Trump's crusade exposes his deepest fear: analysis

President Donald Trump can be best politically taken down by being impeached for his offenses — even if the impeachments themselves do not result in his removal from office.

After dismissing the recent wave of criticisms of the Democratic Party for nominating democratic socialists in a series of New York congressional elections, Salon’s Heather Digby Parton wrote on Sunday that “impeachment is still a very big deal with extremely high stakes. You never know if it just might work because party loyalties have been shown to only go so far. Despite this disclaimer — and despite his historic approval ratings — Trump holds tremendous sway over his party, and it’s highly unlikely he would ever be convicted unless he is drooling and incontinent, and even then.”

Yet that would not be the point of impeaching him, Parton wrote. It would rather be to keep Trump’s various unethical actions in the public eye, no matter how desperately Republicans try to bury them.

“This week data journalist G. Elliot Morris published a Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll that points to one strategy I think is important,” Parton wrote. “When asked ‘Are there grounds to impeach Trump?’ 53% of respondents said yes. When asked to name specifics, the top responses were ‘corruption,’ ‘self-enrichment,’ ‘abuse of power’ and ‘defying the courts.’ There was more — a lot more, from the Epstein files and the Iran war to incompetence, lying and deportations. But by far, the primary grounds most people chose were corruption and abuse of power, the kinds of behaviors that impeachment was designed for. And there is simply no denying that all of it is true.”

Parton noted that America’s system of government may be breaking down, as evidenced by how three presidents were either impeached or faced certain impeachment between 1974 and the present (Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump) compared to only one president being impeached between 1789 and 1974 (Andrew Johnson). Even though no president has ever been forcibly removed from office, Parton added that this “doesn’t mean the process is a useless exercise.” Indeed, the goal should not be to remove him from office, but to make it impossible for Trump supporters to distract from his alleged misconduct.

“He is the most corrupt president in history, and that fact, with all its dark details, needs to be aired for the public to see while he is in office,” Parton wrote. “After Trump leaves office, there is little chance that any successive administration would be able to charge him, even though the expansive immunity conferred upon him by the Supreme Court ostensibly only applies to official duties. We know any such charges would be litigated to death, and by the time it finally came to trial, he might very well be dead, and the case would be moot.”

Trump has already made it clear that he resents his past impeachments, even though neither of them resulted in his removal from office. Under the Constitution, a president is impeached with a simple majority of the House of Representatives but can only be removed with two-thirds of the Senate voting to do so. He was impeached twice in his first term, first for attempting to extort Ukraine for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and then again in 2021 for trying to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Years later, he is pushing to get the impeachments expunged, with a White House spokesperson describing those attempts as "sham efforts" and "shameful."

“I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told The Wall Street Journal about Trump’s wish to expunge the impeachments. “We were saying it at the time, now we know. And they make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyperpartisan attack job.”

Yet the impeachment expungements, if they happened, would be meaningless.

"A repeal of the impeachment vote might be legally possible, but it wouldn’t alter the original impeachment happening in the first place," Dr. Carla Winston, a senior lecturer on international relations at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told The i Paper regarding the expungement campaign. "The actual practical effect of an impeachment by the House is to set up a trial in the Senate … but since the trial did not end in a conviction, there really is no legal effect to void or nullify."

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