The Party, Not the Evidence

Four presidents have faced the constitutional machinery for removal. Three were impeached. One resigned before the vote. None was convicted. The lesson of that record is not that impeachment is broken. It is that impeachment has only ever worked when a president's own party decided it should, and that has happened exactly once.

The short history first. Andrew Johnson, 1868: impeached 126 to 47 for firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, and really for sabotaging Reconstruction. The Senate acquitted 35 to 19, one vote short of two-thirds, after seven Republicans broke ranks to save a president they despised, on the theory that removing him over a policy fight would wreck the office. Bill Clinton, 1998: impeached for lying under oath and obstructing justice about an affair with a White House intern. Acquitted. Donald Trump, 2019 and 2021: impeached first for pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden while withholding military aid, then for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Acquitted both times. Richard Nixon, 1974: never impeached at all. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles and Nixon resigned before the full House could vote. He is the only president ever forced from office, and the only one whose party abandoned him.

The Judiciary Committee's votes in late July 1974 were the tell. Article I, obstruction of justice, passed 27 to 11 with six Republicans in favor. Article II, abuse of power, passed 28 to 10 with seven. Article III, contempt of Congress, squeaked through 21 to 17. The committee rejected two other articles, the secret bombing of Cambodia and Nixon's taxes, because members, Democrats included, did not think the evidence was there. That is what a serious process looks like. It says no sometimes.

Then, on August 5, with the Supreme Court having ordered the tapes released, the country heard the smoking gun: Nixon, six days after the break-in, directing the CIA to shut down the FBI's investigation. All ten Republicans who had voted against every article announced they would now vote to impeach.

On August 7, Senator Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes went to the Oval Office. Nixon asked how bad it was. Goldwater, as Woodward and Bernstein reconstructed it: "I took kind of a nose count today, and I couldn't find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what's been going on and are undecided, and I'm one of them." Scott put the ceiling at fifteen. Rhodes told him he could count on perhaps ten votes in the House. Nixon needed 34 senators to survive. The three men who ran his party had just told him he had somewhere between four and fifteen. The next night he announced his resignation and said why in his own words: "I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort." He did not say he was innocent. He said he would lose.

The public had already gotten there. Nixon's Gallup approval was 24 percent. A majority of Americans supported removal. Three months later, voters took 49 House seats from the Republicans. Gerald Ford's approval fell from 71 to 50 in a single month, the month he pardoned Nixon. The country then spent four years legislating against a repeat: campaign finance limits, the Ethics in Government Act and the independent counsel, the Presidential Records Act, the Inspector General Act, FISA. Watergate produced accountability and reform, because both parties agreed the conduct was disqualifying.

Clinton is the case the public refused to buy. The House impeached him on December 19, 1998, on two of four articles: perjury before a grand jury, 228 to 206, and obstruction of justice, 221 to 212, both nearly straight party line. The Senate, 55 to 45 Republican, acquitted him on February 12, 1999: 45 to 55 on perjury, 50 to 50 on obstruction. Not even a majority, let alone 67, on either count. Ten Republicans voted to acquit on perjury, five on obstruction. Why? Because the public had rendered its verdict first. Clinton's approval hit 73 percent the weekend the House impeached him, the highest of his presidency. Americans had decided, roughly, that he was a liar and a cad and that lying about consensual sex was not a high crime. Republicans paid: they lost five House seats in the 1998 midterms, the first time a president's party had gained seats in a sixth-year midterm since 1822, and Newt Gingrich resigned the Speakership. Clinton did not escape entirely. He was held in contempt of court and fined about ninety thousand dollars, and on his last full day in office he cut a deal with the independent counsel: he admitted giving false testimony, accepted a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine, and was spared indictment. Modest. But it was a consequence, negotiated by a president who accepted that the law applied to him.

Now Trump, twice. In 2019: abuse of power, 230 to 197; obstruction of Congress, 229 to 198. Zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, Republicans first voted 51 to 49 to hear no witnesses, the only impeachment trial in history with none, and then acquitted 48 to 52 and 47 to 53. Mitt Romney became the first senator ever to vote to convict a president of his own party. In 2021: incitement of insurrection, 232 to 197, one week after a mob stormed the Capitol, with ten Republicans voting yes. The Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict, seven Republicans, the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history, and still ten short.

Mitch McConnell voted to acquit and then took the floor to say, "There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day." His argument was that a former president was beyond the Senate's reach but not the law's: "President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office. We have a criminal justice system in this country." That is the sentence to hold him to, because the criminal justice system then did exactly what the Senate did.

Here is the ledger, sorted honestly. Convicted: on May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush-money payment before the 2016 election. He was sentenced to an unconditional discharge, no fine, no jail, no probation, because he had just been elected president. The conviction stands while his appeals continue. Charged, then dismissed without a trial: a federal grand jury indicted him on four counts for the scheme to overturn the 2020 election, and the case was dismissed after he won in 2024 under a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president; Special Counsel Jack Smith's report concluded the evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction. A second federal grand jury indicted him on 40 counts, including willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act; Judge Aileen Cannon threw that out on the theory that the special counsel was unlawfully appointed, and the appeal was abandoned after the election. The second volume of Smith's report, the evidence, sits under a permanent court seal, though a Justice Department blunder in June leaked it, and reporting indicates Smith found Trump had a business motive for keeping the documents. Georgia's racketeering case was dismissed in November 2025 after the elected prosecutor was disqualified. None of these cases was decided on whether he did it.

Found liable by juries and judges: a federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and defaming her, judgments totaling roughly 88 million dollars, upheld on appeal. A New York court found that he and his company engaged in years of fraud in their financial statements; an appeals court upheld that finding and the business restrictions while tossing the half-billion-dollar penalty as excessive, and the state is appealing. And immunized: in July 2024 the Supreme Court held that presidents enjoy at least presumptive immunity for official acts. Nixon's cover-up ran through the CIA and the FBI. Under that ruling it would be a hard case to bring at all. So: the only president in history to be a convicted felon, twice impeached, found liable for sexual abuse and fraud, and the sum of the criminal penalties is zero.

Nixon's crimes were concealed. That was the point of the tapes. Trump's are on a disclosure form. His own 2025 financial disclosure, filed this June, reports more than 1.4 billion dollars in cryptocurrency income: over 500 million from World Liberty Financial, the firm he founded with his sons, and 635 million from selling the memecoin he launched three days before his inauguration. An Abu Dhabi royal's investment vehicle put 500 million dollars into World Liberty, 187 million of it wired up front, while the same government negotiated access to American AI chips. The Trump Organization signed licensing deals in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Qatar handed the government a 400-million-dollar 747 that becomes his library's plane when he leaves office. He pardoned the founder of Binance, a company doing business with his family's crypto firm. House Oversight Democrats estimate at least 436 million dollars in realized profit from foreign interests, a partisan tally, but one built on public filings. The Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause forbids a president from taking anything of value from a foreign state without the consent of Congress. Congress has not consented. Congress has not asked.

Meanwhile the Justice Department indicted James Comey and Letitia James, two people the President publicly demanded be prosecuted, and a federal judge threw both cases out because the prosecutor, Trump's former personal lawyer, was unlawfully installed. He fired seventeen inspectors general in violation of the notice statute. The Government Accountability Office has found repeated violations of the Impoundment Control Act. On February 28 he started a war with Iran without authorization; both chambers passed war-powers resolutions telling him to stop, 215 to 208 and 50 to 48, and he ignored them, because they are non-binding and a veto is certain.

And then there is Epstein. Let us be precise, because precision is what is damning here. Trump was Epstein's close friend for more than a decade. In May 2025 his attorney general told him his name appeared in the files. In July his Justice Department announced there was no client list and nothing more to release. After a revolt that produced a 427 to 1 House vote and a unanimous Senate, he signed a law requiring the files' release within thirty days. His Justice Department blew the deadline by two months, released the files with heavy redactions, and, according to Oversight Democrats, is withholding roughly half. In March it quietly posted 2019 FBI interviews with a woman who alleges Trump assaulted her as a teenager in the 1980s. Those allegations are uncorroborated, were never charged, and have real problems: the timeline predates any known contact between the two men, and the accuser has a record of fraud and theft charges. No one should treat them as proof. No one needs to. The proven story is a president who campaigned on releasing the files, buried them, was overridden by Congress nearly unanimously, and is still defying the law he signed. Nixon went down for the cover-up. This is a cover-up conducted in daylight.

Measure all of this against the standard that removed Nixon: a 24 percent approval rating, a majority favoring removal, and a party leadership that could count. Trump's Gallup approval in August is 40 percent, 37 in July, as low as 33 in other surveys. Sixty percent of Americans disapprove. More than six in ten oppose his foreign business dealings. By the public-mood test, the country is roughly where it was in the summer of 1974. But Nixon's 24 percent was 24 percent of everyone. Trump's 40 percent is 93 percent of Republicans and 1 percent of Democrats, the widest partisan gap Gallup has ever measured. Nixon's base collapsed under him. Trump's has not moved an inch, and every Republican senator knows the primary electorate that would end their career if it did.

That is the whole story, and the arithmetic makes it final. Impeachment takes 218 votes in a House Republicans control. Conviction takes 67 in a Senate where Republicans hold 53. Democrats need four seats to win the chamber this November; a genuine wave gets them to 51 or 52. There is no map, in this cycle or the next, that reaches 67 without roughly fifteen Republican senators, and in two trials the most Trump's party has ever produced is seven. Representative Al Green filed articles again this week, for the ninth time; the last time he forced a vote, in December, the House tabled it 237 to 140 with 47 Democrats voting present. Even the opposition will not hold the vote. Criminal accountability after January 2029 is not much likelier. The Supreme Court has already told prosecutors that official acts are presumptively off limits. Trump has demonstrated that a president will use the Justice Department against his enemies, which means any successor who indicts him will be accused, with a straight face now, of doing the same. And the Ford precedent exists for a reason: a pardon for the good of the country is always available to whoever comes next, and half the country will call it healing.

Nixon resigned because three Republicans walked into his office and told him the truth. Nobody is walking into this office. Not because the evidence is weaker; it is on a government form, in a jury verdict, in a law he signed and will not obey. It is because the party that once counted votes now counts only one.

This paper rates absurdity in clowns, one to five, and in the spirit of the occasion we took kind of a nose count. We couldn't find more than four very firm clowns, and those would be from older Southerners. Then we remembered that Goldwater's count was the one that ended a presidency, and this one won't end anything, and the fifth clown walked in on its own.