What would a third Trump impeachment look like?

Some lessons from history

Image from Princeton University Press

Donald Trump holds the unique distinction to be the only President to have been impeached twice. Calls to impeach him a third are always on the agenda. Representative Al Green recently introduced new articles of impeachment. Should Democrats regain the House next fall, the pressure for impeachment will grow stronger.

How would a third Trump impeachment fit in historical terms?

In my recent book, Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History, I find that the impeachments of Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson, and the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal have a number of strong and striking parallels. The factor I focus on is race: how each of these presidents follow one who breaks with the confines of the racial status quo.

Andrew Johnson followed Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator; Nixon followed Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Revolution; Donald Trump’s first election came after the first African American to serve as president. All of these transformative presidents, as I identify them, had their flaws and imperfections. But all changed American politics in profound ways – and created the politics that allowed lawless, populist successors to attain power.

Trump’s first term impeachments resembled the earlier cases insofar as all were related to abuse of executive power, election interference, and intolerance for political opposition. But there was one difference: Trump’s first two impeachments did not involve political meddling with state and bureaucratic structures. This could change with future impeachments.

In the second term Trump’s expansive and controversial use of presidential power includes ignoring civil service laws, impoundment of Congressional funds, closing of agencies, withholding of funds to Democratic states, and the targeting of Democratic cities with immigration forces. As with Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, the current administration’s attack on the bureaucracy is connected to its racial backlash agenda, inviting speculation about impeachment prospects in the future.

The Historical Pattern

These three cases, across centuries, feature a number of similar factors. Lincoln’s election as the first Republican president in 1860 signaled a shift away from the country’s uncomfortable compromises around slavery. Though Lincoln was not a firm abolitionist, he opposed the expansion of slavery, which was enough to prompt Southern states to secede. In the years that followed, Lincoln used the power and influence of the presidency to emancipate enslaved people and bring them into the Northern military cause, and to reframe the purpose of the war as one to end slavery.

The strange politics of the 1864 election led to the selection of former Democrat and Southerner Andrew Johnson as his vice president. After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson became president and proceeded to clash with Republicans in Congress over how to reconstruct the nation after the Civil War. Johnson favored more lenient approaches, restoring some former Confederates to power and neglecting to address violence in the South against freed people. The Department of War was crucial to the carrying out of Johnson’s Reconstruction policies.

Richard Nixon won the presidency in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights revolution, subsequent urban unrest, and the culturally laden fight over the Vietnam War. Nixon positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate – a phrase later borrowed by Trump – and employed the “Southern strategy” to win office.

My argument places Watergate into the context of shifting party coalitions and Nixon’s racialized ideas about the “silent majority” and the “enemies” he wanted to use the government to monitor. Furthermore, it was African American lawmakers and politicians who advanced the argument that Nixon was not committed to fulfilling the responsibilities of the office for all Americans, beginning with skepticism about his civil rights promises during the 1968 campaign and culminating with Rep. Barbara Jordan’s speech about the Constitution and impeachment.

The period punctuated by Obama and Trump was somewhat different; Obama’s presidency brought a symbolic and visual end to a period characterized by colorblind language and norms. Obama’s presidency promised racial transcendence, but instead brought race to the forefront of national politics. When Obama spoke about race – stating that if he had a son, he’d “look like Trayvon” [Martin] and opining that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” by arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates outside his own home, the angry responses were prompt and prominent. The highly racialized 2016 election brought Trump to power the first time, and his often overtly racist language and two impeachments signaled an emboldened backlash, even as Obama’s racial transformation was highly symbolic compared with previous transformative presidencies.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 doesn’t fit this pattern – but it does illustrate important elements of it. Impeachment is the most severe check that the legislative branch can exert over the president, and it exacts political costs for members of Congress, diverting attention from other priorities. One of the arguments in the book is that changing racial politics shakes up regular practices and allows members of Congress to consider this rare practice. Some political moments are more conducive to risk and improvisation than others. While the politics of Newt Gingrich and the Republican House majority were quite different from the impeaching members of Congress in the Johnson, Nixon, and Trump cases, they were also uniquely unbound by norms and exploring the limits of their power after several decades in the minority. In other words, the book focuses on how racial transformation produces these exceptional moments in Congress, but they are not the only thing that does.

On the surface, Johnson, Nixon, and Trump all faced impeachment for very different reasons: the firing of the Secretary of War and an ill-advised speaking tour; a “third-rate burglary” and its cover-up; a phone call with Ukraine and, later, the incitement of an insurrection. But a closer look reveals that important common themes: each of these was in some part about election interference, born of a deep distrust and disdain for political opponents. As Don Moynihan wrote in 2024, Trump’s first impeachment was “as close as we can find to a single moment when Trump went all in on loyalty as his primary value in governing” – an idea that also animates the Johnson and Nixon cases – and is central to Trump’s second term.

In each case, the president uses the power of the office to undercut the legitimacy of their opposition. The political world is classified either into enemies or loyalists. These actions were rooted in the racial context of the time – Johnson’s in the politics of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Nixon’s in the domestic war he saw between anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and others who wanted to change society versus the “silent majority” who valued tradition and stability.

Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election, both before it happened and after, were also connected to race and electoral politics. Efforts to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2019 aimed directly at the choice of African American voters and leaders in the Democratic primary.

The campaign to overturn the 2020 election results rested on accusations about voter fraud in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia – three cities with large African American populations.

Race, Impeachment, and the Bureaucracy

While each incident invoked racial animus, involved election interference, and undercut the legitimacy of political opponents, something was different about Trump’s.

Johnson and Nixon both violated strong norms about the bureaucracy. Andrew Johnson’s firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton violated not only the Tenure of Office Act but also the expectation that Congress would be able to shape the direction of Reconstruction policy, and the personnel in the federal bureaucracy in general. In a very different moment, the Nixon White House’s “Huston Plan” asked the FBI to compromise their political independence by investigating activists it deemed threatening. One of the articles of impeachment passed by the House Judiciary Committee invoked his use of the IRS for similar purposes.

These cases invite some reflection on the impact of government bureaucracy on race issues. Far from an obscure tiff about who gets to fire Cabinet officials, the Johnson impeachment was about who got to determine the terms for Reconstruction – which in turn directly affected the conditions of freed people in the South. Nixon’s attempts to use the bureaucracy to go after enemies was rooted in his fear and paranoia about civil rights and anti-war activists.

Trump’s second term has echoed these themes. His politicization of bureaucracy and state structures is closely related to the racial project of Trumpism. Elon Musk’s role in the early administration brought these two themes together: Musk kicked things off with a Nazi salute on Inauguration Day, and assumed leadership of DOGE, which dismantled government agencies without Congressional authorization and employed a number of staffers (besides Musk) with a history of racism online.

While Musk embodied the connection between race and the legally questionable efforts to dismantle the administrative state, OMB chief Russell Vought has laid out this connection more explicitly. Violations of laws and norms – the use of government shutdowns to force anti-DEI policies, firing of civil servants, erasing non-white figures from government representations of American history, and the use of the Justice Department for political ends – are all closely tied to Vought’s commitment to addressing a government he sees as “weaponized and woke.” In other words, the second Trump term has very much followed the past playbook of using – and abusing – state power in order to roll back racial progress.

Another example is the lawless nature of immigration enforcement, with disregard for due process, is tied up in racialized language about invasion and “protecting the culture.” From false accusations of Haitian immigrants eating pets, Latin American gangs, or Trump’s current attack on Somalis, the justification for unprecedented use of state power for immigration roundups draws on racist rhetorical tropes. People in the country legally – including citizens – have been detained by ICE, and the Supreme Court has recently ruled that race can be taken into account in these enforcement actions. While prior conflicts about Presidential abuse of power and race centered on African Americans, the connection between racial politics and abusive immigration actions that are fueling opposition to Trump are inescapable.

The question of whether these actions will result in impeachment is an open one, dependent on whether Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives and what the political dynamics are when they do. It may be that having tried it twice, the majority of Democrats will decide impeachment is not worth it. But the lesson of impeachment history is that the convergence of the factors we are witnessing now– racial backlash, abuse of government power, political cooptation of state structures – contributes to building a coalition and a case for impeachment.

Some members of Congress – usually the earliest advocates for impeachment – are motivated by the sense that a backlash leader is not fulfilling the obligation to be president for all Americans. Others are persuaded by discrete instances of abuse of power and violations of either law or accepted practice. Impeachments have been infrequent, and members of Congress have been cautious in the face of the political costs. But the combination of racial backlash and abuse of power have been powerful at times in helping overcome those misgivings.

Dr. Julia Azari is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, political communication and American political development.