Will Donald Trump be impeached?

The conviction of two of Donald Trump’s closest advisers during his 2016 election campaign has sparked speculation that the US President will face impeachment proceedings.

While the President’s allies had a quick response to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s guilty verdict – that it had nothing to do with Russian collusion, and nothing to do with Trump – the decision of long-time confidant Michael Cohen to strike a plea bargain with prosecutors looks like a much more serious problem.

“The verdict in the Manafort trial isn’t nearly as worrisome to me as the Cohen agreement and the Cohen statement,” former Trump adviser Michael Caputo told Politico. “It’s probably the worst thing so far in this whole investigation stage of the presidency.”

Boston Globe’s Michael A. Cohen agrees. “There is a very good chance that August 21, 2018, will forever be known as the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency,” he says.

This is because “the president of the United States has been implicated in the commission of a federal crime”, he writes.

But despite this “it remains far from certain that Congress will take any meaningful action”, says Newsweek. “Leading Democrats, perhaps still wary of the impact on the midterm elections in November, did not jump onboard calling for immediate impeachment proceedings to begin,” adds the website.

So will Trump be impeached?

“This is a very big deal,” said Neal Katyal, a former US solicitor general in the Obama administration. “The president of the United States has been directly implicated in federal crimes, and implicated not by some enemy but by his own personal lawyer.”

He said it was the first time the nation had faced a similar situation since Watergate, and he predicted it would launch “the call for impeachment proceedings”.

But a lot will hinge on the US midterms this autumn. If the Democrats win back control of the House of Representatives, impeachment proceedings now look possible.

But “that’s only the first part of the process”, says Politico. A successful vote in the House “would trigger a full trial in the Senate, which would require a two-thirds ‘super-majority’ of senators to force the president from office, something that has never happened before”, the website adds.

And while the Democrats look likely to take back the House of Representatives, the Senate race is much less clear.

One worry for Trump’s critics is that if a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives moved to impeach Trump and failed, some believe he would become more popular, much in the way that former President Bill Clinton's approval ratings rose after his impeachment proceedings.

Asked if impeachment proceedings would hurt Trump politically, a Republican analyst told Politico, “Of course not.” Another adviser said the theory was “not crazy”, saying that “if you're looking at the politics of it, it's not a terrible thing for 2020”.