How to Survive Impeachment
Updated at 12:40 p.m. ET on October 2, 2019
Twenty years after Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the senior aides who helped him weather the ordeal retain indelible memories of how it felt to work day by day for months on end in a White House under siege. In phone calls in recent days, nearly all of them said the source of their survival was a rigid compartmentalization of the scandal from the normal business of government, and relentless staff discipline—attributes that Donald Trump’s White House has conspicuously lacked in the best of times.
“We had a simple rule of thumb in terms of the external-facing appearance,” Doug Sosnik, who was then Clinton’s senior adviser, told me. “We could never get caught—whether the president or the staff—looking like we were even partially disabled because of the investigations. We knew that if at some point it became apparent to the public that they weren’t getting a full president and a full presidency because of these self-inflicted problems, we thought that could threaten his ability to stay in
