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the celebrated bestseller that has sold over 25 million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages.

I rarely read self-improvement books—not because I’ve arrived at perfection (far from it), but because I gravitate toward literary and intellectual works, and leisure time is finite. Still, Atomic Habits begins with such clarity and momentum that I can already tell it will be a quick read for me—simply because I can’t put it down.

The title itself hints at the premise: small, almost imperceptible changes that compound over time. Baby steps, if you will, that quietly evolve into daily discipline and, eventually, a better self. I’ve long believed that we can’t really make friends with the outer world until we make friends with ourselves, and Clear’s approach aligns with that idea.

Go to bed a little earlier, away from blue screens. Make your bed when you rise. Keep your bathroom tidy. Simple acts, but ones that generate momentum and a sense of self-respect. Want to read more? Start with a single page. Avoiding exercise? Take a five-minute walk. Clear gives modern life to an ancient axiom: “The longest journey begins with a single step.”

This is one of those books I’m reading with a journal nearby, interacting with the text—even if only a paragraph at a time. That, too, is a habit I know would enrich my life, but one I’ve too often postponed.

The irony is that when we fail to act on habits we know would improve our lives, the result isn’t neutrality—it’s to sour on ourselves.

Being up in years, my gray matter has shifted. Memory doesn’t cooperate the way it once did. There was a time I could glance at a list of twenty French or German words and walk away minutes later with them securely lodged in mind. No longer.

That frustration nearly convinced me to abandon my desire to read in Italian. But Atomic Habits reframed the problem: it isn’t the goal that matters so much as the process—where I am today versus where I was yesterday. Incremental steps still count. And so I persist with Italian, imperfectly, patiently.

It’s time for breakfast now—but not before I make my bed.

—rj

When Elections Are Not Enough: Removing Trump From Office

It is now 2026, with the midterm elections approaching in November. My New Year’s wish is straightforward: the impeachment of Donald Trump—assuming Democrats regain a decisive House majority—followed by a Senate trial resulting in his removal from office.

The Framers of the Constitution were not naïve about power. They were steeped in history’s lessons about its corrupting tendencies and had lived, in their own time, under the despotism of a foreign monarch. Their revolution was not merely against a man, but against unchecked executive authority.

Accordingly, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 chose to create a president, not a king. Crucially, they did not rely solely on periodic elections as a safeguard. Recognizing that elections alone might prove insufficient in moments of grave danger, they embedded in the Constitution a remedy for removing a corrupt or dangerous chief executive.

Those impeachment provisions are found in Articles I and II. Article I grants the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment by majority vote and assigns the Senate the sole power to try impeachments, requiring a two-thirds vote of members present for conviction. Article II, Section 4 defines the standard:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Impeachment, it bears emphasis, is an accusation; removal requires conviction.

Presidential impeachment trials are exceedingly rare. In more than two centuries of constitutional government, only four have occurred:

Andrew Johnson (1868)
Bill Clinton (1999)
Donald Trump (2019 and 2021)

All four trials ended in acquittal. Richard Nixon almost certainly would have been removed, but he resigned before the House could vote on impeachment—the first presidential resignation in American history.

The rarity of impeachment trials reflects not restraint alone, but the gravity of the remedy. As Alexander Hamilton explained, impeachable offenses are those that violate the public trust—abuses of power that strike at the constitutional order itself.

Measured against that standard, there should be little ambiguity regarding Donald Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” They include conduct that betrays the nation’s best interests and undermines the rule of law: defiance of judicial orders; the use of the Department of Justice to shield allies and punish perceived enemies; and the deployment of violent rhetoric that incites threats against judges and congressional critics, including calls for the execution of former public servants from the military and intelligence communities.

To these may be added the consistent placation of authoritarian foreign leaders and the initiation of military actions—such as attacks on Venezuela and vessels at sea—without clear congressional authorization.

Conviction in the Senate requires 67 votes. Given political realities, Republicans alone are unlikely to supply them. That leaves responsibility where it has always rested in a constitutional democracy: with the electorate.

If the Constitution is to function as intended—if law is to prevail over personal power—then it falls to citizens to vote in numbers sufficient to make accountability possible. The midterms present such a moment.

Whether the nation seizes it will determine not merely the fate of one presidency, but the durability of the constitutional order itself.

–RJ