The Memo: Even Trump agrees a third impeachment looks possible

A third impeachment of President Trump could be on the agenda if Democrats win control of Congress in November — and that’s according to the commander in chief himself.

“You got to win the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans at a retreat Tuesday. “If we don’t win the midterms … they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

Trump is, of course, making this argument for his own political reasons.

He hopes the specter of impeachment will bolster the determination of his party colleagues as they try to retain an extremely narrow House majority. He is also seeking to fire up the spirits of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) voters, who serve as a kind of electoral praetorian guard.

MAGA voters have helped Trump win the presidency in two of the three elections he has contested. But when his name is absent from the ballot, they do not always materialize for the GOP.

During Trump’s first term, Democrats netted 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms — despite the president urging his supporters to back his party.

Democrats need only a fraction of that number this year to retake the House. Right now, the GOP’s edge in the lower chamber is a mere five seats.

In any event, nobody doubts that Democratic control of the House after the midterms would at the very least make another effort to impeach Trump more likely.

He is already the only president in American history to have been impeached twice — first for an effort that was cast as him blocking congressionally-mandated U.S. aid to Ukraine to try to force Kyiv to investigate his political foes; and later for his conduct relating to the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.

There are already stirrings suggesting that Democrats will try again.

Rep. Al Green (R-Texas), a frequent wielder of the weapon of threatened impeachment, filed a new resolution in December. Green’s resolution proposes to impeach Trump as an “abuser of presidential power who, if left in office, will continue to promote violence.”

Specifically, Green was reacting to Trump’s implied suggestion last November that six Democratic lawmakers who had released a video encouraging troops to defy illegal orders should face the death penalty.

In a social media post, Trump had alleged that the six were guilty of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

There is, of course, no possibility at all of Green’s impeachment effort, or any similar push, gaining steam while Democrats remain in the minority in the House.

If the math changes when a new Congress is sworn in a year from now, it’s likely that the “seditious conspiracy” furor will be only the faintest of memories.

But there are other, more legally substantive matters that could become part of a future impeachment effort — even as Trump and his allies emphatically deny any wrongdoing.

The legality of the recent raid on Venezuela is disputed at home and abroad.

The actions of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have already drawn numerous civil lawsuits — and that was before the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday. It’s easy to imagine Democrats casting ICE’s actions as a broader pattern of illegality directed by Trump.

Questions also swirl around the legality of some of the sweeping cuts spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency;  whether the president has used his regularity powers to enrich himself — as when a flimsy lawsuit centered on CBS’s “60 Minutes” was settled for $16 million as a merger awaited approval; whether he directed the Department of Justice to engage in vindictive prosecutions against enemies like James Comey and Letitia James; and even the degree to which the Trump family’s wealth is reported to have skyrocketed during his first year back in power.

But there is a flip side to all of this — and it goes well beyond Trump’s insistence that all the issues mentioned above are fully legal and above board.

Specifically, Trump has often benefited politically from the idea that he is the victim of sprawling “lawfare” pushed by his political enemies.

In 2024, there was an extraordinary list of apparent black marks against his name — felony convictions for falsifying business records in a case centered on hush-money payments to a porn actor; three outstanding criminal cases, two of which pertained to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election; and the two impeachments.

Trump beat former Vice President Kamala Harris handily regardless. Months before that, his conviction in the business records case led to his two highest fundraising days of his entire campaign up to that point.

These dynamics — as well as a belief that a purely anti-Trump campaign has electoral limitations — persuade even some Democrats that the party should not put impeachment front and center on the trail this year.

“Give voters something to vote for rather than something to vote against,” Democratic strategist Basil Smikle Jr. counseled his party colleagues.

“The more you talk about impeachment, the less time you spend talking about the voter. You focus on Trump, on what you think are impeachable offenses — but that’s a lot about process,  and it takes away from talking about policies.”

Smikle, who is based in New York, cited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) campaign last year, praising the young democratic socialist for “having a focus on the same things voters are focused on, which is affordability, which is housing, which is opportunity.”

Other Democrats have been making similar arguments in the recent past, even as liberal rage at Trump remains high. 

For both Democrats and Republicans alike, the Trump Question is a complicated one. 

He energizes base voters on both sides, but a campaign focused upon him can seem increasingly backward-looking, especially when he cannot legally hold office beyond January 2029.

But Trump’s dominance of the political landscape, for good or bad, is so profound that he is nowhere near lame-duck status yet.

His fate will surely hang over the midterms to some degree — just as he has loomed over every election for the past decade.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.