President Donald Trump appears to be worried that he could face impeachment if Republicans lose their majority in the House of Representatives. In a campaign-style rally in Michigan that the president attended Saturday night as an alternative to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump said it was very important for his supporters to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “We have to keep the House because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him!’ ‘We will impeach him’,” Trump said as the crowd booed when he mentioned Waters’ name. “Then people said, ‘He hasn’t done anything wrong,’… Oh, that doesn’t matter, we will impeach the president’.”
The commander in chief went on to note that the party in the White House usually loses in the midterms so he said supporters shouldn’t get “complacent” just because Republicans control both chambers of Congress. “We cannot be complacent. We gotta go out and we gotta fight like hell and we gotta win the House and we gotta win the Senate.”
Trump has frequently mentioned Waters’ seeming fondness for saying she wants to impeach the commander in chief as a way to rally support. And Waters does talk about the issue a lot. Most recently, she made a point of mentioning impeachment at the Time 100 gala in New York when she was asked about any advice she might have for Trump. “Please resign so that I won’t have to keep up this fight of your having to be impeached because I don’t think you deserve to be there,” she said. “Just get out.”
It’s clear though that not all Democrats are on board with Waters. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, for example, warned fellow party members that impeachment talk would not help them win in the midterms. “I have said over and over again that I don’t think we should be talking about impeachment,” Pelosi said on Thursday. “I’ve been very clear right from the start.” The California lawmaker said all the talk about getting rid of Trump only helps the GOP. “On the political side I think it’s a gift to the Republicans,” Pelosi said. “We want to talk about what they’re doing to undermine working families in our country and what we are doing to increase their payrolls and lower their costs.”
At the very least that’s the public message from the Democratic leadership. ABC News noted yesterday that “sources” claim some Democrats are privately debating the issue ahead of the midterms.
