Women Support Trump's Impeachment Far More Than Men
A fair number of Americans seem ready for President Donald Trump to be pushed out of office.
Forty percent of Americans think Trump deserves to be impeached, according to the most recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute's (PRRI) August poll. That represented a 10-point rise from the group's February survey.
There were divisions over Trump's impeachment among demographic groups, however. Women, for instance, were much more likely to support his impeachment than men. Forty-seven percent of women thought the president should be impeached, while just 32 percent of men thought the same, according to PRRI.
It might not help the president that he has a long history of making offensive comments about women (like the infamous video that showed him bragging about what seemed like sexual harassment and assault), a practice he hasn't particularly curtailed in office (as when he bullied MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski on Twitter with personal insults).
Still, 53 percent of Americans overall don't believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office, according to the survey. It's a very minor victory for the president that a majority of Americans thought he should not be impeached, and the figure represents a decline of 12 percentage points from February.
Perhaps predictably, there was a stark divide along party lines. Seventy-two percent of Democrats believed Trump deserved to be impeached—a 14-point rise from February—while just 7 percent of Republicans felt the same. But independents appeared to be migrating away from Trump, with nearly 4 in 10 (38 percent) supporting his impeachment, up from 27 percent in February, according to PRRI.
Trump's potential impeachment has been a subject of discussion almost since the day he took office, but calls have grown amid the investigations into ties to Russia, as well as the continuing chaos within the White House. Most recently, his reaction to last weekend’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, stirred anger in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
Representative Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, put out a press release this week saying he intended to begin the impeachment process over Trump’s comments claiming counterprotesters were just as bad as the neo-Nazis at the rally.
“I believe the president should be impeached and removed from office,” Cohen said in the statement. “Instead of unequivocally condemning hateful actions by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Klansmen following a national tragedy, the president said, ‘There were very fine people on both sides.’ There are no good Nazis. There are no good Klansmen.”
Others have pointed out that impeachment might not be the only way to remove Trump from office. Representative Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) called for Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment, which allows for a president to be removed from office if deemed unfit. The process starts with the vice president and a majority of the executive branch, then requires two-thirds agreement from both chambers of Congress.
Speier apparently feels it’s necessary to begin the process, tweeting, “POTUS is showing signs of erratic behavior and mental instability that place the country in grave danger. Time to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
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