Trump Is More Likely to Get a Third Impeachment Than a Third Term
In 100 days, he has amply demonstrated he deserves it.
WHEN PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON DEPLOYED the IRS and the FBI to investigate his enemies, the House Judiciary Committee—on a bipartisan vote—deemed it an impeachable abuse of power. So how about Donald Trump siccing the Department of Justice on Act Blue, the Democratic fundraising juggernaut? Hmmm.
To mark Trump’s first (worst?) hundred days, I thought it might be fun to look at all the impeachment articles against presidents and figure out how many Trump has already matched or surpassed.
Spoiler: It has not been fun. And the answer is pretty much all of them—from Andrew Johnson in 1868 to the charges in Trump’s own pair of impeachments a few short years ago. How do we know? Because it’s all unfolding publicly and blatantly in real time.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a former House aide who was lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, said on February 19 that Trump had already committed “dozens of impeachable offenses.” That was one month in. Just before Easter, as Trump approached the 100-day mark, Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky told me that “the systematic violation of the Constitution, the use of power openly for retribution, provide a basis for finding high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“Openly” is key. There’s no hush-hush investigation necessary, and none of the drama that comes with a shocking revelation of wrongdoing. Instead we get floods of social media posts, illegal executive orders, and Trump talking, and talking, and talking. The cumulative effect is to normalize lawbreaking, government weaponization, and the politics of revenge, while the Republicans in charge avert their eyes and let everything slide.
Some impeachments are more equal than others
Though it hasn’t been fun, it has been instructive to get granular in measuring Trump against the small sample of presidents who’ve been impeached or come close to it.
● Andrew Johnson, a former Tennessee governor and senator, was Abraham Lincoln’s regionally balanced running-mate in his 1864 re-election campaign. An advocate of states’ rights and of lenience toward former Confederate leaders, Johnson repeatedly tried and failed after Lincoln’s assassination to oust his holdover secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. Congress claimed Johnson was usurping its power and in 1867 tried but failed to impeach him. That year, over Johnson’s veto, lawmakers passed the Tenure of Office Act barring removal of Senate-confirmed officials without Senate consent. Johnson tried again to fire Stanton, and this time (though the Constitution does not say it’s required for impeachment) he was breaking a law. The House approved eleven impeachment articles against Johnson, nine of them about Stanton. The Senate failed to convict him, Congress repealed the tenure act in 1887, and the Supreme Court in 1926 ruled it unconstitutional.
How does Trump’s second-term record so far stack up next to the charges brought against Johnson? For starters, Trump issued an executive order taking control of “the entire executive branch,” including independent regulatory agencies created by Congress, on February 18. He has ousted numerous officials at those agencies, despite Congress setting fixed terms intended to span presidencies, and a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that such officials can’t be fired without cause. Trump had been threatening to fire Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell, whose term ends on January 31, 2028, but retreated after warnings of economic doom from CEOs and his own advisers.
● Richard Nixon’s central role in covering up the 1972 Watergate scandal, in which Nixon-campaign spies broke into and bugged the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex in Washington, led two years later to the first and so far only presidential resignation. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment charging Nixon with obstructing its Watergate inquiry, abusing his power by using law enforcement and intelligence agencies to investigate his enemies, and refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas. Nixon resigned before a full House vote, after Republican senators told him the Senate would likely convict him of the charges.
Does Trump check any of these boxes? For sure, and right out in the open, starting with his executive order this month that “directs” Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue for possible foreign or dummy contributions (but did not include WinRed, the GOP counterpart, as the AP noted). Trump has also gone after law firms he sees as enemies—threatening to cancel federal contracts, suspend security clearances, and bar lawyers from all federal buildings because he doesn’t like their clients or their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. He’s unleashed similar attacks—and punishment—on universities as well.
Has Trump obstructed justice since taking office this year? It’s more like flouting justice and ignoring the courts. He and his team, including Elon Musk, have shut down investigations, slow-walked or withheld information, and ignored court orders, not least regarding deportations that have sent three children who are U.S. citizens to Honduras and roughly 175 Venezuelans with no criminal record to a nightmare Salvadoran prison, all without due process.
As for compliance with subpoenas, Trump “directed Executive Branch agencies, offices, and officials not to comply” with House subpoenas in the chamber’s 2019 impeachment inquiry, and early signs this time around are not encouraging.
● Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath to a grand jury and for obstructing justice. The charges stemmed from an independent counsel investigation into an Arkansas real estate deal involving the Clintons and morphed into Kenneth Starr’s graphic report on Clinton’s affair with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The full House approved two of four impeachment articles, but Clinton was acquitted in a Senate trial.
Has Trump lied about sex or covering it up? E. Jean Carroll has accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s in a department store dressing room, and filed two civil defamation suits against him. Trump denied in a deposition and in brief testimony last year that he had ever met her, but two juries have found him liable and courts have awarded Carroll tens of millions in damages. Trump has repeatedly denied he had sex with porn actress Stormy Daniels, but he did not take the stand in last year’s hush-money trial. Daniels testified in detail about the alleged encounter, and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified that Trump signed off on all aspects of schemes to bury stories about extramarital affairs. The jury convicted Trump of 34 felonies in connection with falsifying business records to disguise the payoffs.
Trump’s impeachment double-header
Trump was impeached twice during his first presidency, not for scheming to silence Daniels or even for firing FBI Director James Comey—a firing that came four years into Comey’s ten-year term, while he was overseeing an investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, and made it onto special counsel Robert Mueller’s top-ten list of ways Trump may have obstructed justice.
No, it was none of that, although Trump’s first impeachment arguably was related—his “perfect” phone call in 2019, as the 2020 election campaign was ramping up, in which he tried to get Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, “a favor” he strongly implied he needed if Zelensky wanted Trump to invite him to the White House and to release military aid to fend off Russian incursions in eastern Ukraine (money that Congress had already appropriated and Trump had no legal authority to withhold).
The House Judiciary Committee and the full House approved two articles of impeachment charging Trump with “corruptly” soliciting the interference of a foreign government in the 2020 election for his personal gain, as a condition for two official acts, and with telling executive agencies to ignore subpoenas for material and testimony in the House impeachment inquiry. But the Senate acquitted him at trial.
Is Trump up to his old tricks as he begins anew? He is certainly doing whatever he wants with congressionally appropriated money, part of a Project 2025 goal to invalidate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It also tramples all over the Constitution—which makes clear that Congress determines how taxpayer money is raised and spent.
The second impeachment came after the deadly Capitol riot by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, the day Congress was finalizing Joe Biden’s election victory. The single impeachment article was titled “Incitement of Insurrection.” It cited Trump’s lies at a rally before the attack that he had “won” the election, and his exhortation to “fight like hell,” followed by the Capitol vandalism and violence that killed and injured law enforcement personnel, “menaced” lawmakers, staff, and the vice president, and other “deadly, destructive and seditious acts.” His earlier attempts to “subvert and obstruct” the results were also part of the indictment. The House impeached him, but the Senate fell ten short of the sixty-seven votes needed to convict Trump and bar him from future office.
Trump is still insisting he won the “rigged” 2020 election. He continually suggests he may run for a constitutionally prohibited third term, and he’s being sued by multiple states, civil rights groups, Democrats, and nonprofits over an executive order that would establish onerous election requirements such as voters having to prove their citizenship. The Constitution puts states and Congress in charge of federal elections, and a federal judge last week blocked much of the order.
Impeachment No. 3 seems inevitable
We are “a long way from success in impeachment and removal,” Chemerinsky cautions, and says Democrats should be strategic about timing. Their first realistic chance will be after the midterms. If Democrats win a House majority in 2026, Trump would almost certainly face a 2027 impeachment inquiry and his third impeachment. He’s matched most of the offenses that appeared in impeachment articles against past presidents, and now is forging new ground in both volume and subject areas, with violations of laws and the Constitution piling up each day.
He has failed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” as he swore in his oath of office, and he has failed to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” as the Constitution instructs. He personally granted clemency to some 1,600 January 6th rioters, including dozens with earlier convictions or pending charges for serious crimes, and sent them back into communities where they are now in the forefront of a trend that Atlantic writer David Graham calls the pardon-to-prison pipeline.
Meanwhile, the people Trump and the Republican Senate have installed to run the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services are abysmal failures in areas of huge consequence. Their slipshod, careless, unscientific, even hostile leadership falls far short of the mission that the Founders laid out so eloquently in the Constitution’s Preamble: to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves.”
It’s dispiriting to try and catalogue it all, but we must bear witness.
I KNOW SOME WONDER what good an impeachment proceeding will do, especially given that Trump has already survived two and managed a comeback. It helps to remember that many people said the same of the January 6th hearings, and yet they were a spectacle and a drama and a civics education for the country. They produced the headlines necessary to permanently imprint that travesty in the minds of people alive now, and in the history books that others will read later.
That should be the two-year plan. Impeachment after the midterms, two years into Trump’s term and the struggle to hang on to the country we hope we really are. A time when a few Republicans could finally, belatedly, decide it’s time to end the madness. And if they don’t, a Democrat-led impeachment proceeding and House vote would at the very least be a watershed moment—a reckoning as dramatic and necessary as the January 6th hearings that riveted the nation.
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