Donald Trump just guaranteed his own impeachment
Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats have been taking all the necessary first steps in the impeachment of Donald Trump, including cracking down on non-cooperative witnesses who are trying to protect Trump, and scheduling witnesses who are willing to go in front of the cameras and help take Trump down. But because this process will take perhaps a month anyway, there has been no need to call it impeachment yet – and thus no guarantee that House Democrats will actually commit to it when the time comes. That just changed this evening.
Donald Trump posted a tweet that’s getting a lot of attention because he claimed in illiterate fashion that the first two years have been “stollen” from him by the Mueller probe. Even as everyone makes fun of him, no one should overlook his separate retweet tonight which called for him to have two extra years tacked onto the end of his term. They weren’t Trump’s words, but he adopted them by retweeting them.
Make no mistake, this is the moment that will be looked back upon as the inflection point in Donald Trump’s downfall. He just called for his own presidency to be illegally extended. In so doing, he’s declared himself Emperor of the United States. Just yesterday, Nancy Pelosi predicted that Trump won’t leave peacefully when his term is up – but the average person out there wasn’t going to believe Trump would do something so cartoonishly treacherous unless Trump confessed to it. Now Trump just confessed to it. If and when he loses the 2020 election, he’s telling us that he’ll demand to stay in office two more years.
This retweet alone forces the impeachment issue. It will happen. We don’t know if Trump is strategically forcing impeachment as a way of coming out swinging against Robert Mueller’s upcoming testimony, or if Trump has just snapped and no longer cares what impact his treasonous words might have on him. But impeachment just went from being probable to inevitable. Welcome to the show. As a reminder, “impeachment” and “removal” are not the same thing.
