Does President Donald Trump want to be impeached? Some defenders and opponents of the president have argued since the Republicans lost the House in 2018 that an ultimately failed impeachment and removal process could be a boon to him, and many of those who are inclined to criticize the Democratic Party have argued that they are playing into Trump’s hand by passing impeachment articles.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, prior to the Ukraine scandal, even suggested she thought that Trump might be actively trying to be impeached for his own benefit.
The actual electoral consequences of the move may be difficult if not impossible to determine, especially since the 2020 election is almost a year away. Many other factors that arise in the meantime could affect the result. But on the question of how Trump himself actually feels about impeachment, above and beyond his beliefs about the consequences, the answer was revealed in a 2014 interview on “Fox & Friends.”
In the interview, recently resurfaced by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, Trump discussed the prospect of a potential impeachment of then-President Barack Obama and a government shutdown. He seemed in favor of impeachment.
“I’ve been watching the Democrats play poker for the last four years, actually. And I say let’s give them the benefit of the first two — but for the last four years, and listening to them say, ‘He’d love to be impeached, he’d love to be impeached. He’d love to see the government shutdown!'” he said. “They must be coached, they must go to school for this.”
He continued: “What a lot of crap! Because all what they’re doing, they’re actually talking the Republicans into not doing it. Do you think Obama — seriously — wants to be impeached and go through what Bill Clinton did? He would be a mess. He would be thinking about nothing but — it would be a horror show for him. It would be an absolute embarrassment. It would go down on his record permanently. But they’re saying, ‘Oh, he’d love to be impeached, that would be so good!’ And the Republicans, they’re all saying, ‘Oh, we’d never impeach him, we’d never impeach him! Because he’d like that.'”
Trump’s prediction about how Obama would react to impeachment actually seems to have been prescient about his own response. Consider, for instance, this Twitter outburst Trump had on Wednesday:
Pressed directly on whether Obama should be impeached in 2014, Trump reverted to his usual form of vague answers, saying it depends on Chief Justice John Roberts.
“But it certainly depends on what happens,” Trump said. “But I think certainly he could be impeached.”
The video provides pretty compelling evidence that, despite his bluster and his defenders’ assurances, impeachment is and will be a humiliating blow to his ego. And it might sting even more because it never happened to Obama, who he seems to have thought deserved it. Democrats may take some comfort in the fact that impeachment will have this effect on the president’s psyche, but it also suggests the likelihood that — assuming he’ll be acquitted by the Senate — Trump will be out for retribution more than ever.
