President Donald J. Trump visits with U.S. Navy Cadets during the 120th Army-Navy football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Pa. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Since when do we impeach a president on what he might do in the future? Rep. Adam Schiff announced last week that President Trump must be impeached “pronto” so that Trump cannot “cheat in one more election,” reports Jason L. Riley in the WSJ.
Mr. Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 came as a surprise to so many people because journalists consistently played down his chances of winning. Thinking Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, many Democrats stayed home on Election Day.
Much has been written about the millions of voters who switched from supporting Barack Obama to backing Mr. Trump in important battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin. But Democratic nonvoters, who either couldn’t stomach pulling the lever for Mrs. Clinton or didn’t think she needed their support to prevail—were also a decisive factor. In Michigan, for example, Mrs. Clinton received 300,000 fewer votes than Mr. Obama did in 2012, and Mr. Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes.
The media continues to harp on Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, which is news but needs context and is hardly a reason for Democrats to be complacent. Despite low unemployment, rising wages and relatively strong economic growth, the president’s job-approval rating has remained in the 40s. This could be a problem for the incumbent next year, particularly if the economy goes into recession, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. President Obama was also polling in the low to mid-40s in December 2011 and went on to be re-elected in 2012.
Democrats are playing down the findings in the Justice Department inspector general’s study justifying that it was done in the service of taking down President Trump, continues Mr. Riley.
But voters might see things differently, and I don’t suspect that the president will stop talking about how his opponents in the government and the media have spent the past three years using lies and deception to portray him as a White House squatter.
As Charlie Savage opined in the New York Times, “At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil, And what the report showed was not pretty.”
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