Impeach Trump Again? Democrats Might Not Like the Results

Could President Trump be impeached a third time?

Trump already owns the record for impeachments, having been trialed by the House of Representatives once during his first term and shortly after.

While the GOP currently controls the House (making impeachment extremely unlikely), that may change by 2027. Given Trump’s aggressive style of governance and America’s deep partisan divide, a third impeachment is hardly impossible.

But does it make sense?

The Trump Impeachments

We don’t yet have firm projections on the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. Still, given the narrow margin the GOP currently holds in the House of Representatives and the tendency of the incumbent party to lose seats in the midterm, chances that Democrats will retake the chamber are strong.

In 2018, the Democrats gained forty seats despite sound economic conditions. Suppose the thermostatic model of American politics holds (the idea that policy achievements result in a shift towards the party out of power). In that case, a similar outcome is possible, which would give the Democrats a substantial majority.

Democratic control of the House is a precondition for a third impeachment, but It is by no means certain that even a Democratic House will impeach President Trump again. In 2019, activists goaded House Democrats into impeaching Trump over his blackmail of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The impeachment resulted in a Senate trial that ended in acquittal, an unsurprising outcome given Republican control of that chamber. Despite the best hopes of Democrats, the impeachment inquiry barely budged Trump’s approval ratings, which depended upon extremely high polling among the Republican base.

The second impeachment trial should have been far more consequential. Many in the GOP agreed that President Trump had overstepped his bounds by undertaking a coup d’etat against the electoral process on January 6, 2021. However, the trial again failed in the Senate because of constrained timing and some confusion about the appropriateness of a post-presidential impeachment.

Evidently, the second impeachment failed to do permanent political damage to Trump, as he quickly regained his party’s support and won the 2024 Presidential election.

The Grounds

On what grounds could Trump be impeached?

The first impeachment of President Trump was tied to a verifiable act of policy, and the second to his instigation of an attack on the Capitol.

Given that many of Trump’s actions thus far in his second term have skirted legality, it is not at all unlikely that the Democrats will find some sufficient cause for a third impeachment. The activities of DOGE or the illegal deportation of asylum seekers could provide that pretext, and we still have some eighteen months to go before the swearing-in of the next House of Representatives.

The more important question is whether there is any political logic to a third impeachment. Control of the House of Representatives offers opportunity but does not promise success.

Under currently foreseeable conditions, it seems rather unlikely that the Senate would vote to convict Trump; even in 2021, the guilty votes only reached 57 out of the necessary 67 to convict. The only factors that could change this are a dramatic drop in Trump’s political support and a series of devastating defeats for the GOP in the 2026 midterms.

Such outcomes are not impossible, although the magnitude of the defeat would need to be huge to make conviction in the Senate possible.

The latter would require not only a substantial shift in the number of seats controlled by the Democrats (even the most wishful thinking could not possibly push the number of seriously contested seats beyond ten) but genuine fear among the remaining Republicans that support for Trump could be politically fatal. It’s not impossible, but also not likely.

The question then becomes whether there is any political logic in pursuing a third failed impeachment. While social media activists will undoubtedly call for another fight, the political payoff of another failure is uncertain.

The best case scenario is that a failed impeachment will help bring coherence to the Democratic coalition; the worst is that it could solidify Trump’s base of support. These arguments will get intense, with pressure mounting on skeptical Democratic legislators to move forward, just as in 2019.

Maybe No Impeachment for Trump?

The one thing we can be certain of is that the arguments in 2027 will be tiresome replays of the statements made in 2019. For my part, I believe that battles should be fought when battles can be won and that impeachment should be avoided unless there is a substantial chance that the Senate will remove Trump.

There is no point in mobilizing impeachment machinery if there is no verifiable political benefit. While advocates of another impeachment may claim that it is necessary to highlight Trump’s criminal activities in every way possible, it doesn’t seem likely that a “Trump Acquitted by Senate a Third Time” headline will serve to hold the man accountable.

About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997 and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.