President Donald Trump's latest flurry of strong-armed tactics throughout the country are driven by one single, all-consuming fear, Jonathan Lemire argued for The Atlantic on Monday: the realization that Democrats are likely to win back control of at least one chamber of Congress next year, and could use that power to impeach him once again.
In his first term, Trump famously became the only president to ever be impeached twice — the first time for using weapons shipments to try to strongarm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into announcing a corruption investigation of the Biden family, and the second for inciting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of his electoral loss.
Both times, he was acquitted in the Senate, but at least some Republicans crossed the aisle to condemn him.
"Despite his return to the White House this year, he frequently complains privately and publicly about Democrats’ efforts to remove him from office in his first term," wrote Lemire. "Trump, to this day, insists that he did nothing wrong, calling both impeachments 'witch hunts.' And he is fearful that he might have to go through it all again."
After all, even if he can't be forced from office, it would block any future legislative agenda he has and let Democrats "open investigations into the Trump administration, dragging key officials to the Hill for embarrassing, headline-grabbing hearings," Lemire wrote.
This motivation is most obvious in his demands for Texas and other Republican-controlled states to re-gerrymander their congressional maps to block voters from having the ability to vote out Republicans — but it also plays a role in everything else he's doing, Lemire argued.
For instance, his federal takeover of Washington, D.C. can be seen as a bid to push up his own numbers on crime issues, while his efforts to jawbone the Fed to lower interest rates are a bid to temporarily juice his economic numbers. Meanwhile, he has advised Republican lawmakers to hold fewer town halls as angry voters humiliate them, and has done almost nothing to promote his own "Big, Beautiful Bill" as it became clear voters hate it. Even his planned "national housing emergency" declaration has been panned by experts as an attempt to try to defuse Democrats' messaging on cost of living.
“There’s a very potent brew of deeply held beliefs driving these tactics,” said former Mitt Romney presidential strategist Kevin Madden. “First and foremost, Trump thinks that his election was an absolute mandate, delivered by the voters despite every attempt by his opponents and critics to use politics and lawfare to defeat him.” From that perspective, Trump believes any tactics to stop Republicans losing the midterms are necessary. But many GOP strategists doubt this will work.
“Donald Trump knows that he needs the Republicans to control the House in order for him to keep operating without any checks on his power and avoiding congressional investigations,” Trump-skeptic GOP strategist Susan del Percio told Lemire. “But in the end, like almost every election, it will be about the economy, price of groceries, and if swing voters feel like they got screwed by the White House.”
