Trump will be impeached in ’27. Here’s how. | Will Bunch Newsletter

War! Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

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A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024 to federal charges around failing to pay $40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times has reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass $100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another $500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it? We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating $900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again. What didn’t work for the Philadelphia 76ers might work for America.

Trust the process.

Question: Our president is genuinely, terrifyingly out of his mind. When will the press stop sanewashing him and start focusing on the fact that the V-Dem Institute doesn’t consider the U.S. to be a liberal democracy anymore? — Martha Holland (@mkholland.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Martha, I couldn’t agree more. I watched Trump’s comments from the Oval Office on Monday and was, frankly, terrified by his slurred speech, seeming exhaustion, and not-well-sublimated rage. The Rolling Stone writer Asawin Suebsaeng noted Tuesday that Trump’s comment about bombing Iran’s Kharg Island “a few more times just for fun” is almost identical to the words of San Francisco’s 1970s Zodiac killer. And, as you note, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute warned on Tuesday that it no longer rates the United States as a “liberal democracy.” Without democracy, there is no real journalism. It’s way past time for the elite media — those that haven’t already been bought or bought off — to wake up.

So One Battle After Another won the war for Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night, but the half-dozen or so readers who responded to last week’s solicitation for predictions clearly preferred two other nominated films: Sinners and Sentimental Value, the Norwegian film that did snag the Oscar for Best International Feature. Heather Frost felt that OBAA fell back on somewhat racist tropes while, “Sinners allowed Black actors to break out of stereotypes and tropes to display full embodiment of humanity, portray complex characters, and honor and elevate the complicated, painful history of our country.”

📮 This week’s question: In the spirit of the column above, do you think House Democrats should pursue a Trump impeachment in 2027, and, if so, on what grounds? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump impeachment” in the subject line.

The United States, coming off a Winter Olympics where gold medals in the hockey rink united the nation before they divided it, takes another shot at sporting glory Tuesday night when Team USA plays America’s regime-change rival Venezuela for the championship of the World Baseball Classic inside a packed Loan Depot Stadium in Miami. Expect a gonzo, flag-waving crowd — the overwhelming majority rooting on U.S. soil for a nation that America attacked just two months ago.

Some of that is a reflection of Miami’s vibrant immigrant community, in a city that throbs with the fresh blood of its Latin American asylum seekers even as the Trump regime wages its mass-deportation war against their brethren. But some of it is a simple reflection of the fact that Team USA is hard to like, hard to root for.

In plodding their way through the tournament, America’s baseballers have morphed before our eyes into a metaphor for the country that’s bombed at least seven nations since Trump returned to office. Its firepower at the plate is matched by seemingly soulless, joyless arrogance.

“We’re America, we’ve got to assert our dominance over everybody else,” Paul Skenes, the superstar pitcher for Team USA and the Pittsburgh Pirates, said on the eve of the global tournament. He could easily have been talking about Trump’s militaristic foreign policy, not baseball. “That’s what we do. It’s gonna be fun.”

After his comments, the White House posted a video called “American Dominance” that mixed Team USA home runs with deadly explosions in Iran.

Fun? It’s true that the Americans have made it to the title game, largely on the back of Skenes’ stellar hurling. Yet many commentators have applied the same word to Team USA’s slog through the tournament: “Joyless.” That was driven home in an embarrassing 8-6 upset loss to Italy (a team that’s mostly comprised of Italian-Americans), a squad that gleefully embraced its heritage by toasting home runs with espresso shots. It turns out there’s something to be said for playing for the love of what is essentially still a kids’ game, instead of for “dominance.”

It also turned out that the USA manager, Mark DeRosa, seems to have mistakenly thought his team had already qualified for the knockout rounds and rested some of his best players (Italy bailed out the Americans by beating Mexico the next night), then made a Trumpian denial that he knew what he was doing but “misspoke.” Like the Pentagon, Team USA didn’t know the rules of engagement, or didn’t care.

When Skenes shut down the high-powered Dominican Republic in front of a mostly hostile crowd in Miami, Team USA celebrated on the field and the sound system blared Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” John Fogarty’s 1969 ode to an America soiled by privilege and militarism. If the tune fits, wear it.

“Remember Marina Ovsyannikova,” was a line from a USA Today op-ed that I quoted in my column exactly four years ago today. Don’t remember her? Honestly, neither did I at first, but this heroic Russian newswoman gave us all a reminder of the power and perils of a free press when she denounced Vladimir Putin’s then-weeks-old invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I wrote: “At the very moment that Americans (along with most of the world) are swooning over the audacity of the Russian naysayers and how that defines the greater struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, lawmakers across the United States are pushing a plethora of bills aimed at criminalizing political protest in this country — sometimes in ways that mimic the worst of Putin’s Russia." This has not turned out well. Read the rest: “Marina Ovsyannikova’s courage should make U.S. stop our own war against protests.”

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