Where Trump Goes, Impeachment Follows

The party that removed the president twice cannot bring itself to say the word, and the man it impeached has turned his opponents' process into a campaign threat.

"I mean, honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could play it just as well."

— President Donald Trump, in South Carolina between campaign stops, October 29, 2026 (per the Washington Examiner)

Where the president goes, impeachment follows. That was the lede of a Raw Story exclusive published Thursday, and the evidence backs it up in both directions. One week before the midterms, the president was asked about the Democrats' growing talk of removing his war secretary, and his answer doubled as a preview of his own counterstrategy: "I think it's terrible. All they do is they talk about impeaching everybody."

The math is what makes the line hard to read as bluster. In this Congress, 30 articles of impeachment have been introduced, and only six are aimed at the president. Ten House Republicans dropped 15 measures against 12 federal judges. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced measures to expunge the president's two first-term impeachments. And a growing stack of articles now targets the president's own war secretary, the man he calls "a great warrior."

The party that impeached him twice is the one sitting on the word. That is the central tension of the last week of the midterm campaign, and it is not lost on a base that has every reason to be furious.

The most repeated formulation on the Democratic leadership's mouth is a sentence engineered to say nothing and offend no one. "We haven't ruled anything in, and we haven't ruled anything out," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said, first on national television in September and still this month, with five days to spare. He was tapped by Nancy Pelosi to manage the first Trump Senate trial, and the wariness shows.

Ask the party's base and the answer is different. A Politico poll this month found that 54 percent of Americans believe the president has committed impeachable offenses in his second term, including 81 percent of voters leaning Democratic and roughly a quarter of likely Republicans. More than two-thirds expect impeachment if Democrats retake the House, and a plurality of voters says another impeachment would make Trump more popular, not less.

The case is not hypothetical. Democrats accuse the president of accepting a luxury jet from Qatar, taking two billion dollars from the United Arab Emirates for the First Family's World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency venture, trading pardons for political donations, and steering federal loans to family and friends. Four of dozens of examples, by their count. The next Oversight chair, if the Democrats win, is already promising the paperwork. "There's a lot of evidence there that shows a massive amount of possible impeachable offenses," Rep. Robert Garcia told Raw Story. "That's going to be investigated pretty quickly."

Translation: the leadership has a position, and the position is "not yet."

The three House Democrats who actually introduced articles against the president in this Congress all lost their primaries this year. John Larson of Connecticut, Al Green of Texas, and Shri Thanedar of Michigan drafted the six measures that are the entire Democratic case against the Oval Office, and the primary season consumed all of them.

Green, who forced floor votes on three of the four impeachment measures he introduced, was also the man thrown out of the State of the Union in February for holding a sign that read "Black people aren't apes!" He has not softened. "The president himself has shown us that he is not a president who is of the people, by the people, for the people," he told Raw Story. "He seems to be of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires."

Larson, a 14-term veteran who was a history teacher before Congress, says his breaking point was the Iran war, which the president has continued to wage after both chambers passed resolutions disapproving of it. "When you violate the War Powers Act and the Constitution, that's clearly an impeachable offense." Thanedar, who paid for impeachment billboards in his own district and lost anyway, put it more bluntly: "We never had a more corrupt government in the United States. Never."

Every Democrat who pushed the issue out loud is now out of the House. That is either a remarkable coincidence or a message, and the party's own members seem less sure which.

Meanwhile, the other side of the aisle is already running the machine. The precedent is fresh: in 2024, House Republicans impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, the first cabinet secretary to be impeached in more than a century. They used the process to attack a Democratic appointee. Now the roles are reversing, and the first target on the docket is not the president. It is his war secretary.

The sequence has been building since the war began on February 28. In June, the House passed a war powers resolution, 215 to 208. In July, it passed another, 214 to 208, and the Senate approved the measure with four Republicans in revolt. That made it the first joint congressional disapproval of an ongoing war since the War Powers Act was signed into law in 1973. The president ignored it. The war did not stop.

The impeachment stack that followed is the largest of the Congress. In April, House Democrats led by Rep. Yassamin Ansari introduced six articles against Hegseth over the war and the drug boat strikes. Sixteen House members now sponsor the measure. Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who lost his primary, introduced eight more in September and says he will force a floor vote the day the House returns, a vote Speaker Mike Johnson will be compelled to schedule. Jeffries, who has refused to commit on the president, has been less coy about the secretary. "One of the first things we're going to do in the majority, we're going to run Pete Hegseth out of town."

And the president's defense of the man he calls "the best at his job in many, many years" lands, in this context, exactly as intended: as an admission that the game is on.

The math says the game will get a referee next week. The Cook Political Report rates Democrats favored outright in the 218 seats they need, with 220 seats solid, likely, or leaning Democratic, 198 leaning Republican, and just 17 toss-ups. If that holds, Democrats take the gavel in January, and the question they have circled for two years stops being a question and becomes a calendar.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, who says the "current crimes dwarf what happened in the first term," frames the moment the way the base does. "The failure by the Senate to remove and bar him for life from serving again was the biggest failure in modern history," she told Raw Story. "The United States story isn't over."

The president's tarmac quip was right about one thing: the game exists, and both parties know the rules. The only open question is whether the party that has spent two years saying it hasn't ruled anything out will finally rule in, or whether a third Trump impeachment goes down as the one that was always coming and never started. The answer, like everything else in this campaign, gets counted next week.