The countdown to Donald Trump’s impeachment is on, whether House Democrats are calling it that or not

| 4:30 pm EDT April 19, 2019
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The Mueller report is in – or at least most of it – and there’s enough in there to impeach Donald Trump a hundred times over. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to wait until the Mueller report came in before making any decisions about impeachment, yet she’s still not talking about it. In fact her lieutenant Steny Hoyer said yesterday that it’s still not worth it. The trouble here is that a lot of liberal activists are earnestly taking Pelosi and Hoyer at face value, and that’s not how politics works.

Let’s say Pelosi announced right now that she’s going to impeach Trump. The first steps would be to call Robert Mueller, along with the most useful of cooperators like Steve Bannon and Don McGahn and Hope Hicks, to publicly testify over the next month before the relevant House committees in order to establish what Trump did wrong. Well guess what? The House committees just announced that they’re bringing in precisely those people to publicly testify over the next month.

In other words, Pelosi and the Democratic House leadership are on an impeachment trajectory. It’s just that there’s absolutely no reason to call it “impeachment” until they reach the point where they have to formally commit to it. Moving ahead with the process, while fending off that word, is a smart play. The longer they wait to call it impeachment, the more loudly and angrily mainstream Americans will begin demanding impeachment – and that’s the whole point.

House Democrats will succeed with impeachment the most thoroughly if they allow mainstream Americans to “push” them into doing it, because then House Democrats will be seen by neutral observers as doing the solemn and earnest thing, as opposed to the partisan thing. It doesn’t matter what Trump’s base thinks, or what Trump’s biggest detractors think; the success or failure of the impeachment process will depend entirely on what the people in the middle think. Look at the witness list. Impeachment is already underway; they’re just not calling it that yet.