Over the weekend, in a rage over impeachment, President Donald Trump accused Rep. Adam Schiff of “treason,” promised “Big Consequences” for the whistleblower who sounded the alarm about his phone call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine and shared a warning — from a Baptist pastor in Dallas — that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
We’re already on to the next news cycle, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what happened with those tweets. The president was using the power and influence of his office to intimidate a witness and threaten a member of Congress with prosecution (of a crime still punishable by death), before raising the specter of large-scale political violence should lawmakers hold him responsible for his actions.