One of Washington’s favorite parlor games of late has been debating what constitutes an “impeachable” offense, and whether President Trump has committed one. An obvious candidate has gone unnoticed: the government shutdown itself. Unlike previous presidents during shutdowns, Trump is not vetoing bills he objects to — an action clearly within his purview. He is promising to veto bills he does not object to because Congress has not given him an appropriation he seeks — $5.7 billion for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wants to shut down parts of the government — for “months or years” — until he gets his wall money.

Under the Constitution, he has no right to demand such an appropriation — much less to hold vital government functions hostage to obtain it. The president is not coequal with Congress when it comes to appropriations — the power of the purse belongs to the legislative branch, not the executive.

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Trump’s demand for an appropriation from Congress because of a security crisis on the border was anticipated by the drafters of the Constitution; they specifically refused to combine the power of the purse with the role of commander in chief. (This after all, was the specific grievance against the king of England that sparked the American Revolution itself.)

Worse, in shutting down the government to extort an appropriation he is not entitled to, Trump is violating his oath of office and breaching one of his core fiduciary duties: to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” (Emphasis added.) Obviously, a shutdown of one-third of the government for “months or even years” will make the execution of many laws utterly impossible – particularly since the Department of Justice is one of the shuttered agencies. Trump cannot assert that he must shut down the DOJ. The Democrats have passed an appropriation for that department, to which he concedes he has no objection. He is merely trying to use the shutdown as blackmail to force Congress to fund the wall (or at least however much of it can be built for $5 billion).

Taking as our source the very Federalist Society from which Trump gets his judicial appointee punch list, breach of fiduciary duty is the key standard for the “misdemeanors” the Constitution cites, along with criminal acts, as grounds for impeachment.

Working as an editor or producer on Donald Trump’s US version of The Apprentice sounds like it was a bit of a headache. According to staff on the show, the sequences of events had to be ‘reverse engineered’ in the final cut, because he’d fire people ‘on a whim’. That meant that people who might have performed well on the show were just as easily fire-able as anyone else once in the boardroom.

As such, sometimes showmakers would have to go back through footage, and edit it to highlight any mistakes the fired contestant may have made to make it look as if they’d messed up tasks.

In a profile on Trump and Apprentice creator Mark Burnett, six-season editor Jonathan Braun told The New Yorker: “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Another of the show’s producers, Katherine Walker, added that they would also have to edit Trump’s own performance on the show to make him appear more ‘coherent’. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said. “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited. We didn’t have to change him — he gave us stuff to work with.”

In the profile, other staff members also speak out on how unpopular Trump was to work with. “There were no Trump fans on the set, I don’t know a single person who worked on the show who voted for Trump,” said one.