Once again, the nation is on the cusp of the beginning of an impeachment trial that will leave former president Donald Trump at the mercy of the United States Senate.
But while the first such impeachment last year sought to remove Trump from office, this one seeks to strip the former president of the lifetime benefits of the presidency and prevent him from holding any further public office.
While CNN reported that the outlook for conviction isn’t particularly encouraging, it seems that there’s a significant difference with how the American public views this round of impeachment compared to the last one.
When Trump was acquitted by the Senate in early 2020, it didn’t come as much of a surprise.
And according to Newsweek , that outcome apparently didn’t come as a disappointment to the majority of Americans, judging by the findings of a poll by ABC News and The Washington Post .
A month prior, only 47% of those polled said the Senate should remove Trump from office and 49% didn’t seem to think this was the right course of action.
But now that Trump has made history as the first U.S. president to be impeached twice, it seems that Americans are starting to feel a little differently.
As Newsweek reported, 56% of the 508 Americans surveyed by ABC News and Ipsos agree that Trump should be convicted and prevented from holding office again. This leaves 43% supporting the same outcome that occurred last year, with the remaining 1% being undecided.
The poll is considered to have a margin of error of 4.8 points.
But of course, it is the Senate and not the public that decides Trump’s fate here.
And as ABC News reported , Democrats seeking to convict Trump will have an uphill battle ahead of them as they need a total of 67 senators supporting this action.
Assuming every Democratic senator votes in favor of removing, an additional 17 Republican senators will have to agree with them for the impeachment to be upheld.
And considering that all but five Republican senators have challenged the constitutionality of convicting a president who is no longer in office, the outlook for conviction seems uncertain at best and grim at worse.
That information comes to us from ABC News, who also reported that if conviction manages to go through, it won’t be nearly as difficult to bar Trump from future office, as this action only requires a simple majority rather than two-thirds of the Senate.
Regardless of the outcome, however, it’s clear that the tide is increasingly turning against Trump and his allies in terms of public opinion.
In addition to the poll that saw 56% of surveyed Americans supporting his conviction, another one also conducted by ABC News and Ipsos shortly after the removal of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from her House committee appointments found that 42% of those polled believed that the Republican Party has more extremists among its ranks than the Democratic Party.
This contrasted with 25% who believed the opposite and 32% who felt that both parties had roughly the same number of extremists.
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Still, we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks.