The chronic prevaricator and delusionist Donald J. Trump knows that the worse his outlaw actions become, the less likely the Democrats in Congress are to impeach him. The massive number of blatant, impeachable acts by the lawless, corrupt, violent, systemically racist, unstable, dangerous tyrant increases by the day. The American public knows it. The majority of Americans favor impeaching Trump. Among Democrats, it’s 84 percent in favor as well as a majority of independents. Polling even shows that most Americans think Trump is a “dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”

Yet “despite those sentiments,” writes Truthout, “leaders in the Democratic Party are still refusing to include the idea of impeaching Trump in the party’s messaging in the run-up to the 2026 congressional midterm elections.” When asked about impeachment, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries replied: “We haven’t ruled anything in and we haven’t ruled anything out.” What? Every day, the mega-arsonist is burning down our Republic and its Constitution, with tens of millions of Americans suffering and endangered. Yet Jeffries has been noncommittal about whether Democrats would pursue impeachment even if they had a Congressional majority. He has declined to sign on to veteran centrist congressman John Larson’s H.Res.1155 Articles of Impeachment.

Why are the Democratic leaders dragging their feet on impeachment? The party leadership says “we don’t have the votes” in a GOP Congress. But this misses the entire point: to get the votes, you have to mount a relentless drive. Impeachment is a mobilizer for get-out-the-vote efforts, for educating and energizing the people back home. Voters have made it clear they want fighters for them in Washington, D.C., not pussycats among the Republican carnivores.

The GOP certainly does not give up and say “we don’t have the votes.” Republicans, in the minority when the Democrats controlled the House, took their repeal of Obamacare to the House floor over 60 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, to destroy these programs as much as possible. As the great workers’ champion Eugene Debs reminded us, you have to endure losing and losing until you win. The right grasps Debs’ point better than the Democratic leadership.

Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the party’s leaders in the House and Senate respectively, know all the ways Trump is wrecking America. They know that their fellow elected Democrats in the House and Senate overwhelmingly want to impeach Trump. So, what’s the problem with these two men, and their weak Democratic National Committee? Why is the party leadership so cowardly and corrupt?

First, they are antidemocratic control freaks. They are quite comfortable contracting out their campaigns to corporate-conflicted, incompetent consultants. By definition, control freaks do not like electoral mandates from the public. These Democrats want to win elections their way—raise lots of money, including from corporate PACs and Wall Street, run on a very few issues distinguishing them from the Republicans, and declare they are not Trump. They have excluded the input and voter turnout proposals of progressive citizen groups and progressive labor unions, which could have shown them how to achieve landslide victories in election after election against the worst GOP ever.

But impeachment also shines a spotlight on a host of reform agendas that the ossified Democratic leadership does not want to address, unlike restive younger Democratic candidates, some of whom are winning upset primaries. Consider what Larson’s articles of impeachment—which every citizen should read in full—actually charge Trump with:

• Article 1: War Power Murder / Piracy — including “initiating war and murdering scores of putative but unproved drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific; committing war crimes in violation of the War Crimes Act of 1996; blockading Venezuela; and committing piracy on the high seas and coastal waters by theft of Venezuelan oil.”

• Article 2: Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement

• Article 3: Serial Unconstitutional Deportations and Detentions — Trump “illegally detained, deported or attempted to deport citizens or immigrants based significantly on race or ethnicity or political opposition to Mr. Trump protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution” and “these rampant illegalities have terrified immigrant communities, citizens, and green card holders in the hundreds of thousands or millions, including Haitians, Somalians, and Venezuelans legally in the United States.” 

• Article 4: Retaliation Against Constitutionally Protected Speech 

• Article 5: Abuse of the Pardon Power — beginning with the pardoning of hundreds of convicted violent criminals during the January 6, 2021 insurrection and including “pardoning scores of campaign donors or political supporters who were convicted of financial fraud or drug trafficking on an unprecedented scale indistinguishable from bribery.” 

• Article 6: Illegally Crippling or Defunding Programs to Protect Consumers, the Needy, Workers, and the Environment — including “indiscriminately [firing] Federal employees and [withholding] Federal funds contrary to Federal statues” and “irreparably impairing the health, safety, welfare, and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans.” 

• Article 7: Usurpation of the Congressional Power of the Purse 

• Article 8: Contempt of Congress — including “[refusing to] share with Congress a video showing the murder of two civilians who survived an initial strike against alleged drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela and countless Epstein File documents wrongly classified to conceal wrongdoing or prevent political embarrassment.” 

• Article 9: Perverting Law Enforcement to Persecute Political Opponents and Benefit Friends — including “[stripping] lawyers or law firms of security clearances and [initiating] legally frivolous, retaliatory investigations or prosecutions of political opponents,” such as against James Comey, Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, and former CIA director John Brennan. 

• Article 10: Suspending or Dispensing With Laws — including “illegally [discharging] at least 17 Inspectors General under the Inspectors General Act of 1978” and rejecting “any limiting principle that would prevent the President from refusing to enforce any law enacted by Congress thereby making its legislative power a dead letter and rendering the entire United States Code advisory only.” 

• Article 11: Flouting Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment — by promulgating a “flagrantly unconstitutional executive order” purporting to strip a certain category of children born in the United States of their birthright citizenships.

• Article 12: Specious National Emergency—Foreign Terrorist Organization Declarations — falsely declaring a “national energy emergency” for the purpose of “evading Federal laws governing the production, transmission, or export of energy” and listing drug cartels and the government of Venezuela as “terrorist organizations” as “a pretext to initiating an unconstitutional war against Venezuela and murdering suspected drug traffickers.” 

• Article 13: Emoluments — Trump “refused to divest himself of any direct or indirect financial interest in a wide array of business ventures intended to exploit his position as President to offer or withhold political favors to encourage patronage of these ventures by Americans or foreigners doing business with the United States to enrich himself or his family contrary to the prohibitions of the Constitution’s domestic and foreign emoluments clauses.”

Why, then, do Democratic leaders whine that “now is not the time,” “we don’t have the votes,” or “wait until after the midterm elections”—which they know that Trump’s lackeys are working overtime to disrupt and steal the elections?

The Democratic leadership does not want the November election to be about the abuses by plutocrats who have been inflicting so many injustices, crimes and anxieties on the American people. This is because they are complicit in many of those injustices themselves. For example, Trump is starting his own illegal wars, without the authority of Congress—a prime impeachable offense. However, AIPAC—the Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby embedded in the Democratic Party—and the giant weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin support Trump’s abuses of war-making power. Seeking campaign donations from these and other lobbies, the Democratic Party has no interest in Mr. Larson’s first Article of Impeachment regarding Trump unconstitutionally initiating war as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Gaza, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Nigeria without required congressional authorization. Larson’s impeachment articles raise the Democratic Party’s own complicity with the Netanyahu genocide in Gaza/Palestine and the undeclared war against Iran.

A similar aversion extends to the “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” clause of the Constitution. This would open up a can of worms for the Democrats. After all, Democratic presidents have failed to faithfully execute the law, by ignoring waves of corporate crime, hundreds of billions of dollars in commercial billing fraud, including on Medicare and Medicaid, refusing to push for adequate corporate enforcement budgets, bankrolling huge corporate welfare schemes, and allowing the tax code to be turned into Swiss cheese riddled with loopholes for the rich and powerful.

Yet impeachment remains a great campaign issue. Articles of Impeachment are constitutional-level mandates for a political party and candidates to run on, replacing the insincere throw-away lines and bloviating rhetoric so despised by a disgusted populace. Res. 1155 ties together in an authentic way all of Trump’s vicious shredding of the people’s health, safety and economic benefits and constitutional freedoms. H.Res.1155’s thirteen articles, and their connection to “kitchen-table necessities,” must be highlighted in this year’s political campaigns. Majorities despise the openly corrupt Trump, whose support in polls is slumping, but many voters also don’t trust or believe in the faltering Democratic Party, which can’t come up with a credible compact that addresses the needs of the people and a set of political commitments embodied in specific pending bills.

The people want fighters for them who care for them in Washington, D.C., who use the citizens’ delegated powers and tax revenues in the interest of the people. A compact with voters should be convincingly advanced and emblazoned across the land. Imagine if Democratic candidates pushed for “Medicare for All” instead of inadequate Obamacare, or fought for an adequate living wage instead of not even raising the frozen $7.25-per-hour federal minimum wage when the Dems controlled both houses of Congress and had a Democratic president? Repeatedly, people ask “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” They know the Democratic Party is led by political cowards. That’s why bold under-funded progressive primary candidates are starting to win against entrenched Democrats.

It’s also true that not pushing for impeachment contributes to the lowering of public expectations, and ultimately amounts to a get-out-of-jail pass. Both before and including Elon Musk’s criminal DOGE rampages through the federal government, there has been a violatingof basic criminal laws and low public levels of expectations by people vis-à-vis their political and corporate dominators. Trump has mastered pushing expectation levels to the lowest depths in American history. In the past, Americans had higher demands for government officials. For example, Sherman Adams, Chief of Staff to President Dwight Eisenhower, had to resign in 1958 after accepting a vicuña coat from a textile industry friend who was facing federal regulatory investigations, even though there was no quid pro quo for the gift. 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.

Democrats on Capitol Hill, if asked, would say that “yes,” Trump should be impeached—yet the Party’s upper echelons say that taking it to a vote can’t go anywhere so long as the GOP runs Congress. But importantly, the push for impeachment doesn’t have to reach a vote. As the wild and crazy Trump becomes more of a political disaster for the GOP, many Republicans will want to save their own political skins over Trump’s. That’s what happened with the defiant Richard Nixon in 1974. Nixon was never actually impeached. After the Watergate scandal, the GOP jumped ship and forced his resignation. Trump’s crimes are far worse than Nixon’s and intensifying every day. As in 1974, it is before the elections that the GOP feels more insecure. Today, Republican members of Congress know their majority is at risk. In raw politics, sometimes it doesn’t take a vote. It just takes pressure from a president’s congressional base and, for a tiring Trump, and the public humiliation that comes with abandonment. An impeachment drive is a potential road to Trump’s resignation.

Putting impeachment front and center can educate people about how central the Constitution is to their daily lives. The mission of our government is to “promote the general welfare.” Only Congress can spend your money—not the president. Only Congress can take us from peace to war—not the president. Only Congress can define the authority entrenched in the executive branch—not the president or the six “Injustices” on the Supreme Court. Only Congress can tax or not tax—not the president wielding arbitrary tariffs, charging fees, or riddling the tax code with loopholes and escapes for the super-rich and powerful.

With Trump the worst, much violently worse, is yet to come,as he continues to double down. Trump’s illegal and crazed daily behavior and illegal executive dictates worsen the wrecking of our country. He has said there shouldn’t even be elections this year. 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.

But there is a glimmer of hope. In November, Trump may have his comeuppance. Even his core MAGA crowd is shrinking, according to polls—and they no longer want to buy his merchandise. Tyrants and fascist dictators always overplay their hand. The most promising reform movements are often sparked and strengthened by the perpetrators themselves providing continual incriminating evidence of their own lawlessness. It all comes down to the civic self-respect, knowledge, and engagement of the citizenry. Public support for the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump is growing by the day. A March 9, 2026 Task Force report from the New York City Bar—dominated by powerful corporate lawyers, no less—was titled “The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power.” The recommendation: immediate impeachment.

“Impeachment” is our Founding Fathers’ word for “you’re fired”—a phrase used by Trump against millions of civil servants, contractors, and others working to help make a better country. Donald Trump, the arsonist of our Republic, its Constitution, and lawful institutions should not be given one day more without being confronted by a fast-rising national impeachment movement.

The Constitutional and civic basis for such an impeachment movement was the subject of our two symposiums on impeaching Trump, which took place on Capitol Hill in April and July 2026 and are available to watch on nader.org.

Portions of this article first appeared on Ralph Nader's blog.