Rachel Maddow just asked the right question about Donald Trump’s impeachment, and I think I know the answer

| 9:55 pm EDT September 24, 2019
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There’s a reason Rachel Maddow is the most respected host on cable news. Whatever the story of the day ends up being, she knows how to put it into a larger political and historical context, and she figures out which questions we should all be focusing on. This evening, Maddow asked the right question about Donald Trump’s impeachment – and I think I may know the answer.

Maddow laid out the fact that the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton failed to remove them, and that the only president who has been forced out of office – Richard Nixon – wasn’t technically impeached. Her question was this: now that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced an official House impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, what’s going to actually change?

I think Nancy Pelosi’s move today puts a couple things immediately in play. First, it forces the issue to where Donald Trump now has to immediately respond to his whistleblower scandal. Trump is the king of unforced errors in situations like this. We’ve already seen him confess to withholding Ukraine aid over the phony Joe Biden scandal, and then retract that confession, within a span of hours.

The sheer stakes of today’s impeachment announcement forced the Republican Senate to go along Chuck Schumer’s resolution calling for Donald Trump to release the whistleblower report, meaning Trump is backed into a corner. If he releases it, it’ll incriminate him. If he has Bill Barr doctor or strategically redact it before releasing it, such a stunt will immediately get seen through this time around (the dishonestly redacted Mueller report used up that one space on the bingo card), and it’ll make Trump look even more guilty.

So we’re about to see Donald Trump accelerate his own downfall, in what Nancy Pelosi once presciently called “self-impeachment.” It was the threat of impeachment that ultimately prompted Richard Nixon to panic in ways that assured his downfall. I think that’s what Pelosi has set in motion here, and I think Trump is going to do severe, insurmountable damage to himself over the next few days. Stay tuned.