Alan Dershowitz's novel constitutional case against Trump's impeachment relies on a thesaurus
President Trump's defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz pulled the old quote-the-dictionary trick in Trump's Senate impeachment trial, arguing that Trump — or, in fact, any president — cannot be impeached for abuse of power because the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution rejected adding the word "maladministration." In this case, though, the dictionary wasn't much use — "maladministration," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, means "inefficient or dishonest administration; mismanagement," and literally it means "bad management" — so Dershowitz turned instead to the thesaurus.
"The framers rejected maladministration," Dershowitz told the senators. "And what's a metaphor, or what's a synonym for maladministation? Abuse of power. And when they rejected maladministration, they rejected abuse of power." If you look up maladministration in the dictionary, he added later, "and you look up synonyms, the synonyms include abuse, corruption, misrule, dishonesty, misuse of office, and misbehavior."
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