Now we know Donald Trump thinks he’s going to be impeached

| 8:10 pm EDT May 2, 2018
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

There are stretches in which Donald Trump seems to convince himself that he’s somehow going to magically survive his worsening criminal scandals, even as it becomes more clear by the day that he’s going to prison for them. Then there are other times in which Trump seems to be briefly lucid enough to understand how screwed he is. He even told a crowd over the weekend that if Democrats win the midterms, they’ll impeach him. Now we know that he really does believe this.

Ty Cobb announced today that he was resigning from Donald Trump’s legal defense team. In his place, Trump is hiring Emmet Flood. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Flood was Bill Clinton’s lawyer when he was being impeached. Trump has reportedly spent the past month trying and failing to hire Flood, and it’s not entirely clear why Flood has relented now. But what is clear is that Trump now expects to be impeached, and perhaps sooner than later.

You don’t hire a criminal defense attorney specializing in murder trials unless you expect to be imminently tried for murder. Similarly, you don’t hire an impeachment attorney like Emmet Flood unless you expect to be impeached. If the Democrats win the midterms in November, they’ll officially take majority control in early January, and impeachment hearings will begin in the House immediately. But that’s the better part of a year away.

Donald Trump’s decision to hire an impeachment attorney like Emmet Flood, and more importantly Flood’s decision to reluctantly take the case, suggests that Trump thinks he’s going to be impeached sooner than January. That doesn’t mean there’s any chance of it actually happening while the Republicans are still in control of the House, just that Trump fears it might happen before the midterms. The GOP is in a desperate no-win situation heading into the midterms. Does he know something about the party leadership’s plans that we don’t? Stay tuned.