Here’s how Donald Trump gets impeached and removed
It is not inordinately starry-eyed nor optimistic to suggest that 2019 is going to be Donald Trump’s final year as, ahem, “president.” In Nixonian terms, we are on the threshold of 1974. This would not be so easy an assertion to make were it not for the events of the last two weeks. I’m reluctant to enumerate them all, even in part, because I’m bound to forget some disaster that has befallen the Trump White House in the preceding fortnight. But it’s hard to compare the Trump of, say, a month ago with the Trump of this holiday season. Back then, he’d merely hit the iceberg. By now the water is up to the portholes in First Class.
We have Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to thank for a bit of insight into the panicked minds of the loyal opposition. Forget what Sarah and Kellyanne are saying, things are not going well, and White House propaganda and other horseshit aside, everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows it. Mr. Reich has a friend who is a former member of Congress and he puts it this way. “Trump is in deep shit.”
According to Reich’s friend, as soon as the Robert Mueller report is published, Nancy Pelosi will finally have her raison d’etre for putting impeachment on the table. Accordingly the Democratic House will draft articles of impeachment, probably numerous ones, that will credibly inculpate Donald Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors.
The Senate will be duly empaneled to hear the condemnatory charges. All forty-seven Democrats will already be on board. All that will be required will be twenty Republican votes. And according to Reich’s friend, those twenty are already available. For Trump, impeachment and conviction will mean disgrace, loss of pension and an open road to civilian criminal prosecution with absolutely nothing to negotiate and nothing to keep him from spending the rest of his life in prison. Yes, 2019 is going to be an interesting year.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.