Donald Trump and maga Republicans must face the truth. Donald Trump has a list of impeachable offenses Senator Susan Collins alert!

Trump will be impeached in 2027.  Philadelphia Inquirer opinion, by columnist Will Bunch.

(BTW, where is Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins❓)

War❗ Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. 

Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for❓ Absolutely nothing.

A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But, Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass 💲100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another 💲500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ 

We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

• The pardon mess, as described above. Trump’s outrageous abuse of his clemency pen has proved America’s founders made a big mistake in granting such absolute power to just one man. Congressional hearings can and should spur pardon reform, but could also expose evidence that could be used in a Trump impeachment case.

• Cryptogate. Presidents used to put their assets in a blind trust, as Jimmy Carter famously did with his peanut farm. Trump, on the other hand, keeps doing deals and has seen his net worth roughly triple to more than $6 billion in just the first year of his second term. There are many tentacles to what I called Cryptogate with this handy guide I published last spring. Trump’s pump-and-dump meme coin launched on inauguration weekend seems a high crime unto itself.

• War crimes. The war in Iran is illegal,❗. The president did not seek congressional approval to start dropping bombs up and down the Persian Gulf as required by both the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also an illegal, aggressive war under international law. Ditto his regime-change assault on Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people. Ditto his regime’s unending lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have no legal basis. Congress can reassert its authority by impeaching Trump.

• Abuse of power in the justice system. The flip side of Trump’s pardons has been the unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to go after the president’s perceived enemies, from former FBI chief James Comey to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. These investigations, directly urged on by Trump in Truth Social posts, have repeatedly failed to pass muster with judges or grand juries, but that doesn’t erase the stain of such clearly wrongful prosecutions.

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. 

Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. 

A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again.