In the tradition of the Clintonometer and the Trump Apocalypse Watch, the Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.
Well! This morning Donald Trump accused a TV pundit who has been criticizing him—Joe Scarborough—of having recently begged him to kill an allegedly scandalous National Enquirer story. (Trump is buddies with the guy who runs the company that owns the tabloid, which recently published a piece about Scarborough’s relationship with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski that, despite its breathless framing, did not actually reveal anything interesting or scandalous.) Then New York magazine reported that top Trump aide/son-in-law Jared Kushner in fact told Scarborough that Trump would kill the story if Scarborough apologized for being critical of the administration. The (alleged) low-rent media blackmail is yet another embarrassment for the president in a week that has been full of them—and still, as I said yesterday in regards to a related PR disaster, it seems foolish to move our likelihood of impeachment above 50 percent just because Trump did something dumb; he’s always doing something dumb.
However! Late Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported, via solid-seeming evidence, that a Republican operative with connections to Michael Flynn (who was at the time a Trump campaign adviser) had asked representatives of a group he believed to be tied to the Russian government for assistance obtaining hacked Hillary Clinton emails. If confirmed and expounded upon in Robert Mueller’s investigation, this is the kind of evidence of campaign-to-Russia collusion that could sink Trump’s standing in the Republican Party enough to make impeachment a real possibility. So … raise the meter!
