Donald J Trump has the ignominious distinction of being the first US president ever to have been impeached twice. What saved him from removal from office is the requirement that two thirds of Senators present must vote to convict for impeachment to turn into dismissal from office. Impeachment only requires a simple majority of the House. Two other US presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither was convicted. Richard Nixon, who was facing the prospect of impeachment and probably would have been convicted, resigned before the process started.
As the US heads into midterms and the Republicans are tanking in the polls, a third impeachment is becoming a real possibility. With some polls showing the nationwide lead of the Democrats as much as 10% and states that were solidly Republican in the past looking vulnerable to electing a Democratic senator, how does that shift the odds towards conviction?
Because senators have terms longer than the two-yearly election cycle, 35 of the 100 senators (two per state) are up for election in 2026. 33 of these are regular elections; 2 are special elections to replace vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, whose seats were temporarily filled by appointed senators. Of those up for election, 22 are Republicans and the current Senate has 47 Democrats or independents who align with them. To secure a two-thirds majority, the Democrats would have to win twenty of the 22 Republican-held seats and the odds of that are close to zero. What is more likely is that they secure around 53 seats, 14 short of the number to impeach if all Senators are present for the vote. If a small number of Republicans voted to impeach and some chose not to be present, that could change. Last time, seven Republicans voted to impeach Trump over his attempt at overthrowing the 2020 election. Such was the power of Trump over his party that only one of those seven, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, ran for re-election after that and is still in the Senate.
However, if Trump becomes so toxic to the Republican base that a Senate revolt is feasible that could all change.
To understand the dynamics of this, it is necessary to understand how he maintains his tight grip on his base and what is now undermining that.
Trump has mastered the art of the long con.
This is how it works. Get someone to believe something unlikely and they must admit to being fooled to back out. Do it once and it isn’t so hard for them to admit to that. Do it twice and they now have to admit to being a bigger fool to back out. Do it 30,000 times and they are tied to accusing everyone speaking the truth of spouting fake news. To do otherwise is to admit to being fooled a ludicrous number of times.
A variant on this concept is Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, where con artists sell a vain emperor on the notion that they have a magic fabric that is invisible to fools. They mime showing off this fabric and the emperor can’t admit that he sees nothing. After extracting vast riches from the emperor for magnificent clothes that no one can see, they depart and the emperor parades through the streets buck naked and no one dares say a thing for fear of revealing their incompetence. Then a child yells: “The emperor has no clothes!” and the emperor is literally expose to ridicule.
Trump has often been accused of lying but what he actually does is bullshitting and that is a significant distinction. A liar attempts to construct a consistent narrative around falsehood. A bullshitter says whatever it takes to get through the moment. This matters because a liar can be undone by exposure. A bullshitter thrives on exposure because of the Emperor’s New Clothes effect – everyone who is sucked into the narrative cannot admit their own incompetence. And this is exactly why scams are seldom reported – the art of the scam, particularly the long con, is to make the victim feel so foolish, they don’t want to make the con known to others.
Trump has carried this off so effectively up to recently, that his base has believed everything he said even when he contradicted himself or directly harmed their interests. Yet he has finally crossed a line.
What is that line?
There is one serious error any politician can’t get away with and that is proclaiming the economy to be great when ordinary people are suffering. And this has turned out to be Trump’s New Clothes turning point.
Biden made a similar mistake though he wasn’t as much being dishonest as doing a bad job of communicating. The US did indeed have a strong post-Covid rebound that was the envy of the world. But he should have been more open to admitting that the consequential inflation was hurting people. Trump has taken that to a new level: he insists that the US economy is in great shape when objectively it is not – and ordinary people are hurting because of his ludicrous Iran war layered on top of tariffs. If you can put a finger on one thing, it's the diesel price reaching record highs. That he is accused of being part of a child sex trafficking ring you’d think would be disqualifying, as the image of a naked emperor doing that is too repulsive to contemplate. But no, it’s the price of diesel.
While other Trump mistakes like his trade war and the excesses of ICE have hurt some of his base, this one somehow has been the breakthrough that no other mistake has been – not even his disastrous mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. It seems strange that all his other bumbling and harmful antics have not had the same effect, but it could be as simple as needing a single trigger that would start the unravelling. If that is the case, there is no going back as anyone who can now admit to being fooled by Trump is never going to let that happen again. Possibly, just possibly, this will turn out to be bad news for child sex traffickers, white supremacists and malignant narcissists of all stripes.
It would take the kind of massive swing that was previously not possible in the Trump base for a big enough number of Republican senators to turn on him to vote for conviction. The price in the past for doing that is Trump turning on them in their next primary, a fate several Republicans suffered for lesser transgressions than voting to convict.
What you can expect if things do go that way is mass amnesia. Millions of people will have no recollection of ever having supported him. The sight of the emperor with no clothes will be so traumatising that their memories will be wiped clean.
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