How Will History Judge Trump's Impeachment? It Won't Just Be Decided On Election Day
As a legal process, President Trump's impeachment is over. But if it seemed to take a long time to reach the Senate's vote to acquit, the final judgment on Trump's impeachment will take far longer. History will be the final judge, and that court will be in session for a long time.
We can look only to three previous cases of presidential impeachment or resignation in American history, each quite different. But taken together, they indicate just how much the judgment of history may diverge from the initial political impact.
In the Trump case, much will depend on what transpires in the next nine months, and especially in the first week of November. As has been widely and often noted, Trump is the first president to face the voters after being impeached.
That prospect — an Election Day verdict — was more or less the closing argument offered by the president's defenders in the impeachment struggle just concluded: Why not let the voters decide whether the president had disqualified
