What Trump Should Be Impeached For First

The only thing that has grown fatter than billionaires’ wallets under Trump is the list of high crimes and misdemeanors he should be impeached for.

The illegal war(s). The monetization of pardons, Air Force One, and Mar-a-Lago as party favors. The Epstein morass. The weaponization of DHS and DOJ against political enemies, which includes murders and cover-ups of said murders. Each of these belongs in any honest impeachment resolution—and several already are. You surely have your own additions!

But if you are building up your lists of complaints about our mad king, Declaration of Independence-style, from the wreckage up, start with disaster aid. Because that’s the closest issue we have to our faulted yet correct Founding Brothers, the turning of what is meant to help us against us, so we turn against each other.

The numbers are not subtle

Politico’s E&E News found that Trump has approved 23 percent of disaster aid requests from blue states—and 89 percent from red states. The denials blocked Democratic-led states from $250 million in aid that every previous president, including Trump in his first term, would have approved.

As wildfires burned in Los Angeles, he demanded California pass voter ID laws before aid could flow—conditions attached to emergency relief that the Rehnquist Court’s own 10th Amendment doctrine was designed to prevent. In late February, the administration released $5 billion in long-delayed disaster funds—but not to California, Illinois, Minnesota, or Colorado, all Democratic-governor states that had clashed with Trump. A FEMA spokesperson called it results-based. Sources inside the administration called it “a political tool.”

Not FEMA mismanagement. Armed federalism.

The Constitution does not fuck around on this: Congress holds the power of the purse. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 codified what the courts had already ruled when Nixon tried this—that the president cannot unilaterally withhold funds Congress has appropriated. The GAO found Trump violated this law when he froze Ukrainian security assistance in 2019. It was the legal heart of his first impeachment. He is doing it again, to his own citizens, sorted by how they voted, and in doing so, punishing millions of Americans, in California alone, who actually voted for him.

Congress has already filed the articles. H.Res.353 charges usurpation of the appropriations power, among six other articles. The scholarship is not speculative. The Revolving Door Project’s tracker maps every denial by governor, state, and date. Illinois denied. Maryland denied twice. Colorado denied three times in four months. Oklahoma—a red state—denied too, and its Republican governor praised Trump anyway.

Why this is the one that ends the union

The illegal Iran war is a crime against the Constitution and international law. The classified documents case was obvious obstruction, or worse. The Epstein cover-up is corruption so obvious it glows, suggesting vast misdeeds we cannot even comprehend. But those are discrete offenses—wrong, impeachable, and containable in the public mind as things Trump did. People almost expect this shit from Trump.

This is different.

When a president conditions emergency relief on party registration, he has announced that the social contract does not apply uniformly. A hurricane is his leverage. Your wildfire is a chip. Once that principle survives, every future president inherits it. The country on the other side of that is not a democracy with corruption at the top. It is something else. This is a violation of certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Make Republicans defend that.

So yes: the illegal war(s), the free plane, the ballroom, the Epstein cover-up, the DOJ and DHS turned into personal enforcement arms. Impeach for all of it. Put it in one resolution and make every Republican vote. But disaster aid is where the argument must start, because it is the one in which the crime is against all of us.

So if impeachment comes up on the campaign trail, nervous Dems in tight races, make it about standing up the principle this country is founded on: equality that no king can take away.

And make sure you’re at a No Kings event Saturday! I’ll be at the event in Romulus, Michigan, opposing the opening of a “human warehouse” there, because we’re in hell!