Trump Wants His Impeachments Erased. History Doesn't Work That Way.
A man who is confident in his place in history does not spend his presidency trying to rearrange it.
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On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reached Donald Trump by phone to ask him about a plan his allies have been quietly circulating: a congressional resolution that would expunge both of his impeachments from the historical record. His answer was exactly what you would expect from a man who has spent the last decade arguing with facts that have already been documented, photographed, and archived.
“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” he said. “It was a rigged deal. It was a whole rigged situation.”
Constitutional scholars responded the same day with an observation we simply can’t ignore: there is no mechanism in the Constitution to undo an impeachment. The House voted. The record exists. A subsequent resolution expressing a different view of those votes would be, in the word most experts reached for, symbolic. It would not alter a single line of the record that future generations will read when they try to understand what happened in this country in the first quarter of the 21st century.
What it would do is force every Republican member of Congress to cast a vote, in the lame duck session after midterms that their own party expects to lose, defending a president’s conduct on January 6th and in the Ukraine phone call that preceded his first impeachment. That is the extent of the plan.
Look, I voted to impeach Donald Trump., one of only ten House Republicans who did. I have lived with the consequences of that vote every day since, and I would cast it again without hesitation. What I want to say today is not just about the vote, or about the legal merits of the expungement effort. I want to say something about what this moment reveals, because I think it reveals something important.
A man who is confident in his place in history does not spend his presidency trying to rearrange it.
Think about what we have watched over the past eighteen months. Trump has tried to put his face on the $250 bill. He has renamed the Gulf of Mexico. He has plastered his name on military bases and infrastructure projects and federal buildings at a pace that no previous president approached. He is now asking a Republican-controlled Congress, in its final weeks before an expected Democratic wave, to pass a symbolic resolution declaring that his impeachments did not mean what they meant. And this week, simultaneously, he is demanding the expulsion of the congressman who led the case against him.
Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said something at a campaign rally two weeks ago that I have not been able to get out of my head. “He’s trying to put his face on the money,” Ossoff told the crowd. “He’s building a monument to himself. But see, Atlanta, he’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone. Because he’s a failed president and a national disgrace.”
I have been in politics long enough to discount most campaign rally lines, but that one smacked me in the face with its incisiveness. And what makes it accurate is not the assessment of Trump’s record, but the behavioral observation underneath it.
Secure leaders do not behave this way. Leaders who believe history will vindicate them do not spend their final years in office arguing with the record that history will consult.
There is a reason the expungement push is timed for after the midterms. The people organizing it know, as most of Washington knows, that Republicans are widely expected to lose their House majority in November. The plan is to use a lame duck Congress, in the weeks between the election and the seating of the new House, to pass as much of this legacy-burnishing agenda as possible before the window closes.
The face on the money. The expunged impeachments. The monuments and the renamed buildings and the symbolic resolutions.
That understanding is itself revealing. If you believed your legacy was secure, you would not need to manufacture it in a lame duck session. You would trust the record.
Lincoln did not ask Congress to expunge his critics from the record. Washington did not demand that history be amended to reflect his preferred version of events. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan — none of them needed a resolution declaring that their enemies had been wrong. They left office, and history found them as it found them, based on what they had actually done.
Trump has now been president for a total of more than five years across two terms. The record of those years is extensive, documented, and not going anywhere. A congressional resolution cannot reach into the National Archives and alter what is there. It cannot change what happened on January 6th, which will be studied by historians for as long as American democracy exists as a subject worth studying.
I have said for years, and I will say it again here, that future generations will tell a different story about this period than the one being told in some quarters today. The people who enabled what has happened will one day refuse the even admit they once supported the man they now worship. History is patient in that particular way. It takes its time, and then it arrives.
What I did not fully anticipate, though I probably should have, is how clearly visible that reckoning would become while it was still happening. The expungement plan is not the act of a man who believes he is winning the argument with history. It is the act of a man who knows he is losing it and is trying to slow the loss. All of it is the same gesture: the attempt to assert control over a record that has already escaped him.
It will not work. Not because his opponents are powerful enough to stop it. But because the record is simply too large and too thoroughly documented to be rewritten. A vote by a lame duck Republican majority declaring them symbolically void will itself become part of the record, filed alongside everything else this Congress has done, and future historians will read it in exactly the context it deserves.
Ossoff was right. He is doing these things now because he knows no one will honor him when he’s gone. The tragedy is not that he knows it. It is that knowing it has not changed anything about how he governs.
The rest of us, owe it to the people who come after us to keep speaking out about what we are seeing. Not because it will change his mind. But because the record we leave behind is also ours to shape, and the people who read it deserve to know that there were Americans, in this time, who saw what was happening and refused to pretend otherwise.
I refuse to. And I hope you do too.
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