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.
At about 5 p.m. ET Friday things started getting bad, and have been getting worse ever since.
- News leaked that the Trump administration will end the DACA program, which allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to receive protection from deportation.
- Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt for refusing a federal order to stop violating the Fourth Amendment by arbitrarily targeting and detaining Latinos.
- Trump signed a directive forbidding trans individuals from joining the military.
- White House national security adviser Sebastian Gorka, an amateur-hour talking head who claims a Hungarian Ph.D that’s been described by an actual counterterrorism expert as “fraudulent” and who may be a member of a far-right group of Nazi sympathizers, was reportedly fired. (He claims he quit.) This is nominally a good thing, but in context is really just an appalling reminder that a far-right weirdo with a bogus Ph.D worked at an important job in the White House for eight months.
Meanwhile, Hurricane Harvey has made landfall in Texas as a massive Category 4 storm. Trump, the president, tweeted that he is carefully observing its “doings.”
His political position may be relatively weak, but this guy is still the president. Godspeed.
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.
