Protesters throughout the U.S. are starting to make a call to impeach Trump, even months before he will take office officially. Everything he does between now and Jan. 20 will be closely watched and heavily critiqued as people try to determine how serious he is about the more radical statements he has made.
But will there be anything to impeach President-elect Donald Trump for? A growing number of people are predicting that he will do something to give Congress grounds to do it—and that his fellow Republicans will be happy to follow through with it. Also a researcher claimed months ago that Trump is already guilty of some things that he could be impeached for.
Impeachment a hot topic
I know more than a few people who cast their votes based on the vice president candidates because impeachment has been a hot topic even leading up to the election. In September, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama suggested to the Associated Press that Congress should look into impeaching Hillary Clinton, had she been elected. Talk about impeaching her only grew leading up to the elections, with more and more Republicans considering moving against her if she would have been elected.
Few people would deny that both Clinton and Trump have their faults, and arguably most Americans made their choice based on their greater dislike for the policies of the other candidate rather than any real support for the one they voted for. Because the vote was so close and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a fraction of a percent, while Trump took the binding Electoral College vote to win the White House, the nation has been in an uproar as protesters moved beyond words and became violent.
But the reality is that now Trump is President-elect, and both houses of Congress will be controlled by his party. So will they try to impeach Trump?
Predictions that Congress will impeach Trump
Now two prominent voices are predicting that Congress will indeed vote to impeach Trump despite the fact that he’s in their own party. One is the so-called “Prediction Professor,” Allan Lichtman, who also correctly predicted Donald Trump’s surprise win last week even as media outlets declared Clinton to be ahead. According to The Washington Post, Lichtman said Trump would win because voters tend to cast their ballot based on the performance of the party in power. In other words, he believes that enough people were so dissatisfied with the Obama administration that they voted against the status quo, a.k.a., Hillary Clinton.
Now Lichtman says he believes Republicans will move to impeach Trump because they would rather have Mike Pence as president. He called it a gut feeling because Republicans know and trust Pence, but Trump seems unpredictable, and they may not be able to control him.
“They’d love to have Pence – an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican,” he told The Washington Post.
Finding grounds to impeach Trump
The next question is whether they will find anything to impeach Trump for, and Lichtman predicts that it won’t be hard to do. He’s “quite certain” that the real estate mogul will do something to give Congress grounds to impeach him, “either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”
Staunch liberal Michael Moore also predicts that Congress will impeach Trump, and like Lichtman, he predicted in July that Trump would be the next President. He also expects Trump to do something that will provide grounds for impeachment.
“When you have a narcissist like that, who’s so narcissistic where it’s all about him, he will, maybe unintentionally, break laws,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday. He will break laws because he’s only thinking about what’s best for him.
Also David Brooks of The New York Times predicted that Trump could resign or be impeached at some point in the next year.
Grounds to impeach Trump may already have been found
Apparently the University of Utah already found legal precedent to impeach Trump even though he hasn’t taken office yet. KUTV reported in September that law professor Christopher Peterson said he had found enough evidence to charge the now-President-elect with racketeering and fraud. Both crimes are considered to be felonies, which means that if he were to be found guilty of them, he could be impeached.
Peterson studied Trump University, where students spend nearly $30,000 to learn about how to practice real estate. However, he claimed in his report that the for-profit college is not accredited and that it was teaching students nothing but get-rich-quick schemes. Although the school was shuttered in 2010, lawsuits against it are still pending. He noted that false advertising is against the law, and he alleges that Trump University “used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of families into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham.”
Then there’s the fact that Trump is facing civil lawsuits in other areas, so should Congress decide to impeach Trump, they may already have the fodder needed to do it.
