It was clear from the first day of President Trump’s second term that round two would be very different from round one.
Trump’s revocation of law firms’ security clearances and access to federal facilities, his cutoff of research grants to Harvard, his multimillion dollar cryptocurrency deals, his decision to send 700 Marines to contain protests in a five-block section of Los Angeles, his usurpation of congressional power over federal spending — all of these acts have left millions of Americans aggravated and apprehensive, even as a substantial number of U.S. citizens remain untouched and largely unmoved.
We now have a president imposing an agenda far more dangerous than anything Richard Nixon dreamed of.
Here is one measure of Trump’s reign of corruption.
In the five months Trump has held office in his second term, the number of impeachable offenses legal scholars estimate that he has already committed range from three to eight or more.
This is not to say Trump will be impeached. The current Republican-controlled House is far too subservient to even consider it.
In pursuit of his agenda, Trump has sacrificed due process, gutted congressional authority, politicized the administration of justice and run roughshod over the First Amendment.
I asked Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina who has often appeared as an expert witness at congressional hearings on impeachment, about Trump. He replied by email: “It is nearly impossible to overstate the degree of Trump’s corruption. It is manifest every day, as if he is daring the American people and Congress to try to stop him.”
Overall, Gerhardt continued, “Trump has shown time and again his disdain for the rule of law, including for the Constitution of the United States. He has routinely violated his oath of office and even proclaimed himself as entitled to break the law to save the country.”
No American president, Gerhardt went on, “has come anywhere close to Trump’s corruption, and the level of his corruption — on a daily basis — is unmatched in our history.”
President Trump, Gerhardt added,
has committed more impeachable offenses in the first few months of his second term than all previous presidents combined.
They include lying to the American people on numerous matters and violating the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process for both citizens and noncitizens, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the Emoluments Clause, numerous abuses of power including the pardon power, complicity in eroding public health protections, and violating federal laws governing civil service and many other matters.
Gerhardt is by no means alone in his assessment.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, replied by email to my inquiries, listing five separate grounds for Trump’s impeachment:
President Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.
President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.
The impoundment of funds — cutting off funds appropriated by Congress in a myriad of programs, including for scientific research, for international aid, for colleges and universities, for agencies created by Congress — is unconstitutional and illegal. It is unconstitutional because it usurping Congress’s spending power and it is illegal because it violates the Impoundment Control Act. This is a very serious abuse of power causing great harm.
President Trump is using the military for domestic law enforcement in Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and a long tradition against such use of the military within the United States. This is a very frightening abuse of power.
It is clear that he is personally profiting from being president, with his cryptocurrency profiteering and his accepting an airplane as a personal gift and his real estate deals. This violates the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution.
Taken together, Chemerinsky wrote, these actions,
show a president who has no regard for the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our country has never seen anything like this. So yes, there is a constitutional basis for the House to impeach and the Senate to remove him from office.
I sent the legal experts whom I consulted a list of Trump’s actions and policies that might justify impeachment. Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, replied by email:
I believe that many items on the list below would be impeachable offenses at many other times in history. Within a few months, President Trump has repeatedly abused the office of the president by blatantly violating the law, lining his own pockets, punishing his political enemies and rewarding his friends.
Frost described the case Trump and his allies make for their actions as ridiculous:
His legal arguments are absurd, and he and everyone else knows it. Venezuela is not invading the United States, as claimed in his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. His administration was not powerless to return the mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia. Harvard students with valid student visas are not a “class of aliens” who are “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Finally, his decision to pardon over 1500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists who supported his false claim to have won the election, including those who violently attacked the police, is a moral outrage that threatens our democracy. That action alone would justify impeachment at many other times in history.
In legal and political circles, the impeachment clauses in the Constitution have been the subject of extensive debate.
Jon Michaels, a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote by email that he subscribes
to a fairly capacious understanding of impeachable offenses, an understanding that has, in the past year, become even more defensible (given the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States).
Given the wide range of offenses that fall between treason and bribery, I read “other high crimes and misdemeanors” to include any number of offensives that fall between treason and bribery, provided they have a relationship to one’s public duties.
Guided by his interpretation, Michaels found the following actions of Trump’s to reach the level of impeachable offenses:
There’s a broad genre of presidential “threats” or “policy course-corrections” that are deeply troubling under any circumstance but acutely so when they too are tied to the president’s deeply personal political or financial interests.
How credible can the president’s Middle East policy be in light of his shakedown of the Qataris and Saudis? How credible are the positions of the Justice Department when the president threatens political opponents and extracts concessions from them, including the deals struck with law firms that include those firms’ promising to devote hundreds of millions of dollars in billable hours in furtherance of right wing political causes.
There is pure self-dealing and abuse of office for financial gain that’s not specifically tied to policy. You note crypto-profiteering below and, indeed, we run the risk of being desensitized to straightforward corruption of this sort but, yes, this would be a gigantic scandal in any other context, warranting a deep investigation and, quite possibly, impeachment.
The president delegated effective authority over personnel, funds, agencies and data to Elon Musk, a private citizen (and, as a topper, a private citizen whose firms hold billions in federal government contracts and whose firms were embroiled in any number of high-stakes federal investigations).
The president is impounding congressionally appropriated funds, problematic (“maladministration”) under any circumstance but acutely problematic when the release of such funds is conditioned on perceived fidelity to the president and the president’s political agenda.
This president’s political agenda is so venal, vengeful and deeply personal — tied to the family’s finances and political grifts, to his private vendettas, and to the engendering of a personality cult that’s enabling him to govern with reckless abandon.
Last, I worry that the president is continuing to incite violence, as evidenced by Trump’s pardoning violent insurrectionists, providing a remarkable financial settlement to the family of Ashli Babbitt, and Trump’s long history of embracing, defending, and supporting those willing to engage in political violence. We’re right to focus on the president’s authoritarian impulses, especially as he’s just federalized the California National Guard and has dispatched Marines to Los Angeles, but there’s also evident encouragement of private acts of political violence, coercion, and harassment that suggests the optimal center of power is not with the state per se but rather with the (MAGA-fied) party.
Deborah Pearlstein, director of the program in law and public policy at Princeton, wrote by email that “some of Trump’s conduct already appears to rise to the level of an impeachable offense.” Pearlstein stressed that “in general, impeachment is a narrow remedy for specific kind of misconduct, limited by the Constitution to the most serious class of offenses against our constitutional system of government.”
In that context, Pearlstein continued:
Two actions jump out immediately as likely impeachable. The first is Trump’s impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress — his refusal to spend money Congress has already directed the executive allocate for specific purposes.
Every branch of government has recognized in the past that impoundment is illegal and/or unconstitutional — the courts, the Congress, even the notoriously pro-executive Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. It goes to the core of Congress’s most important constitutional power, the power of the purse.
The second, Pearlstein wrote, encompasses
actions that might rise to the level of bribery. Official bribery is always unlawful, especially so when it involves a foreign power — which again, was at the core of the issues the drafters of the Constitution worried about in drafting this clause and the Emoluments Clause.
If the many gifts Trump has been offered/accepted, or favors he has dispensed were done in some relatively direct exchange for an official act (e.g. if I buy your cryptocurrency, you’ll pardon my federal offense), then bribery may well be at issue.
Other legal and political experts I contacted stressed the wide boundaries of what can be viewed as impeachable.
Corey Brettschneider, a political scientist at Brown, wrote by email:
Donald Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses. The challenge lies in presenting these charges to the American people in a way that highlights how they represent not only abuses of power but also fundamental threats to democracy itself.
Impeachment is not a criminal trial, and “high crimes and misdemeanors” are not limited to violations of the criminal code. Rather, impeachment is a constitutional mechanism to protect the nation from a president who endangers the republic.
Trump has repeatedly disregarded the presidential oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” His actions constitute an attack on democratic institutions and norms.
At the top of his list of impeachable offenses, Brettschneider put
attacks on political opponents and the right to dissent, undermining the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The first category of impeachable offenses should focus on Trump’s efforts to silence dissent and punish opposition.
This includes his public attacks on law firms that represented his political opponents, repeated threats to prosecute those opponents, and the revocation of university funding for institutions that refused to comply with his directives.
Brettschneider argued that it would not amount to double jeopardy to impeach Trump again for
his role in inciting and supporting an insurrection. While this was the focus of a previous impeachment, the Senate’s failure to convict does not preclude raising the charges again; impeachment is a political process not subject to double jeopardy. His continued endorsement of previous efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters underscore the urgency of holding him accountable.
In other words, Brettschneider’s argument that double jeopardy does not apply suggests that if the House decided that the pardoning of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists is itself an impeachable offense, that would allow the introduction of all kinds of new evidence about Jan. 6 that was not available during the impeachment proceedings or Senate trial that took place in 2021.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of law at N.Y.U. wrote by email:
As we learned in the first Trump administration, impeachment is a fundamentally political assertion of congressional boundaries over executive conduct. First and foremost it requires a high degree of political consensus that the transgressions are fundamentally antithetical to the limited authority of the president. That occurred in the broad dismay over Nixon’s conduct.
As a practical matter, Democrats are slightly favored to retake control of the House in 2026. If they do, they would have the votes to impeach Trump, and it is quite possible that they will do just that.
Winning a Senate conviction of Trump on House-approved impeachment charges, which requires 67 senators, would be a much tougher hill to climb, possible only if Trump suffers debilitating political setbacks over the next three years.
A failure to achieve a Senate conviction does not, however, guarantee that Trump gets off the hook. A number of the impeachable offenses cited above would justify criminal inquiries, especially Trump’s cryptocurrency profiteering. The president’s ventures into digital currency clearly fall outside the standard of “official acts” that the Supreme Court exempted from criminal prosecution in its 2024 decision, Trump v. United States.
So the man who once boasted “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” may one day get his comeuppance. There is no guarantee that will happen, of course, but it may turn out that some sense of justice has survived Trumps multipronged assault on our legal system.
If Trump does go scot free, untouched by either a third impeachment or criminal prosecution, it will be an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Even so, if he is allowed to retire peacefully to enjoy his cryptocurrency wealth, his presidency will still go down in history as the embodiment of injustice, malfeasance, cruelty and transgression.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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