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If, as seems likely, Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in November, there will be tremendous pressure from the Democratic base to start a third round of impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. If Democrats also win the Senate, the pressure will be still greater. Trump himself has predicted that if Democrats win the midterms, “I’ll get impeached.”
Would another impeachment of Donald Trump make sense? Would it be constitutionally supportable, and would it be in the best interests of the country? I attempt to answer those questions in a new book—Great and Dangerous Offences: The Case For (and Against) Impeaching Trump a Third Time—due out in early 2027. In this end-of-summer series, “Try, Try Again?,” I will lay out the case for impeachment that is most likely to earn buy-in from American voters and also consider the best arguments against another Trump impeachment.
Anyone considering a third Trump impeachment has to answer two questions: First, has Trump engaged in impeachable conduct in his second term? Second, even if so, what is the purpose of a third impeachment effort, and is that purpose achievable?
The clear answer to the first question is yes. Indeed, the perverse difficulty confronting any Trump impeachment project is that he has committed so many impeachable offenses that categorizing and explaining them all in ways the public can easily digest is a daunting challenge.
Unlike the British, from whom the America’s founders adapted impeachment, the Framers wrote a definition of impeachable conduct into the Constitution—“treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That definition has often fomented debate in prior presidential impeachments, primarily because the meaning of high Crimes and Misdemeanors is not immediately evident from the words themselves. Whatever else this enigmatic phrase may cover, it is plain from British constitutional history, the statements of those involved in drafting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, and subsequent American practice that it reaches corruption in office for the personal gain of oneself or one’s family, serious criminality, and direct violations of significant provisions of the Constitution. More importantly, it covers an effort by the president to subvert the constitutional order by evading its structure of interbranch checks and balances, undercutting democracy, degrading the rule of law, and setting himself up as an elected autocrat.
In his second term, Donald Trump has done all these things. His impeachable offenses include:
Personal Corruption
In the first year after his second inauguration in January 2025, Trump is reported to have made a staggering $2.24 billion. Much of this money has come directly from abuses of his presidential office. He has filed lawsuits in his personal capacity against businesses subject to federal regulation or dependent on federal contracts and leveraged his control over the executive branch to extort settlements of tens of millions of dollars. He sued the IRS over leaks of his personal tax returns, then used his control over the Justice Department to secure a collusive “settlement” that, among other things, purports to give him and members of his family immunity from federal tax audits. If upheld, the immunity would eliminate a pending tax liability estimated at $100 million. This agreement may be a federal felony as well.
Trump has also monetized public information by making his for-profit Truth Social media platform a primary venue for announcing government policy and, more egregiously, by launching Truth Social API, which sells early access to Trump’s announcements to institutions with financial interests in trading on such early access.
Trump has reportedly made more than $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency investments, facilitated by gutting the civil and criminal regulatory structure around crypto, the award of pardons to convicted cryptocurrency businessmen (including Changpeng Zhao, whose Binance company helped set up the Trump family crypto business), and accepting money from foreign government–backed entities and dodgy private businessmen.
Emoluments Clauses
The domestic and foreign emoluments clauses were inserted into the Constitution to prevent foreign powers, Congress, other federal executive officers, and state governments from buying influence with the president. Trump has violated both. He continues his first-term practice of taking in millions of dollars from state and federal officials who visit his resort properties on government or political business. He accepted a $400 million luxury airplane from Qatar to be used as Air Force One and, he claims, to be later transferred to his presidential library. The Trump Organization, which he controls, has entered into a series of staggeringly lucrative agreements with entities backed by foreign governments with significant interest in U.S. government policy (e.g., Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi).
Public Corruption
When the Framers spoke of impeachable corruption, they meant not merely corruption that enriched the president and his family, but also the kind of corruption endemic in monarchical Britain, where the king controlled politics through the award of titles, offices, commercial concessions, and outright bribes to members of Parliament and other powerful people. Donald Trump has embraced this sort of corruption, albeit in a contemporary form. In modern politics, money buys power. To secure it, Trump has used the stick of legal threats against businesses he dislikes, as he did with multiple national law firms. He has also offered carrots to businesses and the individual rich in the form of grants of lucrative government contracts, removal of antitrust barriers to mergers and acquisitions, direct government investment in favored businesses, destruction of civil and criminal enforcement mechanisms aimed at corporate crime, and pardons of business criminals who support him or are connected to those in his orbit. His reward has been a torrent of contributions to his political and personal projects.
Power of the Purse
Perhaps the most fundamental authority of Congress is its “power of the purse”—the exclusive power conveyed by Article 1 of the Constitution to both impose taxes and control the expenditure of federal money. By repeatedly imposing tariffs in violation of law, he has usurped Congress’ power of taxation. By routinely dismantling federal programs and agencies, withholding congressionally appropriated funds, and unilaterally canceling congressionally authorized grants, all without congressional authority, he has usurped Congress’ power over federal expenditure. Moreover, he has selectively withheld funding to organizations, states, or regions associated with his real or perceived political opponents in violation of law and, arguably, of the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution.
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Property Clause
Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution confers on Congress the exclusive power to “dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the … property of the United States.” By tearing down the East Wing of the White House and commencing the $900 million construction of a ballroom on the site without congressional approval—using private funds but mostly taxpayer dollars—Trump violated the property clause and congressional appropriations authority.
First Amendment
Trump has systematically violated the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment. He has filed meritless lawsuits against media companies and social media platforms and extorted large monetary settlements. Acting through his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, he has threatened the broadcast licenses of media outlets that provide unfavorable coverage of him. He has actively sought to suppress First Amendment–protected freedom of speech by characterizing political opponents as “terrorists” subject to criminal investigation and prosecution. He has discouraged the freedom of assembly by threatening to cut off federal funding to any college or university that “allows” demonstrations of which he disapproves.
Murder
He has authorized repeated fatal missile and drone attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean based on mere suspicion that their occupants were engaged in smuggling illegal drugs. To date, over 200 persons have been killed. These strikes violate both military and civilian law and amount to criminal homicide.
Destruction of the Rule of Law
Essential to both personal liberty and constitutional governance is the rule of law. Trump has effectively dismantled federal civil regulatory and criminal investigative and prosecutorial agencies as neutral enforcers of national law, transforming them into agents of favoritism for himself, his family, and his supporters, and instruments of retribution and suppression against his critics. He has reinstated in modern America a keystone of absolute monarchy by declaring his personal opinions about the law to be binding on all employees of the executive branch, including administrative law judges. He has repeatedly attacked and attempted to delegitimize Article 3 judges with whose opinions he disagrees. His anti-immigrant campaign has consistently and unconstitutionally denied due process of law to persons detained by federal officials.
Attacks on Democracy
Trump has already been impeached once for scheming to overturn a presidential election. He compounded that offense on the first day of his second term by pardoning or commuting the sentences of his Jan. 6 criminal confederates and co-conspirators. Multiple Framers explicitly declared that a pardon of this sort would be an impeachable offense.
Drive for Autocracy
When creating the presidency, one of the Framers’ greatest worries was that holders of the new office would break through all the anti-monarchical provisions of the Constitution to become autocrats. It was in part to this fear that George Mason referred when he insisted at the Constitutional Convention that any definition of impeachable conduct must cover “attempts to subvert the Constitution.” Taken as a whole, Trump’s conduct during his second term amounts to a wholesale attack on the constitutional order and, as British parliamentarians put it in several of their impeachment efforts, an attempt “to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical way of government.”
In any previous era of American history, this article could stop here. The president is openly corrupt. He is mounting a daily assault on American constitutionalism. He is guilty of a cornucopia of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. Therefore, impeachment in the House should commence. Conviction and removal in the Senate would surely follow.
The problem, of course, is that the last statement is not true. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate—67 senators—to convict in an impeachment proceeding. Even if the Democrats were to win control of the Senate in the midterms, gaining a 51–49 majority, conviction would require the votes of every Democrat and 16 Republican senators. The odds of such a mass Republican defection from Trump’s cult of personality are close to zero.
If one doubts the point, remember that in 2021, only weeks after Trump incited an attack on the Capitol—and on the members of Congress themselves—in an effort to overturn an election, a mere seven Republican senators, five of whom are no longer in Congress, voted for his impeachment. Consider also the recent Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. Blanche has been Trump’s agent in committing multiple impeachable offenses. He has overseen the conversion of the Department of Justice from neutral law-enforcement agency to instrument of presidential spite and retribution. He has helped dismantle the legal structures that might have restrained the Trump family’s crypto corruption. He was the primary architect of the corrupt, collusive, and illegal “settlement” of Trump’s IRS suit. Yet, knowing all that, 50 of 53 Republican senators voted to install Blanche as attorney general (Mitch McConnell being absent). Can it seriously be imagined that any more would vote to convict and remove Trump for being the author and beneficiary of Blanche’s misdeeds?
If a third impeachment is attempted, it must proceed with the clear-eyed recognition that, regardless of the charges or the strength of the evidence, Republican senators will almost certainly not abandon Trump in sufficient numbers to convict him.
That being so, why do it?
One answer might be that the House has a duty to commence impeachment proceedings if a president has engaged in impeachable conduct, regardless of the likely outcome of the case in the Senate. I certainly agree that the mindless loyalty of a president’s party should not automatically bar the House from investigating presidential misconduct or considering articles of impeachment if there is ample evidence to support them.
But it must always be remembered that impeachment is a political remedy for the political problem of an unfit, corrupt, or autocratic president. There is no constitutional duty to unlimber the remedy if it will not solve, or at least help solve, the problem. In Trump’s case, impeachment will almost certainly not expel him from office. It should therefore be started only if it can serve some other beneficial public end.
The biggest potential benefits of an unsuccessful impeachment flow from the investigation itself. Congress has the authority to investigate presidential actions using its general oversight power. However, the power to compel compliance with congressional information demands is universally agreed to be greater in an impeachment inquiry. Although recent history suggests that Trump will defy Congress however strong its constitutional position, any investigation of Trump should be armed with all the legal authority it can muster. Moreover, a formal impeachment investigation provides a high-profile public forum in which to educate the public about presidential wrongdoing.
To be sure, all of the Trump misdeeds mentioned above (and more) need to be investigated, publicized, and sharply critiqued by a Democratic-majority Congress. The conduct, considered piece by piece and in the aggregate, is so outrageous that focusing public attention on it ought to increase votes against the Trump GOP’s autocratic turn and toward a return to democracy.
Dear (Juris)Prudence: Who Cooks Up the Supreme Court’s BS Originalist Ideas, Anyway?
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The optimistic view that congressional investigations will move public opinion has to be weighed against the real possibility that framing Trump’s many transgressions in terms of impeachment risks diminishing their impact on the voting public. The sad truth is that impeachment has in recent years been so often employed by each party against the officials of the other that many voters are quite likely to discount, even scoff at, any impeachment campaign as a crassly partisan gesture. And if that reaction is common, impeachment may only hobble the transcendently important project of defeating Trumpism and restoring healthy constitutional government.
I am certain that Trump is a dangerous would-be autocrat who has committed a plethora of high crimes and misdemeanors. At the same time, I am not yet certain whether a hoped-for Democratic majority in the House should launch a formal impeachment proceeding against him. Still, laying out the major grounds on which Trump is impeachable may convince voters to reject candidates who persist in supporting Trump’s ongoing assault on constitutional democracy. With or without a third impeachment, Trumpism can only be finally defeated if the American electorate rejects it.