This might all seem like a liberal fantasy: No president has ever been booted out of the job, and only Richard Nixon resigned under the pressure of the impeachment process.
But people putting money on the line are taking impeachment seriously. According to the prediction market Betfair, the chance that Trump will fail to serve out his four-year term is about 50 percent (!). There’s even a 20 to 25 percent probability (!!) that Trump doesn’t finish out 2017 in office, these bettors reckon. [...]
To provide evidence against Trump being removed, the data would instead have to contain examples of presidents who could have been removed from office, but weren’t. For instance, it might be relevant that there were never serious efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal. In fact, the Democratic leadership in Congress went somewhat out of their way to avoid actions that could lead to impeachment proceedings against Reagan. Why was that, exactly? One could come up with a variety of plausible theories: that the scandal wasn’t severe enough; that Reagan wasn’t personally involved enough; that Reagan’s popularity insulated him from impeachment; that Reagan enjoyed good relations with Congress at a period of relatively low partisanship, and so forth. [...]
The good news for Trump ends there, however. While the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” might seem hopelessly vague, it has a fair amount of legal history and is generally regarded as referring to political crimes (“crimes against the state”) as opposed to personal affairs. A drunk driving conviction might not qualify as a “high crime,” for instance. But an action that wasn’t illegal per se but reflected an abuse of the president’s office could count as one. That Trump almost certainly did not commit a criminal offense in reportedly disclosing highly classified information to Russia would not necessarily protect him from an impeachment charge on those grounds, for example. [...]
For the time being, this factor contributes only modestly to the likelihood of Trump being removed from office. Trump is unpopular, but his numbers are not unsalvageable (several presidents have come back from similar ratings to win a second term). A further deterioration in his popularity would imply that he is unpopular even in red states, however, and would greatly increase the risk to Trump.
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