Democrats are all but done with Trump impeachment talk

During Trump’s first term, there was a multimillion-dollar “Need to Impeach” campaign, organized by mega-donor Tom Steyer, that built a list Steyer would end up using for a failed presidential bid. Trump’s second term has sparked a grassroots “Citizens’ Impeachment,” run by a former Hill staffer with a Google spreadsheet, and a “Mayday Movement” that will begin protesting on the Mall this weekend for “however long it takes” to remove Trump.

Elected Democrats accept the premise that Trump deserves impeachment. They have also learned that impeachment does not remove presidents whose own party will stick with them.

“He’s been impeached twice, but we don’t have any confidence that House and Senate Republicans would do their jobs” and remove Trump, House Democratic Conference Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., told Semafor. “And so, this is not an exercise that we’re willing to undertake.”

The Mayday Movement’s plan is for rolling protests with different daily themes, like “Gender Equality & Queer Liberty” (on Monday) and “Borders, Belonging & Racial Justice” (on Wednesday). Its efforts are smaller than those during the first Trump term, when Democrats were more hopeful that even Republicans would want him gone.

Steyer, who shut down Need to Impeach five years ago, did not respond to a question sent to a spokesman.

Cultural pro-impeachment signifiers have faded, too. Authors who published impeachment books in the first term have moved on from the topic; the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild, which produced Trump-branded “Impeach-Mints,” stopped making them after 2020. (Stefan Shaw, the company’s president, told Semafor that it may bring “some version” of the mints back, but was currently working on “First Amend-mints” and “International Embarass-mints.“)

The lesson taken by Democrats and liberals was that impeachment, as practiced, simply did not stop Trump.

“We all know that Donald Trump has broken the law, constantly,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas, told reporters on Tuesday. Elected in 2022, Casar did not vote on either Trump impeachment.

“”What we are committed to doing is hitting him where it hurts … instead of going and saying: ‘OK, Jim Jordan, why don’t you determine the witnesses and the evidence?’” Casar added.

That attitude has left impeachment, for now, in the hands of safe-seat Democrats who do not mind if the rest of their party won’t join. Texas Rep. Al Green’s impeachment articles during Trump’s first term were not adopted by Democrats, but the party later impeached the president for strong-arming Ukraine to release dirt on Joe Biden and for working to overturn his 2020 loss.

Green has said he’ll bring new articles anyway, focused on Trump’s plan to take over Gaza. Thanedar said he had already heard from Democrats who want to support his impeachment effort, and he dismissed the criticism that it was pointless.

“If you don’t ask, you will never get it,” Thanedar told Semafor.

Trump’s party believes that voters will reject any impeachment talk as a waste of time by MAGA-obsessed Democrats who have no ideas of their own. Republicans’ Senate and House campaign committees amplified Ossoff’s comments from last week, and Trump took a shot at Thanedar on Tuesday.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who began working on impeachment articles against Joe Biden as soon as the former Democratic president was sworn in, said that voters had rejected “lawfare” against Trump in 2024.

“They’ve done it twice, and everybody’s so sick of it,” Greene told Semafor. “Everybody knew that it was just a complete abuse of the system. And it’s not what the American people want their politics to be.”

At this point eight years ago, Democrats still saw Trump as a fluke president who his party might be convinced to get rid of. Their core logic sounded something like: What true conservative wouldn’t trade him for Mike Pence?

Democrats’ base wondered if the firing of James Comey might undo Trump, or his jawboning of Ukraine’s president, or the violence of Jan. 6. We’re not mentioning the countless stories quoting anonymous Republicans saying they worried that Trump might implode and they’d be happy when he did.

That thinking is dead now, and the impeachment power is viewed very differently. It is not a threat that can stop a president; in 1998, 2019, and 2021, it simply rallied the president’s supporters while leaving him in power (or, in the last case, in command of his party from exile).

Democrats passionately believe that the president is acting like a king and violating the Constitution. But they can’t stop him, a reality that we’ve watched many Democrats try to explain to angry voters who want them to do something. Their answer, again and again, is that it’s really just up to judges unless they win back Congress.

At one Casar event this month, he repeatedly laid out the party’s action plan and was then asked why Democrats can’t act faster, given the urgency.

At the same time, the cost of talking about impeachment has diminished. Democrats don’t really believe that the 2021 impeachment hurt them; their midterm campaign in 2022 went better than any of them expected. Similarly, Republicans don’t think that the impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden hurt them; Trump repeatedly called for Biden to be impeached, and the investigations into Biden’s family were politically damaging.

Democrats have the tougher balancing act. Their candidates will be asked before the next election if they think Trump should be impeached, and if they are honest, they’ll say yes — while assuring voters that they wouldn’t focus their majority on a doomed impeachment of a term-limited president.

Gabe Garbowit, a former Senate staffer who launched Citizen’s Impeachment this year, pointed to polling that found a majority of Americans open to another impeachment, if convinced that Trump is defying the Constitution.

He said he had spent “a few hundred dollars” organizing his effort and signed up 3,000 people — at least one in each congressional district.

“I don’t really buy the arguments that it’s impossible,” Garbowit said, “Everything is getting so much more extreme. A lot more activists are really starting to understand where power is blowing through the system and where the pressure points are.”