Impeachment: Trump’s 2020 Battle Cry?

Donald Trump will be the first impeached US president to seek re-election in more than 150 years, and he’s betting that voters in key swing states will view his rebuke at the hands of House

Democrats

as a rallying cry.


Far from showing contrition or contemplating resignation, as his predecessors have done in the face of impeachment, the US president instead offered an indignant defense as the House weighed his fate, raging on Twitter from the White House. “SUCH ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS,” the president wrote as the debate took place on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. “THIS IS AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA, AND AN ASSAULT ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!!”

Later, as members cast their votes to impeach him in Washington, Trump took the stage to roars of adulation from his supporters at an arena-style campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, a Republican stronghold that helped him win the traditionally Democratic state in 2016. He brushed aside the constitutional confrontation as a “hoax” based on unfounded charges, and said the move to impeach him will result in a “big backlash at the box office” — which he quickly corrected to “ballot box.”

“I’m not worried,” Trump said. “You don’t do anything wrong and you get impeached. That may be a record that will last forever.” “But you know what they have done?” he said of Democrats. “They have cheapened the impeachment process.”

Recent national polls have shown weakening support for Trump’s removal from office, and in states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, data and interviews suggest the picture is even brighter for the incumbent president.

In fact, more than 99% of Trump’s TV ads have focused on impeachment this year, according to an analysis that shows how central the topic has become for his re-election campaign. The anti-impeachment blitz has cost the Trump campaign over $4.4 million for more than 4,500 television ad airings through December 14, the Wesleyan Media Project, a nonpartisan group that tracks political advertising, said in a report on Thursday.

No other president has previously won his party’s nomination for election after being impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached during his second term. Andrew Johnson, impeached in 1868 after clashes with Republicans over reconstruction following the Civil War, lost the Democratic Party nominationRichard Nixon resigned in 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment related to the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.

And despite his unpopularity and the gravity of the Ukraine allegations, Trump has all but squelched a primary challenge to his re-election. That “tells us how much this has become the party of President Trump,” said Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “A president that is this unpopular nationally should be ripe for a challenger,” he said.