By Staff Writer Timothy Howard.

President Donald Trump has been mired by investigation and speculation from the day he took office. Many political pundits and news personalities see it as an inevitability that Trump will be impeached before the end of his tenure as President of the United States. They cite Trump’s questionable financial background, his fondness of Vladimir Putin, and the indictment of more than thirty persons associated with the Trump Campaign as evidence that impeachment is a certainty.

Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation is getting warmer by the day, and Trump’s actions (in regard to the special counsel and the prospect of impeachment) keep getting more and more erratic. So it would be a pretty safe bet to align your positions with those of the pundits, right? Unfortunately for them, there is at most a 50/50 chance that impeachment proceedings will ever occur, with the more likely outcome in my opinion being that they won’t happen at all.
Now it’s important to specify that the definition of impeaching a president is trying him for a crime or serious wrongdoing; it seems that most people think that impeachment is synonymous with removal from office. While impeachment in many theoretical cases is followed by the President’s resignation, as was the case with Richard Nixon, it’s not a rule. I don’t see Trump willingly resigning from office in any context.
If there is one thing that everyone reading this article can agree on, it’s that Trump is masterfully good at media manipulation. From the earliest days of his 2016 campaign, Trump has played the media into a more favorable position for himself.
He acquired 2 billion dollars of FREE media via saying controversial things during the opening stages of his candidacy. He managed to contain multiple scandals that would have doomed other Presidential campaigns intp mere chyrons for the media to run for a few hours and then neglect in favor of the next thing Trump said or did that day. The Access Hollywood Tape (Grab ‘em by the…) is a prime example of the aforementioned.
Love him or hate him, no one can deny Trump knows how to outwit the media. This is especially problematic for Impeachment. If Trump can successfully subvert the findings of the Mueller Report (or whatever else could catalyze Impeachment) then the people may not back impeachment.
The American people are crucial to the success of an impeachment. If the people are not on the side of impeachment, then the lawmakers needed to initiate the impeachment of a president, and successfully convict them, is all but impossible to ascertain (see Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial).
The good news is that as far as majorities go, the people would be behind it: according to a couple new surveys, more people support Trump’s impeachment than the man himself.
The political gamble of impeaching a president is quite large. Hence why no the Democrat controlled House of Representatives has not impeached Trump already. The risks are undeniable.
If Trump was impeached right now and was acquitted on all charges, then the Republican Party, and those sympathetic to Trump, will rally to support him.
This would make the possibility of a Democrat being elected to the presidency even less likely in 2020.
Therefore, it is doubtful that Trump will be impeached unless some kind of egregious evidence comes out against him in the coming months.
So if you dislike Trump, strap in, because he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.