Trump Rants That He Can’t Be Impeached After Winning ‘The Greatest Election Of All Time’
Perhaps in reaction to a handful of Democrats calling for impeachment on day one of the new Congressional term, President Donald Trump on Friday issued a tweet in response, saying that he shouldn’t be impeached based on his election win two years ago.
In his tweet, Trump also alluded to himself being a “great” president, who has had plenty of accomplishments in the first half of his term. He also brought up collusion with Russia, which some have accused him of doing after several reports and leaks about the Russia investigation have come forward over the past year and a half.
“How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” Trump wrote in his tweet.
Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 but lost the popular vote by around 3 million votes nationally to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Only four other presidents have won the election without securing a plurality of votes, according to the Independent, which reported on the topic back in 2016 after Trump’s win.
Some Democrats have suggested they want to start an impeachment process against the president right away. Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, said he planned on submitting articles of impeachment on Thursday, according to reporting from Fox News. Democratic leadership, however, has urged lawmakers to set a higher bar for impeachment, warning that there isn’t ample cause as yet to push for Trump’s removal through the legal mechanism, per reporting from the Hill.
President Trump reacts to new impeachment talk: "(Democrats) only want to impeach me because they know they can't win in 2020, too much success!" https://t.co/Ctwc5n4hGK pic.twitter.com/v7XohsQ7RR
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 4, 2019
Polling on the issue demonstrates some Americans are receptive to the idea while others are not. A CAPS/Harris poll released this past week found that 39 percent of respondents wanted the impeachment process to begin, while 20 percent thought that as of right now, a censure of the president by Congress would be more appropriate. A slim majority, 51 percent, said that impeachment shouldn’t begin at this time, according to reporting from AOL.
Impeachment against a president requires a majority of the House of Representatives to agree to do so. Democrats definitely have a majority at this time, but with the Russia investigation still ongoing, the evidence for (or against) impeachment is not yet public and could be a political miscalculation if it’s done too soon. While the House is in charge of impeachment, the Senate is in charge of deciding if the charges of impeachment warrant removal of a president, requiring two-thirds of that legislative body of Congress to vote in the affirmative in order to do so.
Calls for the impeachment of a sitting president by an opposing political party isn’t uncommon in these modern times. Former Democratic President Barack Obama, for example, faced a barrage of calls for impeachment after his first two years in office, and beyond, according to reporting from the Atlantic.
