Wherever you may be on this planet of ours, there’s little chance that the mid-term elections in the US escaped your attention this week.
Indeed, with Donald Trump in command of the infamous ‘little red button’, there are connotations for humble folk in all four corners of the globe with the bouffanted president in charge.
Whether you are a fan of his bombastic politics or loathe the man, there were reasons to be cheerful at those mid-term elections.
On The House
The big bit of news, no matter how Trump and his Republican PR machine tried to downplay it, was that the opposition Democrats recaptured power in the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.
The party won a massive number of seats, with a strong percentage of female and ethnic minority candidates earning power. Is there a sea-change from the toxic masculinity of Trump and co on the horizon?
Either way, the point is that now they control the House, the Democrats have a number of key platforms they can work with:
- They can block the president’s more controversial policy ideas.
- They can run investigations into his background, including checking his taxes and financial payments.
- They can act upon alleged conflicts of interest if they believe Trump is abusing his power
- Perhaps most intriguingly, they have the power to roll out the impeachment process should they find it necessary
Forget Trump’s claims of ‘unprecedented success’; if he gets up to no good, he could find himself in the brown stuff.
Conga Around Congress
It wasn’t all bad news for the incumbent leader of the free world, however.
The Republicans strengthened their grip on the Senate, albeit by just two seats, and that is considered to be something of a ‘vouch’ for Trump’s time in office so far.
It doesn’t give him any additional powers, and indeed losing the House was arguably more damaging to his future credentials, but in maintaining his level of support in the upper chambers Trump has not relinquished his grip on American politics quite yet.
Will Trump Win the 2020 Election?
The bookies aren’t always the best guide when it comes to the political landscape; after all, they said Trump didn’t have a chance of being elected in the first place.
But the mid-terms have altered how they foresee the 2020 elections in the country going.
The Democrats are now the odds-on favourites to wrestle back the White House, and while their price of 5/6 is less than overwhelming evidence they have shortened noticeably since Tuesday’s vote.
At odds of 11/10, the bookies aren’t exactly laying the prospect of the Republicans enjoying another four years in office.
Will Donald Trump Be Impeached?
You can go back hundreds of years, but there’s has only ever been two cases of impeachment in US politics.
The first was back in the 1800s, and the second was Bill Clinton for his infamous ‘cigar-gate’ scandal in 1998.
Both were subsequently acquitted, and so it would be fair to say that impeachment processes are rarer than hen’s teeth.
Mind you, America has never had a leader quite like Donald Trump before….
What is interesting is that the odds of Trump being impeached by the Democrats have fallen as short as 5/4 following their success in the House; that’s an implied probability of 44.4%.
And who knows: if revelations regarding Russian involvement in the election process come true, Trump may be the first American president in history to be successfully impeached.