One year before vote, Trump support wanes Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Nov. 4, 2019

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2019 (1880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As U.S. President Donald Trump begins his last year before the 2020 election day, the political winds appear to have turned against him. Polls are finding about half the U.S. public thinks he should be impeached and removed from office, which is the result his Democratic opponents are trying to bring about.

Polls are only opinion samples, not authoritative rulings. But it is a sad day for a president when half his people think so ill of him that they cannot wait a year for the opportunity to vote him out of office but want him kicked out sooner.

In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published on the weekend, 49 per cent of respondents said Mr. Trump should be impeached and removed (an increase since early October) while 43 per cent thought he should not be impeached (a decrease from early October).

Democrats overwhelmingly supported impeachment while Republicans overwhelmingly opposed it.

Other polls published lately asked slightly different questions, but poll results from Fox News and from CNN were consistent with the NBC News/Wall Street Journal conclusion. Mr. Trump, in his public comments, cast doubt on the accuracy of the polls and took comfort from the finding that Republicans were sticking with him.

The Democrats, who hold a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, will be encouraged by the latest poll findings to press ahead with their committee inquiries. They are investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to persuade the government of Ukraine to dig up dirt on the family of former vice-president Joe Biden, who is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination against Mr. Trump.

The Republicans, meanwhile, hold a majority of seats in the Senate, which would have to conduct a trial and rule on any impeachment passed by the lower house. They could either acquit him or remove him from office. Senators — especially those up for re-election a year hence — will be keenly aware of public sentiment in their states about the impeachment question.

It is a sad day for a president when half his people think so ill of him that they cannot wait a year for the opportunity to vote him out of office but want him kicked out sooner.

The process might be concluded without a vote one way or the other by the Senate. As in the case of Richard Nixon, leading Republicans might conclude that the president’s conduct cannot be defended and they might then tell him privately he should resign. What the mercurial Mr. Trump would then do is anybody’s guess, but the results could not be good for the Republican party. If he resigned, Vice-President Mike Pence would presumably take his place and finish the term. If he hung on, the Senate might have to remove him or, failing that, the election could unfold a year hence with Mr. Trump as a candidate.

In the meantime, the world is left in doubt over who will be running the U.S. government in the last months of this term of office and what policy the U.S. will uphold. Will the U.S. in fact withdraw from the Paris accord on greenhouse gas emissions? Will the United States continue its trade war with China? Will Canada’s new trade treaty with the U.S. and Mexico take effect, or will we continue with the present one?

To this point, Mr. Trump’s defence against the accusation that he tried to bully Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden has been astonishingly weak — little more than the bluster and name-calling that are his stock-in-trade.

The longer he waits before mounting a substantial defence, the weaker his hold on power will become.