Trump Told A Crowd In South Carolina That He Is Going To Be Impeached If Republicans Lose In November

Trump told supporters at a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on Friday that he expects to be impeached if Republicans lose control of Congress in November.

He said if they lose the midterms he is going to be impeached, that Democrats are going to impeach him, and that they have no idea why. He told the crowd they would lose everything, naming the border, the tax cuts and the rest of his agenda. Then he made the ask directly, saying what he really wanted was for people to pretend he is on the ballot and just come vote.

That last line is worth sitting with, because he is not on the ballot. All 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats are up in November. His name appears nowhere.

Here is the part that reframes the whole thing. NBC News reported back in July that Republican operatives were planning to use the threat of another Trump impeachment as a turnout tool precisely because he would not be on the ballot. So this was not a candidate thinking out loud at a rally. It is a strategy that was reported over a month before he said it, and Friday was the strategy being run in public.

He has also been saying it all year. In January, speaking to House Republicans at a policy retreat, he told them they had to win the midterms because otherwise Democrats would find a reason to impeach him, and that he would get impeached. The line has been in rotation since the winter.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise recently gave it a fresh hook, telling Fox News that Democrats would move to impeach on day one if they retook the House. Democrats themselves have said they would focus first on investigations rather than moving straight to impeachment.

What impeachment would actually mean is the part that usually gets skipped. The House can impeach a president with a simple majority, which is essentially a formal accusation. Removing him from office requires conviction by two thirds of the Senate, a much higher bar that almost never gets cleared. Trump has already been impeached twice, in 2019 over the Ukraine matter and in 2021 over January 6, and the Senate acquitted him both times. He remained in office both times, and he was later elected again.

So the warning he is delivering describes something that has already happened to him twice without removing him from anything. As a factual prediction it is thin. As a way to get people who are not motivated by a midterm ballot to show up anyway, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do.