Donald Trump Has Committed Too Many High Crimes to Count. But Should Democrats Really Impeach Again?
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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:
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........
