One of the journalists who reported on the Watergate scandal wrote in an op-ed Thursday about the “inevitability of impeachment” for President Trump.
“An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase,” journalist Elizabeth Drew wrote in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Thursday.
Drew points to several happenings in the past few weeks – including Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation, the partial government shutdown, and new revelations in investigations involving the president – as events that she claims have “instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans.”
“It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived,” Drew continued.
“In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival,” she wrote. “Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.”
Drew also recalled President Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the op-ed.
“It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection.”
“Mr. Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, and despite suspicions, no evidence has ever surfaced that the fix was in,” Drew wrote in conclusion. “While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.”
