Calls to Impeach Trump Collide With Reluctant Democratic Leadership

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, speak at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 08, 2026. —Kevin Dietsch—Getty Images This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Until this week, most Democrats in Congress deflected when asked if President Donald Trump should be removed from office over his latest outrage, be it his aggressive efforts to curb immigration, his demolition of the White House's East Wing, or his chaotic tariff policies.  That restraint has now ended amid the Iran War and in particular a social media post threatening to wipe out "a whole civilization." Dozens of Democrats this week called for a premature end to Trump's second term—either through impeachment or the Constitution’s 25th Amendment—as much of the party's base expresses outrage at Democrats' inaction. Yet there is scant appetite for such an effort before the midterms from party leadership—as well as from swing-state lawmakers and those who see it as the kind of therapy presenting as governance that risks sapping the party’s momentum. Conversations with more than a dozen Democrats involved in this fast-moving internal debate paint a picture of a party out of power divided between wanting to show voters they are fighting Trump and not wanting to be viewed as chasing performative exercises in futility.  “If you're expecting an immediate vote on this or whatever, that's probably not going to happen,” says Rep. John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat who on Monday introduced his own articles of impeachment against the Republican President, acknowledging the limited appetite in his party to move quickly on the issue. Both paths—impeachment or the 25th Amendment—are, to the mind of party Leadership, a distraction from their planned midterm campaign focused on high costs and unchecked corruption. “I don't want to get out ahead of that discussion,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Thursday when asked about the impeachment rumblings, adding that if Democrats choose that path, “we want to be able to do it in an informed way.” That hesitation may harden after Friday’s planned caucus conference call for Democratic lawmakers to learn more about the mechanics of the 25th Amendment from Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law expert who led Trump’s second impeachment trial. Jeffries asked Raskin to talk the caucus through the range of options available to address presidential conduct before they reached a consensus position. Raskin tells TIME ahead of that call that he does not plan to sway members in any direction, but will instead outline how Congress could approach both impeachment and the mechanics of invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet—or a separate body established by Congress—to declare a President unfit to discharge the duties of the office. While that congressional body has never been created, Raskin has long proposed establishing one as an alternative mechanism if a president’s Cabinet is unwilling or unable to act. Any such effort would still require the cooperation of the Vice President, he noted. “None of this is a panacea,” Raskin says. “The caucus, like a huge part of America, was angst-ridden and panicked by the President's fulminations about committing war crimes and potentially genocide. People want to know, what are the constitutional safeguards for a situation like this?” On a personal level, Raskin believes impeachment would not make sense for the party at this moment. The lessons are pretty clear. Democrats have been down this road before. Both times they failed, with the House voting to impeach but the Senate failing to convict. (Raskin’s aides described the five day-long impeachment trial he participated in as a “brutal exercise”). “I've got no doubt in my mind that there are what appear to be impeachable offenses that this President could be charged with,” Raskin tells TIME. “But the President having committed those offenses does not mean that we have the means to engage in the impeachment process.” Not enough votes for impeachment The problem facing Democrats these days is that enthusiasm cannot overcome arithmetic. The math is just not there in either the House and the Senate without Republican support. As much as Democrats may see the public as being with them—Trump has the highest disapproval ratings of any President this century at this point in his term—they still lack the numbers to hold him to account. “Until the voting cards match the voters, there’s not much we can do,” says a staffer to the Democratic House Leadership team, referencing the electronic voting cards members use to pass legislation. Even so, patience is in short supply. Democratic leadership is urging restraint, much the way former Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept things at a simmer before pushing hard for Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 over revelations involving his dealings with Ukraine. She knew she had the caucus at heel and had built a durable coalition that does not currently exist inside the party.  A source familiar with Jeffries’ thinking says the party needs to “do the work” to build broad support for impeachment before going down that route, including getting some Republicans in Congress on board, a process they said had not been undertaken yet. Any Republican who dares flirt with such a coordination would quickly face the White House’s ire, and figures like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger offer examples of what happens when GOP members fall afoul of Trump. That has not deterred some Democrats from moving ahead on all paths. Rep. Al Green, the Texas Democrat who has introduced multiple articles of impeachment against Trump dating back to 2017, says the outcome matters less than the signal it sends. “There are people who believe that it should only be done at a certain time when you have a certain amount of people in Congress that you can be assured that you will get the impeachment articles through. This is not the case,” Green tells TIME. “Impeachment is what we can do to express our disapproval of a President’s behavior.” That’s why Green says he is likely to sign onto any other lawmakers’ efforts—on almost all topics, including Trump’s latest threats to wipe Iran’s culture off the face of the earth. “What person in his right mind says, ‘I will destroy a civilization’?” Green says. “Most of what others say along this line is something that is aspirational, not operational. He has the weaponry to do this.” Larson tells TIME he unintentionally filed his impeachment resolution just before Trump threatened to annihilate the Iranian civilization, which legal experts have said could amount to war crimes, and that he had been planning the effort for more than a year. He says that he “wanted it to serve as an example” of how Democrats are holding Trump accountable, though he did not ask Jeffries to back the impeachment effort and says that Leadership has made clear they have concerns about how such a vote would be perceived. A failed impeachment effort, a party leader suggested privately, risks being framed as tacit approval of the President’s conduct, while also diverting attention from the party’s core economic message on affordability and health care—issues party leaders believe resonate more directly with voters. Trump’s sinking polling The party strife comes as Trump’s approval ratings are creeping toward record lows. His numbers on immigration are at their lowest this term, and he’s never had worse polling on the economy, health care policy, or inflation. One in five Republicans now disapprove of Trump’s job overall and one in four disapprove of how he’s dealing with foreign policy, according to CNN’s most recent polling. It’s an environment that Democratic strategists say is ripe for the party to make major gains in November’s midterm elections. Republican excitement for the elections is down; enthusiasm among GOP voters is a decades-long low and Democrats have an epic 14-point advantage on that question. Democrats note that this week’s special election in Georgia saw a stunning 25-point swing in their favor from the results just a year ago. While special elections draw a smaller, more-engaged turnout than other elections and are far from predictive, Democrats note that every special election since Trump took office has moved in their favor even if the Republicans held the seat. “We have to get out of our way,” says one ally of House Democrats’ campaign arm, implying that the smart strategy is to force Republicans to own the two Big Cs of this cycle: costs and corruption.  Which is why Raskin, who led the last major impeachment effort, is trying to make sure his party is aware of the harsh realities of the ill-fated I-word. “We have to recognize that impeachment is not a panacea in the Constitution for what ails us,” Raskin says. “But the Constitution cannot be a fetish either. It shouldn't be a taboo. It's got to be part of what constitutionally conscientious members are thinking about in the face of extraordinary misconduct and offenses taking place by the President of the United States.” Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.