How Robert Mueller’s testimony will draw a straight line to Donald Trump’s impeachment

| 9:09 am EDT May 6, 2019
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Last night Donald Trump pushed the impeachment question all the way to the forefront when he retweeted a demand that two extra years be added onto the end of his current term. House Democrats are bringing in Special Counsel Robert Mueller to publicly testify about Trump’s antics, and it’s fairly easy to draw a straight line from Mueller’s testimony to Trump’s impeachment. Here’s why.

About a week ago, CNN released a poll which showed that 37% of Americans were to some degree in favor of impeachment. Over the weekend, NBC News released a new poll which showed that 49% of Americans are to some degree in favor of impeachment. It’s tricky to compare the work of one polling outlet to that of another, as it gets a bit into apples and oranges territory. So it’s not fair to look at these two numbers and necessarily conclude that additional 12% of Americans have gotten on board with impeachment over the past week. But a jump of that size shows that there’s been some kind of movement in the impeachment direction over the past week.

The only thing that transpired last week that could have caused this kind of shift was Attorney General William Barr’s disastrous Senate Judiciary Committee testimony in front of the television cameras, and his subsequent unwillingness to show up for his House Judiciary Committee hearing. Barr’s ineptness made Donald Trump look overwhelmingly guilty. Most people haven’t read any of Mueller’s four hundred page report. But they saw Barr talking about the Mueller report on TV, and the polls suggest that some of them took it as a sign that Trump must be guilty after all.

Keep in mind that Barr’s testimony, in front of a Republican-controlled Senate committee, was supposed to help Donald Trump’s case. Barr was supposed to convince Americans that the Mueller report exonerated Trump. Instead it had the opposite effect – and it demonstrates the wide and instant impact that televised hearings can have.

Now imagine the impact that Robert Mueller’s televised testimony will have. He’ll pull in a huge audience of highly curious people. He’ll be talking about the criminal evidence against Donald Trump. He’ll be in front of a committee that’s controlled by the Democrats and thus won’t go off the rails. And by the time he’s done talking, the polls will have much higher pro-impeachment numbers than they do now. At that point impeachment won’t just be an option, it’ll be a mandate.