On the menu today: Democrats are licking their lips at their prospects in the 2026 midterms, but are a little bit reticent when it comes to discussing a third attempt to impeach President Trump and remove him from office. It’s almost silly; in just about every conversation, Democratic candidates, strategists, and talking heads will lay out how Trump is a dangerous menace who’s an aspiring dictator and breaking laws left and right. And then we’re supposed to believe that they might not make the move they’ve used twice before. But considering how their last two efforts turned out . . . what is the point? Read on.
A Hallucination with a Press Release Attached
Democrats are quite likely to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives and appear to have a decent shot at winning the Senate. And then, apparently some Democrats fervently believe that finally, this time, for real, they’re going to get him.
The “him,” of course, is Donald Trump, a man who has already survived two impeachments the way a cockroach survives a nuclear test, and who has almost cheerfully dared Democrats to try a third. As the president put it to Will Cain back in January, his Democratic foes will “find something,” because that’s simply what “very nasty people” with “bad policy” do.
South Carolina Democratic Representative James Clyburn appeared on NBC News’ Meet the Press this past weekend, and the host brought up the prospect of impeaching Trump:
KRISTEN WELKER: Do you rule out supporting impeachment?
REP. JAMES CLYBURN: I don’t rule it out, but I don’t rule it in. No, I don’t. But I don’t think that should be our priority if we get into office. Our priority ought to be making housing, education, energy, health care affordable and accessible for all of our citizens. Impeaching the president will not do that. We need to focus on what is necessary to make education available for our children, making health care affordable for our children, making housing affordable, making energy affordable. That’s where the focus ought to be.
WELKER: Okay. Congress—
CLYBURN: And we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and maybe do both.
For as long as there has been a President Donald Trump, there have been Democrats who have wanted to impeach him. I mean this literally: back on January 20, 2017 — Trump’s first day in office, in his first term — two progressive groups, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, launched a campaign calling for Trump’s impeachment. As you likely recall, Trump was impeached twice and acquitted by the Senate twice; more on that in a moment.
Free Speech for People launched a new initiative — Impeach Trump Again — on January 20, 2025, the first day of Trump’s second term. In June, the group commissioned a survey that found 53 percent of Americans believe there are grounds for impeachment, including 40 percent who say there are “definitely” grounds for impeachment. Just 39 percent said there were not grounds for impeachment.
This past August, Democratic Representative Al Green — who lost his primary for reelection in Texas — introduced another resolution to impeach Trump.
If Trump’s impeachment is as popular as Free Speech for People’s polling numbers contend, you might wonder why Clyburn sounds so noncommittal and emphasizes that impeaching Trump won’t make housing, education, energy, or health care affordable.
(Hey, remember the Affordable Care Act? Remember when the Obama administration insisted, “President Obama promised that he would make quality, affordable health care not a privilege, but a right. After nearly 100 years of talk and decades of trying by presidents of both parties, that’s exactly what he did.” Here we are, 16 years after its passage, and ten years after that declaration of a promise kept, and Democrats are still running for office saying that health care is unaffordable. It’s like “crumbling roads and bridges.” No matter how many massive, big-spending infrastructure bills get passed, lawmakers come back a short while later and argue we need to pass another one, because of our “crumbling roads and bridges.” Whatever the U.S. government has spent in recent years, some candidate out there will insist this vital priority is desperately underfunded.)
Most election analysts think that if Democrats win control of the Senate, they will do so with the slimmest of majorities, 51 seats to 49 seats. If you give Democrats a win in every competitive Senate race, you can get them to 52 seats. (I don’t buy that Andrews campaign poll that put Democrat Annie Andrews ahead of Darline Graham in South Carolina by three percentage points; a subsequent independent nonpartisan survey put Graham ahead by 13 percentage points.)
Removing Trump from office would require 67 Senate votes to convict, a threshold so far beyond partisan reach that it makes the filibuster look like a speed bump.
Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021 produced the most bipartisan conviction vote in history, and it still only got 57 votes, ten short, with seven Republicans breaking ranks after the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. The seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump were Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
There are now fewer Republican senators around who give off any whiff of willingness to defy Trump. Murkowski will be around next year, and Collins probably will. But that doesn’t get Democrats anywhere close to 67. Votes to convict will probably top out somewhere in the low to mid-50s.
If seven was the ceiling after January 6, the idea that 15 or 16 Senate Republicans cross over in 2027 to convict is not a prediction so much as a hallucination with a press release attached.
If House Democrats vote to impeach Trump a third time, it will pass on party lines, generate a few weeks of cable news apoplexy, and then go to the Senate to die exactly as the first two did, this time probably without even the fig leaf of bipartisan drama. Trump will not be removed from office.
The rest of us will watch this “threequel” and wonder what the point was, since it was so obvious that this third effort would end the same way the first two did. Democrats will likely argue that they will do this to “hold Trump accountable.”
To quote Dr. Phil . . . how’s that working out for you?
Rather than a stinging rebuke, a third impeachment is likely to become a demonstration of congressional impotence. By 2021, Trump had become the most impeached American president of all time. The electorate reelected him in 2024 anyway. Yes, the House voting to impeach Trump for a third time will be treated as something akin to a Super Bowl victory on MS NOW and #Resistance social media, and the likes of Jennifer Welch and Hasan Piker will likely react like Meg Ryan in the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally.
But in the end . . . Trump will remain sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, and he is just about certain to treat acquittal No. 3 as validation No. 3, which is the political equivalent of a man surviving a car crash and concluding he’s an excellent driver.
In that Cain interview, Trump contended, “They impeached me twice and, by the way, I won the impeachments very easily and quickly.” In Trump’s mind, 57 senators voting to remove you from office is a “win.”
And yet, if your political opponents spend a lot of time and energy doing something that doesn’t change anything . . . maybe it is a win, after all.
ADDENDUM: A few weeks ago, this newsletter assessed the grim outlook for the Ken Paxton for Senate campaign, and warned, “If you’re running for office, you can’t be a slimeball and be lazy.”
I had missed that Paxton chose to spend this most recent July 4 weekend . . . in London, England.
Why? Why would you make that choice? There must have been a thousand events in the Lone Star State that were celebrating the country’s 250th birthday. Why would you choose to not attend any of them and to go overseas instead? Why would you choose to go to the country we fought against on that anniversary?
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana appeared on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing this past weekend, and mentioned this about the Texas Senate race:
We in the Senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the president. President says he has $850 million in his campaign accounts. That’s a lot of jack. I’m hoping that the president’s going to spend a 100 or 200 million in Texas, but he hasn’t committed to it yet. But in the meantime, we’ve got a race, and I’m not going to play-act and say that we don’t.
I’m sorry, Senator, did you just say that you’re hoping that the president will spend $100 million to $200 million in Texas?
Trump indeed said he has raised “about $850 million” in his campaign account.
Early voting in Texas begins October 19.