Former President Donald Trump appears to move on from negative events like impeachments and indictments undaunted by their impact, instead using what might be ruinous moments as opportunities to lambaste his opponents and raise money off his troubles. (Or in the case of the 2020 election, lambasting and fundraising without moving on.)
But former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance believes Trump’s seeming indifference to how he’s perceived by his enemies — and how his Presidency looks in the historical record — isn’t quite what it seems.
Vance thinks Trump’s record-setting two impeachments while President — Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were impeached once each — bothered Trump more than he lets on. Vance makes her presumption based on new efforts by Trump’s MAGA forces in Congress to “expunge” his impeachments from the record.
When Rep. Adam Schiff recently commented on the GOP-led expungement efforts, Schiff said “there is no floor below which [Republicans] will not sink to debase themselves for Donald Trump, and so we could very well have a vote on it. It will be a meaningless sop to their most flawed, unethical leader.”
“It also suggests,” Vance responded, “that the impeachments really got under Trump’s skin if he’s pushing this years later.” (Vance didn’t comment on Schiff’s view of GOP “debasement.”)
It also suggest that the impeachments really got under Trump's skin if he's pushing this years later. https://t.co/UKhGJ8fduk
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) July 23, 2023
Trump is currently facing two indictments and at least 37 federal criminal counts that might reasonably dominate his attention, leaving little room to revisit the impeachments.
But one important distinction between Trump’s current legal trouble and the impeachment expungement effort in Congress is that the former will be litigated in courtrooms, whereas the expungement effort can be executed by Trump’s loyalists in Congress who don’t need to meet any legal standard to accomplish it.
Vance may be right that the impeachments really got under Trump’s skin, but another plausible reason for the effort may be that the expungements look like low-hanging fruit to Trump, given the current majority in the House — fruit that could deliver him a way to claim a victory and rewrite history without having to answer to prosecutorial evidence, as will be required in a court of law.