Trump: The impeachment question
As 2019 begins, “Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president,” said Garrett M. Graff in Wired. The White House is now embroiled in at least 17 investigations—and only about half stem from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. “Prosecutors are studying nearly every aspect of how money flowed both in and out of Trump’s interconnected enterprises,” including whether Trump’s inauguration committee broke corruption laws by trading favors for a record $107 million in donations, some of which may have illegally come from foreign sources. The Trump Foundation, which recently agreed to dissolve itself in response to a lawsuit by the New York State attorney general, is now under criminal investigation for illegal use of its funds for noncharitable purposes. None of this includes the new Democratic majority in the House’s committee investigations into Trump’s taxes and financial dealings with foreign countries. Truly, we are in Watergate territory.
“The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part” is becoming too great to ignore, said Elizabeth Drew in The New York Times. The most likely outcome of these myriad investiga- tions is that Trump will be impeached and forced to resign. Knowing he will face the possibility of being indicted and imprisoned after he leaves office, Trump may follow Richard Nixon’s lead and step down in return for pardons for himself and his family. The sooner the better, said James Carroll in USA Today. Whether or not Republicans in the Senate are willing to convict Trump, it’s the House’s constitutional duty to impeach Trump if there’s evidence the president committed crimes. Otherwise, Congress will be declaring that America’s president is effectively a king, unbound by the rule of law.
Impeaching Trump would be “a disaster for the Democrats,” said Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post, unless Mueller finds “incontrovertible evidence” of a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Americans knew that Trump was a philanderer with “shady business dealings” before the 2016 election, and 63 million voted for him anyway. Impeaching him for his business dealings or paying off a porn star “would be received in Trump country as nothing short of an attempted coup.” It would boost Trump’s popularity, and could cost the Democrats “the chance to take back the presidency in 2020.”