America's founders would have already kicked Trump out of office by now: presidential historian

Even though the redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report is set to come out on Thursday, one presidential historian already believes that we already have all the information we need to impeach President Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Engel, the director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, writes in the Washington Post that impeaching Trump should be a "no-brainer," and he thinks America's founders would agree with him.

"The group that created our nation’s founding document would already have judged Donald Trump unfit for office -- and removed him -- because he’s repeatedly shown a dearth of the quality they considered paramount in a president: a willingness to put national interest above his own," Engel argues.

He goes on to explain that the founders intended to give Congress the power to impeach the president even if they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president had committed crimes.

"The Constitution’s authors understood that impeachable treachery need not, in fact, be a literal crime at all, but rather a demonstration that a president’s presence harmed the body politic, the people, either through maliciousness or selfishness," Engel writes. "For example, any president 'who has practiced corruption' to win election, a Pennsylvania delegate argued, should be impeached. So, too, in the eyes of Virginia’s James Madison, should any president who 'might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression,' or any who 'betray[ed] his trust to foreign powers.' And what of a president who used his immense pardon power to conceal his guilt, perhaps by promising a pardon to subordinates he ordered to break the law? They thought of that, too."

Trump, Engel argues, has been credibly accused of all these misdeeds.

Read the whole editorial here.