A student wears a hat reading “Impeach Trump” during a graduation ceremony at Columbia University in New York, May 17, 2017. (AP/Seth Wenig)
As controversies and Russian investigations keep growing and developing, an increasing number of U.S. citizens support impeaching President Donald Trump, recent polls show.
Forty-three percent of American voters now want Congress to begin proceedings to impeach Trump after the president’s return from his first trip abroad since he took office, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.
“If President Trump was hoping his foreign trip would shift the conversation away from scandals, he may be out of luck,” Morning Consult Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp said. “Over the last week, support for beginning impeachment proceedings among voters rose from 38 percent to 43 percent.”
But much of the support for impeaching Trump comes from political considerations, rather than a belief that Trump is actually guilty of impeachable offenses, the poll showed.
There are still 45 percent of voters who don’t want Congress to impeach Trump, down from 46 percent the week before.
After Trump’s controversial firing of FBI Director James Comey calls for impeachment started surfacing.
“We have no love lost for Comey, but Trump firing him in order to shut down the Russia investigation is another in a long line of impeachable offenses. This has to stop. Congress must act — NOW,” Democracy for America said in a petition.
Comey revealed that the FBI was in the midst of investigating potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in last year’s presidential election, just days before he was fired. He was reported to have asked the Justice Department for more prosecutors and other resources to handle the investigation.
The U.S. Justice Department had appointed Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, as special counsel to oversee the Russian investigation. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner has been named as a person of interest in the probe.
Comey also plans to testify publicly in the Senate as early as next week to confirm reports that Trump pressured him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia, CNN reported.
Only three U.S. presidents in history have faced legitimate impeachment threats.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a commencement speech at Wellesley College last week that Trump will end up being impeached.
“We were furious about the past presidential election, of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice, after firing the person running the investigation into him at the Department of Justice,” she said.
Trump is already the least popular president in U.S. history. The new Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that 45 percent of voters approve of the job Trump is doing, while half disapprove. That has recovered from a low of 41 percent earlier this month.
A March Gallup poll said Trump had an approval rating of 39 percent — a historic low since Gallup started charting presidential approval in 1953.
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