How Donald Trump will be impeached

From the election in November to the presidential inauguration in January, media commentators took turns to pronounce the Trump “Resistance” dead. I know I did. The line was too tempting. As Trump stormed back into the White House, his power looked irresistible. His enemies seemed so broken and defeated.

We all spoke too soon. “NeverTrumpism” is a reaction to Trumpism, as natural as magnetic repulsion and the urge to defy and destroy his presidency hasn’t vanished. In fact, look closely and you can see a “Resistance 2.0” gathering momentum in response to the second Trump administration.

The arguments for the next impeachment of Donald Trump are being tested ahead of the 2026 midterms and they will center, once again, on the possible corruption of the Trump family and its associates through vast sums of Middle Eastern cash. Trump is going to Abu Dhabi today and he seems cock-a-hoop at all the trillions of dollars in Arab investment deals that are coming his way. “I want to thank the media,” he said yesterday, magnanimously, at a meeting in Qatar. “The media, I have to say, has been very fair. They’re having a hard time saying bad because this is a record tour that will raise… it could be a total of $3.5-4 trillion.” Everybody loves big numbers.

But Trump is deluding himself if he can’t see the negative publicity spinning out of his golden grand tour of the Levant. There’s the Qatar Force One story – the news that Trump has accepted a $400 million luxury jet as a gift from the government in Doha. The aircraft is meant to replace the aging Air Force One aircraft and Trump professed himself incredulous as to the outrage over the present. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” he said.

But the Israel hawks surrounding Trump are displeased with his new friendship with the Qataris, who are, according to the official line from Tel Aviv, state sponsors of terrorism, the evil Robin to the badman Batman that is Iran. If Trump continues to fall out with Benjamin Netanyahu – and dares to strike some kind of nuclear deal with Tehran – the jet gift story will be pushed as evidence of a sinister “quid pro quo” with the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember it was allegations of a “quid pro quo” offer to Volodymyr Zelensky that caused Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.

But the jet story will be just one arrow in the Resistance 2.0’s quiver. The bigger looming scandal is World Liberty Financial, the crypto business which the Trump sons launched at Mar-a-Lago last September. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that, this month, an Abu Dhabi investment firm used a WLF “stablecoin” to invest $2 billion in Binance, the online crypto platform. WLF’s co-founder is Zach Witkoff, son of Steve, Trump’s Middle East envoy, and the whole enterprise has more than a whiff of Hunter Bidenish depravity about it. Crypto is still the wild west of the digital future and riddled with nefarious operators, some alarmingly close to the First Family. And the WLF story is already being connected to the $Trump coin scandal – the obviously bogus crypto currency that the president helped launch in the week of his inauguration. A number of Trump associates made a lot of very fast money out of that.

Democrats claim to be shocked by the sheer brazenness of the Trump family’s double-dealing. “It’s hard not to be simultaneously terrified at the thought of the damage he can cause with such power and awed by his willingness to brazenly shatter so many harmful taboos,” Rob Malley, who helped broker Barack Obama’s deal with Iran in 2015, tells Axios. But without a congressional majority, Trump’s opponents remain impotent.

The question then turns towards the mid-terms: if Trump loses his slender advantage in the House of Representatives, as he did in 2018, the Democrats will make White House “kleptocracy” their number-one issue and move to impeach him once more. That is unlikely to remove him from office, as the Democrats surely won’t have a sufficiently large Senate vote to terminate the presidency. Still, as Trump continues his pharaonic world diplomacy, the corruption stories are piling up against him. And if most Americans don’t start feeling richer as a result of these petro-trillions flooding into the tech-dominated American economy, the stench will start to overpower.

The above is taken from Freddy Gray’s weekly Americano newsletter. To subscribe click here.