He predicted the most shocking moment in American political history. But it turns out that was only part of the story.
Last year, American University Professor Allan Lichtman used a statistical model to accurately predict Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. He was initially ridiculed for making the bold claim, but now looks like sage compared to, well, everyone else. He even got a congratulatory message from the president-elect.
But Lichtman is telling Trump and the world to pump their breaks. Because his other prediction was that while Trump would win, his presidency would quickly go up in flames after he was impeached by Congress.
In his new book, The Case for Impeachment, Lichtman writes that there are a number of issues that could lead to his impeachment, including Russian collusion, as well as Trump’s actions prior to becoming president. He says that if Democrats win back control of Congress in 2018, they’d have the power to pursue impeachment, but he thinks Republicans might beat them to the punch. “Trump’s policies and appointments pose an existential threat to humanity,” he writes.
The book has immediately become such a hot topic that it’s skyrocketing to the top of the best-seller list days before it’s even released.
Interestingly, Lichtman says the best way for Trump to avoid impeachment is to radically shift his positions toward a more centrist style, something various news reports suggest he is already doing.
“Opponents will challenge your decision-making abilities and claim that they were right all along about your temperamental unfitness for the presidency, yet you have survived and thrived by defying the conventional political wisdom,” he writes. “Why not do it again?”
As crazy as that might sound, he pounds out that two of our nation’s past 44 presidents have been impeached. And a third, Richard Nixon, was almost certainly about to be impeached before resigning in disgrace. Both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached by Congress. But the rules say that two-thirds of the U.S. Senate must decide to then convict the impeached commander in chief for him to actually be removed from office. That has never happened. But impeachment itself? Not such a long shot, apparently.
“Gamblers have become rich betting on longer odds than that,” he writes in his book.
In fact, those odds almost make predicting impeachment seem far more modest than his initial bold claim that Trump would make it to the White House in the first place.
