Trump has little to fear from impeachment proceedings

According to his odd, rambling, six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump believes that the impeachment proceedings against him are unfair: “More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Yet as the modern-day mayor of Salem points out, this is wide of the mark. Kim Driscoll advised the president to “learn some history” and took to the president’s favoured medium, Twitter, to put him straight:

If Mr Trump is worried about impeachment proceedings, he should relax. While he is the third president to face them – the fourth if you include Richard Nixon, who quit before they could begin – no president has been removed from office as a result of the charges levelled against them. Bill Clinton in 1998 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 survived the ordeal.

So the precedents are not favourable for the president’s enemies. Nor is the political arithmetic. While there is a substantial Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, there is no such opposition facing Trump in the Senate. A two-thirds majority – 67 of the 100 senators – is required to force Mr Trump from office. In a highly partisan political culture, this is an almost entirely Democrat project – and they can only muster some 47 Senate votes.

Mr Trump must also be aware that the Senate leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, has declared that he has no intention of playing the role of disinterested judge, and will resist attempts to make senior House staff testify. The “trial”, which is in effect what it is supposed to be, will be as crooked as those in Salem – but this time, bent in favour of the accused.

As such, there is no prospect – barring some extraordinary revelations – of Mr Trump being fired in the most ignominious fashion.

That, though, is hardly the point, for either side. The Democrats plainly want to make a nuisance of themselves and cause the administration maximum reputational damage. You might think further damage to a figure such as Donald Trump was impossible, but perhaps there remain people left to be shocked; his activities, as alleged, are certainly shocking. Despite all the bluster and adoring rallies – predictably, Mr Trump chose to attend one at a moment of crisis – the president’s approval ratings are soft, and he is perhaps more vulnerable to a Democrat challenge in next year’s presidential contest than is often assumed.

Besides, there is clearly a case for him to answer: even fervent Trump fans might think it at the very least unwise for him to be trading US foreign policy for dirt on his rival Joe Biden.

If the Democrats wanted to irritate the notoriously thin-skinned Mr Trump, they have succeeded. They have distracted him from his official duties (never a difficult task) and, perhaps, dented his boundless self-esteem.

Yet none of this changes the biggest political fact of all. As Abraham Lincoln once observed: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” At the moment – and in stark contrast to the Watergate scandal and the all-but-successful impeachment of Richard Nixon – public sentiment seems not to have shifted so far against Mr Trump as to make his position untenable. His base remains mostly faithful to him, believing either that the whole impeachment process is a political stunt, or that it doesn’t matter anyway, or that the charges are, so to speak, trumped up.

Impeachment will drag on, annoying and embarrassing Mr Trump, and perhaps shifting public opinion a little. But if the public doesn’t take impeachment seriously – which it appears it won’t – it is the Democrats who will find themselves in the docks in the court of public opinion.