IMPEACHED - part 2

Impeachment, Donald Trump said, could turn a president into “a mess.”

A president impeached, he continued, “would be thinking about nothing but — it would be a horror show for him.”

In fact, to be impeached “would be an absolute embarrassment,” he concluded.

“It would go down on his record permanently,” Trump declared.

The future president offered this existential take on impeachment during a 2014 call-in to “Fox & Friends,” in reference to then-President Barack Obama.

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The House vote also marked one of the rare moments in Trump’s life where he has faced concrete accountability for his actions.

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Sure, 46 percent of people still oppose Trump’s impeachment — statistically similar to the 49 percent who support such action, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released Tuesday. And of course, he may yet win reelection in 2020.

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But for a man consumed with his legacy and legitimacy, the 230-to-197 vote on abuse of power and the 229-to-198 vote on obstruction of Congress are stains that undermine both.

It is impeachment, and it is for life. It’s historical and it’s constitutional. It’s not something Trump can squirm his way out of, or cut a hush-money check to make disappear.

  WaPo

Don't worry. He'll pass it off once he's acquitted in the Senate.

Trump can spin and obfuscate all he wants — he can dismiss it from the rally stage and decry it from his Twitter feed — but the scarlet “I” of impeachment will be, as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said, “permanent.”

Yep. The horror of having had him as a president at all will be somewhat mitigated by the fact that everything printed about him in history books will include the word "impeached".

On Wednesday night, Katy Tur, an MSNBC anchor who covered Trump’s campaign, tweeted out the myriad ways Trump has long evaded accountability — a riff she articulated again on her show the following day.

“This is the first time — if you don’t count 2018 and the election there — Donald Trump has suffered political consequences for his actions,” she said.

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Even Trump, who has approached what he calls the “very ugly word” of impeachment by blaming just about everyone but himself, seems to understand the severity of his historical sentence. His tweets and pronouncements and public statements have the feel of someone trying to scream away the one thing that can’t be undone.

“I don’t feel like I’m being impeached because it’s a hoax, it’s a setup,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday, responding to a question about what it feels like to be impeached. “It’s a horrible thing they did.”

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At his two-hour rally in Battle Creek, Mich. on Wednesday night, which presented a surreal split screen with the vote unfolding in the Capitol 600 miles away, Trump cycled through outraged indignation to claims that he was barely even being impeached.

“There’s no crime! There’s no crime, right!” he argued. “They call it impeachment light.”

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“It’s evident that he is suffering in whatever way he does, manifested by the hundreds of tweets and the anger and the two-hour diatribe,” [Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump’s 1987 bestseller, “The Art of the Deal,”] said, referring to Wednesday night’s rally.

Schwartz likened the president to “a balloon with a small pinprick hole” that is constantly “leaking self-worth.”

“That’s his life work, blowing that balloon back,” Schwartz continued. “It is a grim survival mentality. Impeachment is simply the most extreme version of something he must blow back against.” Tuesday in the Oval Office [...] asked whether he bore any responsibility for his impending impeachment, the president replied, “Zero, to put it mildly.”

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“You get impeached,” Trump said. “That may be a record that will last forever, but you know what they have done? They’ve cheapened the impeachment process.”

It will last forever, which is how long he'll whinge about it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.