Trump supported impeaching former Presidents, and barring people from future office
We regret to inform you of several inconsistencies
Donald Trump proposed impeachment of former Presidents up to three years after they departed the White House. Trump also believed Presidents could be impeached for repeating a series of policy falsehoods. He furthermore supported barring politicians from ever holding office again.
Impeaching former Presidents
Trump proposed the impeachement of former President Barack Obama on February 10, 2020 — over three years after Obama exited the White House.
“Why aren’t we impeaching him?” Trump asked, using the present tense, during a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Trump wanted the former President impeached over the implementation of his Affordable Care Act (ACA), more popularly known as Obamacare.
“We should impeach him for that!” Trump declared, as he whipped his audience into a froth over patients having lost access to their preferred doctors under the ACA:
Trump’s defense against his second impeachment has rested in large part on claims that a former President cannot be impeached. Trump was impeached by the House while serving in office, of course; his trial is being conducted in the Senate after his Presidency.
Impeachment for a series of lies
Trump said George W. Bush should have been impeached for “saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true” that resulted in serious complications for the country.
Trump was referencing Bush’s series of claims upon which he’d led the United States to invade Iraq. Trump contrasted the seriousness of Bush’s claims, with what he termed the inadequate case for impeaching Bill Clinton.
“Look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into, with something that was totally unimportant,” Tump said. “And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war.”
Trump repeated the lie that the 2020 election had been “rigged” or “stolen” more than 100 times before the siege of the Capitol, according to a Huffington Post analysis led by senior reporter Hayley Miller.
Barring politicians from holding office again
Trump proposed that Members of Congress be barred from seeking office again in the future.
“No member of Congress should be eligible for re-election” he declared via a tweet, “if our country’s budget is not balanced — deficits not allowed!”
Trump ran deficits throughout his presidency, of course. His biggest budget buster was his 2017 bill that slashed taxes for large corporations and upper-income households. That legislation was shepherded into existence by countless Republican Members of Congress who, today, oppose any prospect of barring Trump from future office.
The tax bill, in combination with Trump’s lack of spending restraint, set the nation on a trajectory of historic levels of debt, even before the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting mandate for stimulus.
