The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump Is Clear: The Will to Do It Just Isn’t There – The case for impeaching President Donald Trump—again—is not difficult to make.
In some ways, it’s stronger than ever.
And yet, it will go nowhere.
Because the question before us isn’t whether Trump should be impeached. It’s whether America still possesses the political maturity—or the institutional integrity—to confront what that would actually mean.
Let’s be clear: Trump’s return to the presidency was a democratic result, a response to elite failure. The American people, or at least enough of them in enough places, gave him a mandate. But a mandate to govern is not a license to undermine the very structures that make governing possible. What we are witnessing is not a debate over policy direction or ideological contest. It is a slow-motion confrontation between one man and the constitutional order itself—disguised, as always, as populism.
Already, this administration is skirting the outer edges of legality and constitutional fidelity. The warning signs are not buried deep. They are right in front of us—Trump defying court rulings, publicly deriding judges who rule against him, and calling for their impeachment simply for doing their jobs. His vision of presidential power is not expansive—it is absolute, even monarchical. And that, in the American system, is a tendency that impeachment was designed to check.
It’s tempting to wave this all away – to pretend what’s going on is not really a threat to democracy. After all, haven’t we been down this road before? Twice? Didn’t the American people just signal that they are, if not enthusiastic, at least unbothered by Trump’s past offenses? That’s the wrong lesson. Impeachment is not a popularity contest.
It’s not a referendum on electoral legitimacy. It is a constitutional remedy for those moments when the chief executive officer refuses to be constrained by law, when the very idea of checks and balances becomes intolerable to the man at the top.
By that standard, Trump qualifies.
The fundamental political issue isn’t Trump’s personal conduct, however contemptuous it may be, but his systematic rejection of the system of checks and balances that defines the American system of republican democracy. When a sitting president declares that courts have no right to question his policies, when he floats the idea of ignoring rulings from various courts, and when he demands his supporters in Congress simply accede to his demands, the republic is not merely being tested. It is being threatened.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that Trump is not alone. He is enabled by a political movement that no longer even pretends to be constitutionalist in any meaningful sense. The institutional Republican Party has become a vehicle not for policy, but for power. It does not challenge Trump’s violations—it echoes and amplifies them. The legislative branch, designed by the Founders to check executive ambition, has become more of a cheering section than an institutional constraint on that ambition.
And so, Trump will not be impeached—not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because the institutional will, or capacity, no longer exists. This is not a partisan point. It’s a structural one. The House majority, cowed by Trump’s influence, is incapable of serious oversight. The Senate, still reeling from the political trauma of two failed impeachment efforts, has no appetite to try again. And much of the electorate, exhausted by years of performative outrage and media madness, has lost the capacity to distinguish between real constitutional overeach and mere partisan posturing.
That collapse of discernment – or, in classical terms, prudence – is perhaps the most dangerous development of all. When impeachment becomes nothing more than a punchline, constitutional decay follows. We are now at the point where a president can announce, openly, that he may ignore the courts and Congress—and half the country shrugs. The argument is no longer about whether Trump’s behavior is unprecedented. It’s about whether precedent matters at all.
This is how republics fall—not with tanks in the streets, but with one or two branches of a tripartite government abdicating their duty to constrain the others. Trump didn’t invent this dynamic. But he has perfected it. And in his second term, unshackled by reelection pressure and surrounded by loyalists who view the Constitution as a nuisance rather than the DNA of democratic self-governance, he is testing just how much power a president can seize before anyone stops him.
Some will argue that the courts can stand as the last line of defense. But courts are not self-enforcing. They issue rulings. They do not command armies. If a president refuses to comply—and if Congress refuses to hold the chief executive accountable—then the entire system becomes performative. It exists on paper, and in the media, but not in political practice.
This is where we now find ourselves: with a president who should be impeached for his open constitutional overreach, for his contempt for the constitutional system of checks and balances, and for his effort to turn the executive branch into a quasi-monarchy. But he won’t be. Because the mechanisms of accountability have collapsed, not under the weight of any one scandal, but under the corrosive acid of political cowardice.
It may be that the American people, or at least the institutional players who claim to represent them, have decided that the cost of removing a president—even one who openly challenges the legitimacy of the courts and the Constitution—is higher than the cost of keeping him in place. If that is true, then the crisis we face is not Trump. It is us.
President Donald Trump delivers his Joint address to Congress, Tuesday, March 4, 2025, in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok).
Impeachment is not about vengeance. It is not about political theater. It is about whether we believe, in the very marrow of our political bones, that executive power must be constrained. If we no longer believe that, then we should stop pretending. The pretense is simply worse than the reality.
Trump should be impeached – and convicted. But he won’t be. And in that quiet abdication, a republic inches closer to becoming a feudal state, one ruled not by law but by feudal ties of fealty, homage and service – one composed of lords and vassals rather than citizens and their elected representatives.
And the truly tragic part? When the reckoning comes, we will pretend we never saw it coming. But we did. We just lacked the courage to act.
About the Author: Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
