What the commentators said
“Trump is in trouble. Deep trouble this time,” said Justin Webb in the Daily Mail. Bad enough that Cohen – a man who once said he’d “take a bullet” for the president – has implicated him in a serious crime. Cohen’s lawyer has hinted that his client is ready to share “all he knows” with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Quite possibly Cohen will supply the “missing link” connecting Trump to Moscow. If he does have such evidence, he will fire a potentially fatal shot “into the heart of the Oval Office”. The parallels with past presidential wrongdoing are already clear, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. Nixon tried to cheat the voters by covering up the Watergate break-in; Bill Clinton did the same by lying under oath to conceal an affair. If Trump misled us over his pay-offs to these women, he’s just as culpable, and there’s only one proper response. “The constitution demands the impeachment and removal from office of this lawless president.”
The Need to Impeach campaign is certainly gathering pace, said David Smith in The Observer: it now has 5.6 million supporters. Yet Democrats should be wary. Pushing the case against Trump too hard could well “backfire” and create a backlash, prompting Republicans to claim their enemies are just using legal means to reverse the result of the 2016 election. In any case, impeachment would prove a “meaningless symbolic gesture”, said Kyle Smith in National Review. Even if, after the midterms, the House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, there’s no chance of the Senate – which is sure to retain its Republican majority – voting by the two-thirds majority necessary to actually remove him. Nor will the latest revelations do much to swing public opinion against Trump, said Janan Ganesh in the FT. This is a president who has never depended on his good name to win votes. “As long as he keeps up his stream of tweetable ‘achievements’ on trade and immigration”, his base seems ready to forgive anything.