On a sunny afternoon in mid-June, several hundred students and lecturers from the Lebanese University, in Beirut, gathered in a square outside the Prime Minister’s office. Some stood on top of a pickup truck loaded with loudspeakers, leading chants against proposed government budget cuts to the university. “We want to continue our year and we worry about having our lessons,” a biochemistry student named Claudia Khalil told me. Professors at the university had been on strike for weeks demanding an increase in pay. In May, retired members of the military burned tires and demonstrated in the same square against proposed cuts to their pensions and benefits. “Thieves, thieves!” they shouted at the old Ottoman building.

Lebanon’s profound economic dysfunction is coming to a head this summer, as its political leaders try to impose austerity measures on a restive public, while failing to enact anti-corruption measures that France, the World Bank, and the country’s other primary foreign donors insist on to reform a political system renowned for its graft and dysfunction. Lebanon ranks a hundred and thirty-eighth out of a hundred and eighty nations in the 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, released by the global anti-corruption group Transparency International. Nearly thirty years after the country’s civil war ended, its people still endure rolling power blackouts owing to corruption and inefficiency in the country’s state-dominated power company.

In May, 2018, the country held its first parliamentary elections since 2009, raising public hopes of more effective governance. So far, the results have disappointed many Lebanese. It took nine months of political fighting and deadlock before a government could be formed, in January, with Saad Hariri as Prime Minister. The Sunni leader, however, was left weakened, losing a third of his party’s seats, while Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite political party and militant group, made major gains.

This week, the Lebanese parliament’s finance committee approved a draft budget that analysts dismissed as riddled with economic half-measures—some tax increases and spending cuts. The draft budget, which should have been approved six months ago, is expected to be voted on by the full parliament next week. The budget could spark further public protests as Lebanon’s four and a half million people struggle with a tepid economic growth rate of one per cent, rising cost of living, and barely functional public services. At the same time, more than a million Syrian refugees are living in the country, placing further strain on the economy.

According to the Beirut-based research consultancy firm Information International, eighty-five per cent of Lebanese citizens don’t trust their politicians. Tarek Serhan, a student activist, told me that the new tax increases will fuel further civil unrest against the country’s ruling élite. He predicted a summer of protests. “The normal people, let’s say, like, the students, the waiters, the bartenders, even the small businesses will be affected” by the taxes, he said.

Today Lebanon is the third-most indebted country in the world, with around forty per cent of its annual government revenue going toward servicing debt. At the same time, there are growing concerns that the Lebanese currency, the lira, is at risk of devaluation. In January, the ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Lebanon’s credit rating to junk status, on fears that the country could default on its debts.

Government officials told me that the passage of a budget was a reason for cautious optimism. They said it would give the country an opportunity to receive a better credit-rating assessment in August. “I think we want Lebanon and the government of Lebanon to send as positive [a] message as possible,” one senior official at the central bank, who did not wish to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said. “The budget and the budget deficit—will it witness a decrease?”

Last year, France hosted a meeting of international donors designed to bolster Lebanon’s economy in the wake of the war in Syria. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and several nations pledged eleven billion dollars in soft loans, money that the country desperately needs to avoid financial collapse in the future. Donors, however, have not released the money, because Lebanon’s government has not met their conditions—including reducing the country’s vast budget deficit of eleven per cent of G.D.P. to 7.5 per cent, and enacting major economic reforms.

The proposed 2019 budget now being considered by parliament includes some spending cuts, but it primarily consists of freezes and an increase in taxes to raise government revenue, such as increasing the taxes on interest earned on bank deposits, from seven per cent to ten per cent. Analysts say the government half-measures will only exacerbate the country’s economic problems. “This will deepen the problem,” Sami Nader, a financial and political analyst and the director of the Beirut-based Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, said. Nader said that Lebanon’s ruling élites appear to be betting that European powers do not want to see the country’s economy collapse because it could result in a new wave of Syrian migrants heading toward them. “They think that all the world will be on its knees begging us to take whatever we want but in exchange we will keep the refugees,” he said. “It’s not like that. No one is begging us.”

After the civil war, which was fought from 1975 to 1990, Lebanon’s political and religious factions agreed to a complex power-sharing agreement that divided government power along sectarian lines. Since then, political deadlock has regularly ensued, with the country’s parties and sects fighting for control of positions, policy, and lucrative government contracts. Lebanon’s political divisions have crippled the country’s economy, with graft and sectarianism working in tandem to fuel the current economic crisis. Nader, the analyst, told me that state institutions, rather than being viewed as providing important services to Lebanese citizens and the country, are divided up between powerful politicians as sources of income. “Here every single procurement contract is a way to finance political parties,” Nader said. “You have electricity that is under the control of one party, the waste management under the control of another party, the port authority under the control of a third party.”

The result of such vast corruption is that government-owned companies that should provide public services rarely do so effectively. Instead, they eat into the state budget and push the government deeper into debt. The state power company Electricité du Liban is among the worst offenders. Each year, it receives at least $1.5 billion in financial support from the government. Despite that vast expenditure, Lebanon has not regained twenty-four-hour electricity since its civil war ended. To avoid blackouts, residents pay high prices for power produced by a network of privately owned neighborhood generators. Above Beirut’s streets, a jerry-rigged, tangled mess of heavy black cables connects hundreds of thousands of apartments to generators.

In April, the parliament passed sweeping legislation designed to reform the power sector, including the building of new power plants and the provision of twenty-four-hour electricity by 2020. The measure was the type of reform demanded by the donors who gathered in Paris last year. In June, Lebanon’s constitutional court struck down a major part of the law after several members of parliament filed a lawsuit questioning the fairness of the issuing of contracts to build new power plants. The ruling stalled the power-sector-reform effort. Nader, the analyst, said that corrupt politicians were blocking reform across the economy. “Why would they privatize the electricity if they are getting their money from the electricity?” he asked. “Why would they open the sector of telecom to competition if they are financing their parties, if they are employing their people?”

Even trash disposal hasn’t escaped political payola. In 2015, Beirut’s landfill had well surpassed its capacity for garbage. Despite years of warnings, neither the government nor the state-contracted company, Sukleen, had developed an alternative site. At the same time, Sukleen’s garbage-collection contract ended. As politicians fought over who would get the next contract and how much it would be worth, piles of rotting garbage accumulated underneath bridges and in carparks. Residents of densely populated neighborhoods in Beirut burned their garbage, and tons of refuse was illegally dumped in rivers, valleys, and the Mediterranean Sea. The owners of Sukleen are close allies to Prime Minister Hariri’s family. Thousands of protesters staged angry demonstrations in Beirut, organized under the banner “You Stink,” to show their anger at politicians whom they blamed for creating the crisis. It was a rare moment of unity in a deeply divided society, showing that anger at the country’s ruling élites cut through its religious divisions.

Lebanese politicians and political parties operate vast patronage networks that provide government jobs to party loyalists. The result is a bloated civil service. There are an estimated four hundred thousand civil servants in Lebanon, so roughly a tenth of the population receives a government salary. The state-owned railway continues to fund an office of several dozen staffers, even though it hasn’t had a functioning railway in decades. Government salaries and pensions account for thirty-five per cent of the state’s total budget. Before the 2018 parliamentary elections, the public sector was promised a pay raise—a popular move among voters, but not a financially viable one. Now those same government workers are protesting over the potential cuts to their wages that donors say are needed to stabilize the economy.

Hariri has warned that “painful” austerity will be needed if Lebanon is to avoid “catastrophe.” But persuading the international donor community that real change is finally taking place will be difficult. Getting the population to shoulder the cost of decades of economic mismanagement will be an even harder sell, after decades of postwar corruption and graft. Serhan, the student activist, told me that Lebanon’s leaders are to blame, not its people. “They are the ruling authority and they have been ruling this country for tens of years,” he said. “They put us in this trouble, not us.”

When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon on Friday, the sight was at once familiar and strange—strange, in part, for seeming so familiar. The two men were meeting for the fortieth time, the fourteenth at a major. They had met only five weeks before, in the semifinals of the French Open. Nadal had run away with that one, but that was to be expected, given that the match was happening on clay. The win improved Nadal’s record against Federer to 24–15—though Federer had won their previous six matches. And now they were meeting at Wimbledon, where Federer has won eight titles to Nadal’s two. The last time they had faced each other there was in 2008, in what many consider the greatest match ever played. Federer was twenty-six then, and Nadal twenty-two; now they are thirty-seven and thirty-three, respectively. They were seeded two and three in this tournament, behind Novak Djokovic, rather than one and two, as they had been then. They have less hair than they used to. In 2008, the match had seemed to represent a passing of the torch or a changing of the guard—pick your favorite cliché. Except the torch wasn’t passed, and the guard didn’t change: instead, what we got, in the years to come, was a long, incredible rivalry. One that has gone on so long that, these days, it can seem that tennis is caught in a time warp.

In the days leading up to Friday’s match, there was a great deal of talk about that match in 2008—the replays of old points on TV seemed, at times, to overwhelm the coverage of tennis that was actually happening in the present. It was irresistible: old footage of the early rain on that day, and then the fade into twilight; the dramatic rallies and momentum swings. As for any new analysis, it was mostly halfhearted. What was there left to say? Federer, after he won on Wednesday and knew who his next opponent would be, said, “Well, we have a lot of information on Rafa, and so does he about us. You can either dive into tactics and all that stuff like mad for two days, or you’re just going to say, ‘You know what? It’s grass-court tennis, and I’m going to come out there and play attacking tennis.’ And, if he can defend that, that’s too good. And, if he can’t, well, then, that’s good for me.”

Nadal’s and Federer’s careers are intertwined now—they form a tiny ecosystem, in which each of them has forced the other to change. It was once easy to caricature the stylistic differences between them, and, although the contrast remains, there has also been convergence. Nadal hits that heavy hooking forehand and can still run for days, but he comes into net more often, and, in the past couple of years, he has developed a brutal serve. Federer still floats into that fluid forehand with the long extension, serves with perfect precision, and plays with invention. But, assisted by a bigger racquet face, he drives his backhand hard, making it less of a liability.

On Friday, then, it was no surprise when the first set favored both servers: aces and classic 1–2 patterns. There were forays to net, and long rallies—most notably on Federer’s break point at 4–3, which lasted twenty-one shots, with Nadal’s topspin forehand bouncing higher and higher, and Federer fighting it off with his one-hander up around his shoulders, until finally the Swiss player blinked. It was the only real opening on either man’s serve in the first set, which went to a tiebreaker. There were more fireworks: Nadal running down a Federer volley and flicking his backhand to drop deep in the corner, an impossible get; Federer flying in on his forehand. When there were errors, they were of the smallest margins—lines missed by millimetres, ground strokes rolling off the tape.

Federer came away with the first set, and the match seemed on its way to becoming another classic. As the second began, each player ratcheted up the pressure on the other’s serve. Federer exploited his superior timing to take the return early and put Nadal on his back foot; Nadal’s intensity rose to a pitch that only he seems capable of. Federer was hitting about twice as many winners as Nadal, following his aggressive game plan, but Nadal was an unbreakable force; he came away with the match’s first break.

Then something unfamiliar happened: Federer fell apart. The errors came fast, and Nadal started toying with him. He took the set, 6–1. Federer had won only fifteen of the set’s forty-five points. But another swerve was in store. Federer regained his form on his serve and rediscovered his forehand, and Nadal struggled to break. Federer took the third set, 6–3. In the fourth and final set, Federer’s ground strokes, unexpectedly, allowed him to outlast Nadal in rallies. He took the final set, 6–4. Was it revenge for 2008? Not really. But that wasn’t the point.

Meetings between Federer and Nadal were once almost crude in their symbolism: brute force versus elegance, right versus left, passion versus cool. Now those old story lines feel a little silly. Even the debate over which player is the greatest of all time can seem a little off point (and, besides, Djokovic may have something to say about that). The more they play, and the more they distance themselves from almost everyone else, the more they seem to share. Most notably, they have in common a calmness under incredible pressure, a mental fortitude that others can’t match, and an ability to recover, physically and emotionally, even mid-game. On Friday, they even shared in the ebbs and flows of the match.

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However high the level was for stretches of the match, it wasn’t a classic—not quite, no matter how much we may have wanted or expected it to be. But, like all the matches between these two men, it offered a chance to watch two players who have made each other, improbably, almost impossibly, improve, in order to keep pace with the other. The pressure, at this point, is off, or should be. Their semifinal was one more data point in their long rivalry, not a definitive showdown. It didn’t decide who is the best ever, or even who is the best in the world right now. (That title belongs to the man whom Federer will play in the final, on Sunday, Djokovic.) Toward the end of the fourth set, as I watched Nadal fend off four match points—in an astonishing stretch that matched the level that he and Federer showed more than a decade ago—I found myself simply submitting to each shot, without worrying what it meant in a larger sense. They were just playing grass-court tennis, and we had the privilege just to watch.

Early next week, according to a D.H.S. official, the Trump Administration is expected to announce a major immigration deal, known as a safe-third-country agreement, with Guatemala. For weeks, there have been reports that negotiations were under way between the two countries, but, until now, none of the details were official. According to a draft of the agreement, which The New Yorker has obtained, asylum seekers from any country who either show up at U.S. ports of entry or are apprehended while crossing between ports of entry could be sent to seek asylum in Guatemala instead. During the past year, tens of thousands of migrants, the vast majority of them from Central America, have arrived at the U.S. border seeking asylum each month. By law, the U.S. must give them a chance to bring their claims before authorities, even though there’s currently a backlog in the immigration courts of roughly a million cases. The Trump Administration has tried a number of measures to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country—from “metering” at ports of entry to forcing people to wait in Mexico—but, in every case, international obligations held that the U.S. would eventually have to hear their asylum claims. Under this new arrangement, most of these migrants will no longer have a chance to make an asylum claim in the U.S. at all. “We’re talking about something much bigger than what the term ‘safe third country’ implies,” someone with knowledge of the deal told me. “We’re talking about a kind of transfer agreement where the U.S. can send any asylum seekers, not just Central Americans, to Guatemala.”

From the start of the Trump Presidency, Administration officials have been fixated on a safe-third-country policy with Mexico—a similar accord already exists with Canada—since it would allow the U.S. government to shift the burden of handling asylum claims farther south. The principle was that migrants wouldn’t have to apply for asylum in the U.S. because they could do so elsewhere along the way. But immigrants-rights advocates and policy experts pointed out that Mexico’s legal system could not credibly take on that responsibility. “If you’re going to pursue a safe-third-country agreement, you have to be able to say ‘safe’ with a straight face,” Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told me. Until very recently, the prospect of such an agreement—not just with Mexico but with any other country in Central America—seemed far-fetched. Yet last month, under the threat of steep tariffs on Mexican goods, Trump strong-armed the Mexican government into considering it. Even so, according to a former Mexican official, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is stalling. “They are trying to fight this,” the former official said. What’s so striking about the agreement with Guatemala, however, is that it goes even further than the terms the U.S. sought in its dealings with Mexico. “This is a whole new level,” the person with knowledge of the agreement told me. “In my read, it looks like even those who have never set foot in Guatemala can potentially be sent there.”

At this point, there are still more questions than answers about what the agreement with Guatemala will mean in practice. A lot will still have to happen before it goes into force, and the terms aren’t final. The draft of the agreement doesn’t provide much clarity on how it will be implemented—another person with knowledge of the agreement said, “this reads like it was drafted by someone’s intern”—but it does offer an exemption for Guatemalan migrants, which might be why the government of Jimmy Morales, a U.S. ally, seems willing to sign on. Guatemala is currently in the midst of Presidential elections; next month, the country will hold a runoff between two candidates, and the current front-runner has been opposed to this type of deal. The Morales government, however, still has six months left in office. A U.N.-backed anti-corruption body called the CICIG, which, for years, was funded by the U.S. and admired throughout the region, is being dismantled by Morales, whose own family has fallen under investigation for graft and financial improprieties. Signing an immigration deal “would get the Guatemalan government in the U.S.’s good graces,” Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, told me. “The question is, what would they intend to use that status for?” Earlier this week, after Morales announced that he would be meeting with Trump in Washington on Monday, three former foreign ministers of Guatemala petitioned the country’s Constitutional Court to block him from signing the agreement. Doing so, they said, “would allow the current president of the republic to leave the future of our country mortgaged, without any responsibility.”

The biggest, and most unsettling, question raised by the agreement is how Guatemala could possibly cope with such enormous demands. More people are leaving Guatemala now than any other country in the northern triangle of Central America. Rampant poverty, entrenched political corruption, urban crime, and the effects of climate change have made large swaths of the country virtually uninhabitable. “This is already a country in which the political and economic system can’t provide jobs for all its people,” McFarland said. “There are all these people, their own citizens, that the government and the political and economic system are not taking care of. To get thousands of citizens from other countries to come in there, and to take care of them for an indefinite period of time, would be very difficult.” Although the U.S. would provide additional aid to help the Guatemalan government address the influx of asylum seekers, it isn’t clear whether the country has the administrative capacity to take on the job. According to the person familiar with the safe-third-country agreement, “U.N.H.C.R. [the U.N.’s refugee agency] has not been involved” in the current negotiations. And, for Central Americans transferred to Guatemala under the terms of the deal, there’s an added security risk: many of the gangs Salvadorans and Hondurans are fleeing also operate in Guatemala.

In recent months, the squalid conditions at borderland detention centers have provoked broad political outcry in the U.S. At the same time, a worsening asylum crisis has been playing out south of the U.S. border, beyond the immediate notice of concerned Americans. There, the Trump Administration is quietly delivering on its promise to redraw American asylum practice. Since January, under a policy called the Migration Protection Protocols (M.P.P.), the U.S. government has sent more than fifteen thousand asylum seekers to Mexico, where they now must wait indefinitely as their cases inch through the backlogged American immigration courts. Cities in northern Mexico, such as Tijuana and Juarez, are filling up with desperate migrants who are exposed to violent crime, extortions, and kidnappings, all of which are on the rise.This week, as part of the M.P.P., the U.S. began sending migrants to Tamaulipas, one of Mexico’s most violent states and a stronghold for drug cartels that, for years, have brutalized migrants for money and for sport.

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Safe-third-country agreements are notoriously difficult to enforce. The logistics are complex, and the outcomes tend not to change the harried calculations of asylum seekers as they flee their homes. These agreements, according to a recent study by the Migration Policy Institute, are “unlikely to hold the key to solving the crisis unfolding at the U.S. southern border.” The Trump Administration has already cut aid to Central America, and the U.S. asylum system remains in dire need of improvement. But there’s also little question that the agreement with Guatemala will reduce the number of people who reach, and remain in, the U.S. If the President has made the asylum crisis worse, he’ll also be able to say he’s improving it—just as he can claim credit for the decline in the number of apprehensions at the U.S. border last month. That was the result of increased enforcement efforts by the Mexican government acting under U.S. pressure.

There’s also no reason to expect that the Trump Administration will abandon its efforts to force the Mexicans into a safe-third-country agreement, as well. “The Mexican government thought that the possibility of a safe-third-country agreement with Guatemala had fallen apart because of the elections there,” the former Mexican official told me. “The recent news caught top Mexican officials by surprise.” In the next month, the two countries will continue immigration talks, and, again, Mexico will face mounting pressure to accede to American demands. “The U.S. has used the agreement with Guatemala to convince the Mexicans to sign their own safe-third-country agreement,” the former official said. “Its argument is that the number of migrants Mexico will receive will be lower now.”

Crises make and break historical reputations. In our current constitutional emergency, a few unlikely figures, above all the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have upheld the rule of law, possibly redeeming their places in history. Many others, above all the current Attorney General, William Barr, seem determined to irretrievably sink theirs. Now the reputation at risk is that of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

With regard to the debate over the proper response to Donald Trump’s brazen deeds, Pelosi has not taken impeachment off the table, saying, “I don’t think you should impeach for political reasons, and I don’t think you should not impeach for political reasons.” Yet political reasons seem to be preventing her from pursuing constitutional concerns. Her reasoning is clear: if the House were to launch an impeachment without “overwhelming” evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors and strong bipartisan public support, Trump’s inevitable acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate would only strengthen him, and he could cruise to reëlection. But, in this instance, Pelosi’s normally acute political judgment is failing her, and the historical precedent she is evidently relying on—the impeachment of President Bill Clinton—is not analogous. In fact, based on the past half century of political history, suppressing an impeachment inquiry seems more likely to help insure Trump’s reëlection. If this happens, Pelosi’s formidable reputation, based on a lifetime of public service and her role as the first female Speaker of the House, will suffer.

The basic historical error behind suppressing an impeachment inquiry confuses the genuine crisis surrounding Trump with the manufactured one that engulfed Clinton. In 1998, the House Republicans, lacking public support and all but assured that the Senate, though it was controlled by their own party, would not convict Clinton, impeached him anyway, which only served to win him sympathy and drive up his popularity ratings. Pelosi apparently sees the same thing happening now, but the two cases are very different.

When the scandal involving Clinton and Monica Lewinsky broke, in January of 1998, Republicans had been pursuing both Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than five years, and they had come up with nothing. In the view of most Americans, the Lewinsky story, although pathetic and unnerving, never amounted to a case sufficient to justify Clinton’s removal from office, even when attached to Clinton’s dissembling under oath about the matter. Moreover, Clinton, unlike Trump, was a broadly popular President: when the scandal broke, his approval rating hovered around sixty-six per cent; on the day he was impeached, it rose to seventy-three per cent; the week after his acquittal, it was the same as it had been at the beginning: sixty-six per cent.

Trump, by contrast, is the least popular President of the postwar period, who enjoys a fiercely loyal base but so far has failed to win the support of more than half those Americans polled. More important, the evidence presented in the Mueller report—regarding Trump’s campaign’s expectation that it could benefit from Russian interference and hacking efforts, and numerous contacts with Russians, as well as the President’s subsequent attempts to obstruct justice—is formidable, if, in Mueller’s view, insufficient to “establish” that members of the Trump campaign actually conspired or coördinated with Russia. (The insufficiency, of course, may have been due to the efforts at obstruction that the report describes.) Despite Barr’s efforts to obscure the fact that Mueller’s report does not exonerate the President, only thirty-three per cent of Americans, according to a Quinnipiac poll, believe that the Attorney General has accurately represented the report’s conclusions. That number may fall further after Mueller’s testimony before Congress, which is scheduled for next week.

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The more relevant historical analogy to Trump’s situation is that of President Richard M. Nixon, during the last two years of his Administration. Nixon won reëlection in a historic landslide in 1972, but his public standing eroded during the summer of 1973, when the televised Senate hearings chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, Democrat of North Carolina, began to reveal the extent and the seriousness of the Watergate crimes. Even so, at the start of 1974, less than thirty-eight per cent of the public were in favor of removing the President from office, and support for Nixon among Capitol Hill Republicans remained strong. A major reason for Nixon’s continued support was the effectiveness of his Administration’s stonewalling strategy of denial and redaction—the same strategy that the Trump Administration has pursued in fighting subpoenas from several current House committees. (On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee voted to issue subpoenas to a dozen people associated with the White House, including Sessions and Jared Kushner.) Still, support for Trump’s impeachment stands at forty-five per cent, according to a June Gallup Poll.

In 1974, the Democrats did not flinch. Based on what was known after the Ervin Committee inquiries—which was nowhere near as conclusive as the evidence amassed against Trump by Robert Mueller—the House Judiciary Committee authorized its chairman, Representative Peter Rodino, of New Jersey, to undertake an impeachment inquiry. That inquiry, alongside the continuing work of the special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, produced the evidence and sustained hearings that decisively turned public opinion—and led to Nixon’s resignation.

In short: Nixon, a popular President who retained public support, finally succumbed to powerful charges once the House fulfilled its constitutional duty. Yet now an unpopular President may get away with acts at least as grievous as Nixon’s because the House will have evaded its constitutional duty. The blame for that evasion would fall on Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi, more surprisingly, is also ignoring the chief political lesson of the Nixon impeachment. The case against authorizing an impeachment inquiry rests in part on polling, which shows that the public over all remains unconvinced that an impeachment inquiry is warranted—though the number in favor keeps growing. Yet had the House Democratic leadership come to the same conclusion in early 1974—when, it needs remembering, public support for impeachment was actually weaker—Nixon would have finished out his second term. The lesson is simple: on matters as serious as a Presidential impeachment, the opposition must lead, not follow, public opinion; it must examine and develop the evidence in plain view, and not permit the White House to persist in shaping perceptions through concealment and lies.

Another lesson follows from this one. Asserting that a Senate acquittal would allow Trump to claim vindication elides the fact Trump has already claimed vindication, a falsehood which the Democrats’ failure to pursue impeachment would only strengthen. It also overlooks how a Senate trial always reinforces either the severity of the alleged crimes and the persuasiveness of the evidence, or the lack thereof. Nixon resigned only when Senate Republicans told him that his case would not survive a trial. Trump’s domination of the G.O.P. does make it all but impossible that the Senate would vote to remove him. But evidence presented by the House impeachment managers would enrage independents as well as Democrats, on the eve of the election, putting pressure on vulnerable Senate Republicans as well as on Trump. The electorate would, in effect, do the job that the Senate refused to do.

Pelosi, viewing the House and Senate proceedings narrowly, argues that Trump is best contested not with impeachment, which would be divisive, but by replaying the kitchen-table issues that won the Democrats the House majority in 2018—health care, immigration, and climate change. But that strategy would commit the classic military blunder of fighting a war on the basis of the last successful campaign, regardless of the facts and context. It’s one thing to defeat Republicans in congressional races in which Trump’s name does not appear on the ballot. It’s quite another to defeat them when the charismatic Trump heads the ticket and is able to claim that he is exonerated because Democrats did not pursue an impeachment inquiry. In any event, the campaign so far has showcased that Democrats are far from united on a number of kitchen-table issues, from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal.

It’s hard to think of an electorate in modern times any more split than the one that exists today, which Trump is powerfully dividing, on his own anti-liberal terms. Pursuing a fully justified impeachment inquiry, however, would turn Trump’s demagogy against him. It would reframe the division on constitutional terms, not with empty insults but with hard evidence, televised daily—the kind of evidence that could turn crucial independent opinion and energize a Democratic base. The principal issue that truly unites and mobilizes the fractured Democrats, and with them a majority of Independents, is the clear and present danger of Donald J. Trump. To this extent, Trump’s narcissism has succeeded in making American politics revolve around him—but to deny that reality will only perpetuate it and enable him politically. To expose his actions in detail, however, starting with his manifest failure to defend the national security against continuing Russian cyberattacks and Putin’s open support for the evisceration of “obsolete” Western liberal democracy, would put the matter differently—and put him on the defensive.

Such proceedings would also accentuate the now-or-never importance of the 2020 election. Think of Trump in a second term, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, bolstered by a Senate perhaps still led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and guided by an Attorney General set on realizing the dream of a “unitary executive.” The recent Supreme Court ruling giving license to the wholesale gerrymandering of congressional districts, along with Trump’s defiant order to include a citizenship question in the census, are just two indications of where we would be headed.

On May 19th, Nancy Pelosi was the recipient of the Profile in Courage Award, bestowed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She was rightly given the prize for her advocacy of the Affordable Care Act, the basis of a universal health-care system, which took decades of struggle to enact, and which she defended to help win a Democratic majority of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. The history of the Congress has been filled with profiles in courage, including, in recent times, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, standing to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy; Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, conducting hearings on the Vietnam War, despite his friendship with President Lyndon Johnson; and Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican of Arizona, telling President Richard Nixon that he must resign or face removal from office.

Nancy Pelosi knows that history. In accepting her Profile in Courage Award, she said, “In my public life, I have seen leaders who understood that their duty was not to do what was easy but what was right.” She added, “In the darkest hours of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, ‘The times have found us’ . . . and today the times have found us to strengthen America. It is not about politics but about patriotism.” The choice is hers. More than her reputation rests on it.