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Polymarket has the odds of President Donald Trump being impeached before his term ends at 70%. That feels low.
Democrats appear ready to ride a tidal wave into the House, and their voters want vindication for their decadelong Trump monomania. They won’t wait out the clock politely; they’ll crack the whip and cleanse the temple.
How dark is the Democratic mood? A new Center for Strategic Politics poll found that 77% of Democrats want Trump administration officials jailed, a majority would welcome Trump dying in his sleep, and 32% would cheer his assassination.
If Democrats take the House, investigations and impeachment proceedings are certain. There will be a parade of grandstanding, self-indulgent nincompoopery — just as in Trump’s first term. These are Democrats, after all.
But will they also be a colossal waste of time? That’s less certain.
The good news for Trump is that the math hasn’t changed. Conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds supermajority of the senators present. That means something like 17 to 20 Republicans will be needed to remove the president from office.
But the politics surrounding the president are entirely different now. And the self-dealing of Trump’s second term will give Democrats plenty of ammo.
Underwater and sinking
We’ll start with the politics. Trump’s RealClearPolitics job approval average has dipped into the 30s, with six of the last seven polls showing him below 40%. His disapproval average sits right at 60%. The last president to hit 60% disapproval on the RCP average was George W. Bush, who first reached the mark the summer before the 2006 midterm elections. Joe Biden’s average disapproval peaked at 58, and Trump never reached 60% disapproval in his first term — even after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Another major difference: Unlike at any point in Trump’s first term, voters are deeply dissatisfied with the economy on his watch.
A new CNN poll found that a staggering 72% of Americans now rate current economic conditions as “poor,” compared with only 28% who said the same at the midpoint of Trump’s first term. A new Wall Street Journal poll confirms the foul public mood on the economy, with 60 percent of voters saying that Trump’s policies have made the economy worse and only 25% saying they’ve made the economy better.
Trump’s poor marks extend beyond the economy. A new Fox News poll found that a clear majority believes Trump’s immigration enforcement policies have “gone too far,” erasing his long-standing advantage on his signature issue. That same poll found only 37% believe he’s handled foreign policy well — once another strength for the president.
Numbers like these change behavior — even around a president who has spent a decade defying political gravity. Republicans are suddenly crossing Trump on the campaign trail and in the media.
In recent days, three Midwestern Senate nominees broke with the president over the Iran war: Rep. Ashley Hinson (IA), former Rep. Mike Rogers (MI), and Sen. Jon Husted (OH). The GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Wisconsin, Rep. Tom Tiffany, formerly a close Trump ally whom the president endorsed in the primary, called for the U.S. to leave Iran and focus on domestic issues. Tiffany even blasted the president over renaming the Great Lakes and beef tariffs.
Photos: AP Newsroom and Canva, Graphic: Grace Hagerman/Washington Examiner
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Photos: AP Newsroom and Canva, Graphic: Grace Hagerman/Washington Examiner
In Trump’s own home state of Florida, gubernatorial nominee Rep. Byron Donalds scrubbed mentions of the president from his website and openly criticized Trump’s plan to issue $5,000 “dividend” checks. Donalds was on Trump’s shortlist for vice president in 2024 and has been one of Trump’s most effective media surrogates. Now the congressman is quietly putting some distance between them.
There’s reason to suspect Trump will have little leverage left to plug these holes in the lame-duck stretch of his presidency. It is no longer a given that the benefit of Trump’s blessing outweighs the cost of appearing alongside him. On Tuesday, Washington Examiner executive editor Bob Cusack told CNN’s Laura Coates, “There’s going to be more of them… And I think the dam could break after the election.”
Should the president’s numbers continue to slip into the low 30s and even high 20s — a recent American Research Group poll pegged the president’s approval rating at a startling 29 percent — Republicans might begin to calculate, with an eye toward 2028, that their own fortunes would improve with Trump gone. And Democrats will be more than happy to oblige.
That calculation, of course, won’t be true in every case — in certain contexts and in certain pockets of America, Trump’s approval will remain valuable. Indeed, there are still contexts in which George W. Bush’s blessing is considered helpful.
But the laws of political physics are absolute. Politicians who lose public approval lose influence over their colleagues. And for a president staring down the barrel of impeachment proceedings, that’s a dangerous place to be.
A target-rich environment
Then there’s the ammunition. Trump’s second term has handed congressional investigators more material than they’ll know what to do with, and a House majority with subpoena power will relish sorting through it.
Consider the United Arab Emirates deal, the implications of which could go beyond personal enrichment toward national security. Four days before Trump’s inauguration, Aryam Investment, a firm backed by the UAE’s national security adviser, agreed to buy 49 percent of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. Roughly $187 million went to Trump-family entities and at least $31 million to entities tied to the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy.
Months later, the administration agreed to let the UAE purchase hundreds of thousands of America’s most advanced AI chips, reversing Biden-era restrictions meant to keep them out of China’s hands.
There’s no smoking gun of criminality here, but no congressional committee with subpoena power has sunk its teeth into it yet.
And that’s just one of dozens of potential impeachment bombshells. There’s the Qatari jet. The Binance pardon. All of the suspect Trump family crypto deals, including the $TRUMP memecoin dinner, that Democrats will be able to effortlessly portray as selling access. The Democrats’ biggest problem will be picking a target and sticking to it.
Through it all, Trump will surely claim the scandals are “hoaxes” with partial justification: Democrats and their media allies have concocted countless Trump scandals out of thin air. But the stench of corruption this term is so thick that even voters who tuned out a decade of false alarms can smell it. Connecting the dots and telling the story will be easy — perhaps easy enough that even Democrats won’t bungle it.
The Vance calculation
The Republicans to keep a close eye on next year are those most closely associated with Vice President JD Vance, especially senators. Their calculation here will be simple: If running as an incumbent president with a record of his own will boost Vance’s 2028 odds more than running as a third-term heir to Trump’s legacy, they will be more open to removing Trump in the event of truly damaging revelations.
TRUMP CONFIRMS HE’S REJECTED IRAN’S PEACE PROPOSAL
The dynamic might eerily resemble the Democrats’ predicament of 2024, when blind loyalty to their own octogenarian president handed the White House back to Trump on a platter.
Even Republicans have begun to accept that a big blue wave is building on the horizon. Its size, along with public approval of Trump’s performance, will go a long way toward determining whether the Democrats’ coming impeachment crusade ends in a President Vance.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
