Trump’s next victim has a familiar face

Donald Trump again tried rewriting the Constitution by issuing another executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Steve Vladeck has a breakdown of the details. For me, it was a reminder. No matter what happens in November, the republic still faces two more years of this gangster presidency – two more years of sabotage.¹ A Democratic Congress can check him, expose him, impeach and remove him. But it can't stop his crimes before they happen.

His party won't be spared. The Washington press corps characterizes the president as if he were on the same side as the Republicans. Yet Donald Trump suggested last week that he's indifferent to the results of the congressional elections. If voters are mad, he said, it's not at him. "They’re angry at Republicans,” Trump said Friday in an interview with Punchbowl News. “But they’re not angry at me. They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”

I think the conventional wisdom is missing that if the Republicans keep the House – they won't, but let's say they do – they won't need Trump anymore. They will have proven they can win despite his abysmal approval rating. (According to Pew, the president with the lowest midterm-year approval rating over the last 44 years was George W Bush. In 2006, his was 36 percent. Trump's stands at 34 percent.) But if they lose the Senate as well as the House, the Republicans won't want him anymore. Neither outcome is acceptable to Donald Trump.

If they lose, he will punish them. If they win, he will punish them.

Trump is doing what he can to encourage voters, especially maganites, to be angry at congressional Republicans. In that interview I mentioned, he said he's not sure whether John Thune should continue serving as Senate majority leader. He wants Thune to get rid of the filibuster (the Senate's 60-vote rule) and pass the SAVE America Act. He appears to believe the measure would secure victory and spare him the humiliation of a third impeachment.

But the SAVE America Act would almost certainly backfire, as it would require onerous voter-ID requirements that would disenfranchise voters in red states more than voters in blue states. (Thune knows the votes are not there, even without the filibuster.) That said, I don't think it matters to Trump what the SAVE America Act does, because that's not the point of his feud with Thune. The point is that in protecting the filibuster, the Republicans are imagining a future without Trump, and the point is that Trump will never tolerate that.

The conventional wisdom also appears to believe that there's little appetite for a third impeachment attempt. Over the weekend, Reuters reported that in anticipation of retaking power, the Democrats are "developing a broad investigative strategy targeting companies and financial firms surrounding [Trump], instead of trying to impeach him immediately."

Reuters: "The approach reflects both Democratic caution and a lesson many in the party say they learned during Trump's first term: that impeachment proceedings can consume Congress while allowing Trump to cast himself as the victim of a partisan campaign."

Yet despite the Democrats' apparent caution, the door is clearly open to impeachment. "No one wants a failed vote on day one," a senior Democratic aide told Reuters. "The focus is on building a body of evidence through investigations that can hold Trump accountable."

The question appears to be when to impeach, not if, and the answer will be clear in time. The president has no intention of changing, except in that his criminal conduct, which includes the prosecution of an illegal war against Iran that he cannot extract himself from, will get worse, no matter what happens in November. (The Iran War could go on indefinitely.)

Though a Democratic Congress cannot stop him before the damage is done, fear of accountability will almost certainly push him to commit more and greater crimes against the republic. Meanwhile, the consequences of his crime spree are burning up the US economy.

Trump will cry foul in any attempt to hold him responsible. But in neither of the first two attempts was his net economic approval as low as it is now. (According to the Wall Street Journal, it fell below -40 before his first 500 days. In his first term, it never fell below -10.)

Trump's image as a "successful businessman" shielded him in 2024. Voters could rationalize their support, saying that he might have led an insurrection, but he was still better for their pocketbooks than Kamala Harris. That image is now shattered. His crimes are enduring, painful and highly visible, and yet he blames his party for the public's rage. The Journal said this morning that his economic advantage is gone. With it, I think, is his political immunity.