By Ralph Nader
July 17, 2026
The chronic prevaricator and delusionist, Donald J. Trump, knows the worse his outlaw actions and mouth are, the less likely the Democrats in Congress are to impeach him.
The Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, like Trump, oppose impeachment drives but for different reasons. With Trump the coming weeks, are only going to get much worse, domestically and abroad!
Let us recall that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats impeached Trump in 2019, over the Hunter Biden/Ukraine deal demanded by Trump, and in 2020 over the Jan. 6th insurrection and attack on Congress. Both Senate impeachment trials failed to get the two-thirds vote required to convict Trump.
Why aren’t the Democrats demanding impeachment back home, where some 60% of the people favor this “You’re Fired” remedy, including 84% of Democratic voters? In a poll taken a few months ago, 59% of the people agreed with the designation of Trump as “a dangerous dictator.” Why has Hakeem Jeffries opposed House Democrats, almost all of whom favor impeachment in principle, signing on to veteran, centrist Congressman John Larson’s H.Res.1155 Articles of Impeachment?
Capitol Hill reporters should ask that question why the Democratic leaders are dragging their feed on impeachment. Maybe it is because the GOP could claim that prior Democratic presidents have committed impeachable offenses. But the counterclaim is that no president in history has committed such egregious offenses, daily, doubling down when challenged. Trump brags about his outlawry, his mantra being “doing whatever I want,” aided by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Six Injustices (see Trump v. United States 2024).
The Democratic leadership says “we don’t have the votes” in a GOP Congress. But to get the votes, you have to mount a relentless drive. Impeachment efforts around the country, have collateral benefits, such as giving a demanding, angry electorate an answer to their question: What does the Democratic Party stand for? Impeachment is a mobilizer for get-out-the-vote efforts, for educating and energizing the people back home who want fighters for them in Washington, D.C., not pussycats among the Republican carnivores. That’s why bold under-funded progressive primary candidates are starting to win against entrenched Democrats.
Compare the GOP to the Democrats. Republicans, in the minority when the Democrats controlled the House, took their repeal of Obamacare to the House floor over sixty times and lost. Still, they made their point, again and again, until they won the House and, with Trump, moved to make using Obamacare and Medicaid more difficult. As the great workers’ champion, Eugene Debs said, you have to endure losing and losing until you win.
Another explanation for the Jeffries/Schumer crowd is that pushing impeachment creates conflicts and turmoil that goes contrary to their top-down control discipline. They have their narrow and often flawed strategies to win elections, without alienating Wall Street. They also don’t want other variables to rock the boat, including an Impeachment article that raises their complicity with the Netanyahu genocide in Gaza/Palestine and the war against Iran.
When asked about Impeachment, Jeffries replied: “I don’t want to get ahead of that discussion.” What? The mega arsonist is burning down our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands every day, with tens of millions of Americans suffering and endangered, and their political leaders are saying “Now is not the Time,” contradicting the wishes of the vast majority of their voters.
It is not just the lack of basic political fortitude and self-respect by the Democrats. In recent years, before and including Trump, before and including Elon Musk and his criminal DOGE rampages, there has been a destruction of basic norms and public levels of expectations by people vis-à-vis their political and corporate dominators. Lowering public expectation levels amounts to a get-out-of-jail pass.
Trump has mastered pushing expectation levels to their lowest depths in American history. He can lie, cheat, defame, corrupt, and wreck everything he feels challenges his egomaniacal-driven greed, arrogance, and lust for illegal power and ignorance. Trump’s polls remain in the mid-thirties a midst all the fake promises and current lies he peddles about his non-existent Golden Age for America, with its booming economy. He even claims falsely that nations are falling all over themselves to invest trillions of dollars in America. (See “Medical Concerns About Donald J. Trump and His Fitness For Office” in the April 30, 2026 Congressional Record.)
In the past, Americans had higher expectations for government officials. For example, Sherman Adams, Chief of Staff to President Dwight Eisenhower, had to resign in 1958 after accepting a vicuna coat from a textile industry friend who was facing federal regulatory investigations, even though there was no quid pro quo for the gift.
Or in 1987, Senator Gary Hart had to suspend his presidential campaign because of accusations of womanizing. A picture of Hart, a married man, with a young woman sitting on his lap on a yacht raised a furor. In 2016 and 2024, Trump, the worst, most boastful sexual predator in American political history, went to the White House as president.
Ronald Reagan, a grade B actor, broke new ground when he became California’s Governor and then President with a winning smile and optimistic, patriotic rhetoric that so diminished people’s expectation levels about what they needed and wanted from an American president.
So low were their expectations, including those of the media, of Reagan’s intelligence and knowledge that he became expert at obliging them. Mark Green, in his great book Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error gives many examples of Reagan’s ignorant statements, words, and jokes that would have sunk previous politicians’ prospects. (See: https://nader.org/1983/12/02/ronald-reagan-reign-of-error/) Reagan dismissed criticism of his polices or actions with a laugh inducing people to say: “There he goes again.”
It all comes down to the civic self-respect, knowledge, and engagement of the citizenry, starting with civic history and skill courses untaught in schools, with parents being circumvented by harmful direct corporate advertisements to their children, now addicted to over five hours a day on their iPhones and similar environments for growing up powerless.
There is a glimmer of hope. Tyrants and fascist dictators always overplay their hand. In Trump’s 26-minute televised speech on July 16, 2026, he showed how desperate and depraved he is. Trump wants to usurp state control of our approaching elections. This time, he didn’t begin to fool the media, so off the wall were his fabrications and phony accusations.
Typical is the Wall Street Journal’s summary of his ravings: “ [T]rump didn’t provide any evidence of voter fraud, prove that people had cast ballots in the U.S. who shouldn’t have, or reveal that election outcomes had been altered because of interference.”
The Fuhrer in the White House, who said in January there should not be any elections in November, may have met his comeuppance. Even his core MAGA crowd is shrinking, according to polls.
But Trump still has something to teach his feeble Democratic opponents. He will never give up his many nefarious plans to disrupt the elections with his false claims and his possible invocation of the Insurrection Act to seize the states’ election data and machinery.
Voting in the upcoming election is a right and a duty. The consequences of not using your vote to send dictator Trump and his Republicans enablers the message that our democracy and the rule of law will not be subjugated by a dictator and his criminal gang.