It’s only 3.5 years to go.
- Congress needs to start working together
- Achieve some things directly against Trump’s wishes
- Public opinion sways to see how much better things could be without Trump.
- Congress can actually impeach and get rid of Trump
I doubt this will happen, and some might argue that 3 is already true, but I don’t think it is. Until Congress gets it’s shit together in a bipartisan way, most people will assume that a change of president is not going to do much.
The Senate did vote 97-2 to impose sanctions on Russia. The House passed similar legislation by a similarly wide margin. Trump used to oppose this, but now the White House has said that he will sign the bill. This could count under number one and two.
Meanwhile, 43 percent of the public wants Donald Trump to be impeached. This may seem like a lousy number, but in July 1973, about a year before Nixon resigned, 24 percent of the public wanted Richard Nixon to be impeached. I would expect that number to tick up in the coming months.
Finally, if Democrats win the House in 2018 (which they have a good shot of doing), I would expect Donald Trump to be impeached by the House very quickly. I’m not sure, however, if the Senate would convict him of a crime and therefore forcing him out of office. It would be a tall order to get around a dozen Republicans on board for that. Maybe if it seems like Trump is threatening the Republican agenda, they’ll decide that President Pence would be a better route to take. Who knows, though. I don’t know what the political climate might be like in 2019 or what revelations might have come up by then. There’s also the (very small) chance that this Russia story was nothing to begin with, or that Trump personally wasn’t involved in any collusion. I seriously doubt that, but it’s a possibility.