President Donald Trump could continue to “push the envelope” so much that even Republicans become sick of him enough to back impeachment, according to one of his former first-term aides.
Anthony Scaramucci famously served as White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term in the White House and was fired after a week and a half on the job, after comments critical of his colleagues emerged. Since then, he has become a vocal critic of his former boss, making countless media appearances to offer his unique perspective on the Trump political machine.
On Sunday, he was a guest on the latest edition of The Daily Beast Podcast, where he predicted to host Joanna Coles that, after the seemingly inevitable midterm blue wave, the numbers in the House and Senate could end up in the right place to actually remove Trump from office via impeachment. He also argued that Trump himself is making this possibility even more likely as his unhinged actions continue to make life miserable for elected Republicans.
A third impeachment of Trump has seemed inevitable, given his almost unending list of offenses and the virtual certainty that Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in the midterms. Given that a two-thirds majority is needed in the Senate to actually convict and remove an impeached president, that prospect has largely been dismissed as impossible despite the increasing odds that Democrats will win that chamber as well.
Scaramucci, however, thinks that possibility remains a live one. He made the argument after also suggesting that a proposed trilateral meeting between Trump and the leaders of Russia and China would mark the ultimate death of the Republican Party.
“And so Trump should be very careful with that, because, you know… probably he’s going to push the envelope where he may be asked to leave the presidency,” Scaramucci said. “So, you know, people say, ‘Oh, that’s crazy.’ Not crazy, because the Democrats are going to take the House. Let’s say they split and they go fifty-fifty [in the Senate]. You need 17 Republicans that have had enough of him. And you’re a good journalist. They hate his guts. Michael Wolff knows that, okay, I listen to you guys.”
He added: “You know, they hate his guts — [and] he hates them, by the way. And they hate him. And so, you know, keep pushing and keep doing this sort of nonsense that they all hate.”
Scaramucci gave the example of Trump shutting down the bipartisan sanctions against Russia, passed in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, as a prime example of the sort of behavior likely to turn Republicans against him.
“Lindsey Graham puts out the sanctions, he dies unceremoniously and tragically, and they vote 86-to-whatever, bipartisan commitment on the sanctions,” Scaramucci explained. “Trump revokes the sanctions. So okay, keep doing that and you’re going to get a you’re going to get cross-traffic to the Democrats who, say, ‘Impeach him in the House, I’ll pull up 17 votes and we’ll knock him out of the presidency.’ And by the way, people can say, oh, that will never happen. That is on the table, ladies and gentlemen; that is on the table. That’s how much these people hate him.”