(April 23, 2019) — The question on everyone’s mind is whether Trump will be impeached. In other words, will America fire Trump?

Well, I have news for you. America has already fired him.

When the public fires a president before election day—as it did with Richard Nixonand Herbert Hoover—they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired. They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone, but he might as well be.

It’s happened to Trump. House Democrats are moving against him. Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. The courts are pushing back. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown. 

The Federal Reserve is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing the day-to-day work of the agencies. States are taking up the slack: California, for example, is now running environmental policy. 

Departments and agencies are being run by lobbyists and insiders busily carving out loopholes, cutting taxes, and slashing regulations on behalf of the wealthy and big corporations. 

Isolated in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies, distant from his Cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.

His tweets don’t create headlines as before. His rallies are ignored. His lies have become old hat.

Even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong Unand Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American public, and then do whatever they want. 

Action and excitement have shifted elsewhere – to Democratic challengers, even to a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman too young to run for president.

Energy is now coming from the grassroots – from people all over the country who are determined to reclaim our democracy and create an economy that works for all.

According to polls, most Americans want Medicare-for-All and higher taxes on the wealthy. And they don’t want a wall along the southern border. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. Trump is still dangerous, like an old land mine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war. And his court picks are a terrifying legacy. 

But in an important sense, he’s already gone. 

Mr. President: In the words you yourself have often used, “You’re fired.”

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock”, “The Work of Nations,” and “Beyond Outrage,” and, his most recent, “The Common Good,” which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, “Inequality For All.” He’s co-creator of the Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism,” which is streaming now. 

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