Desperate Donald Wants You to Forget His Impeachments

Thousands of Americans are rushing to give up their citizenship, while Trump spent the week insulting women journalists

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I was in college both times Trump was impeached. If the weekly benders weren’t enough to wipe my memory, I doubt anyone will so easily forget those votes. But Trump is trying to erase history anyway. Let’s talk about it.

Trump Is Pushing Congress To Vote Away His Impeachments

The Congress that can’t pass a budget on time somehow has a five-month plan for one resolution.

Donald Trump and his allies are weighing a plan to push lawmakers toward a resolution that would expunge his two first-term impeachments, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. And they’re not hiding it — a White House official confirmed the effort to Reuters shortly after the story broke.

The resolution, from California Rep. Darrell Issa (take a guess), would expunge both impeachments “as if such Articles had never passed” the House, and it already has Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s backing along with more than twenty cosponsors.

The timeline is the most interesting part. Speaker Mike Johnson is reportedly open to the move, but the plan is to wait until after the November midterms — the same midterms in which Republicans are widely expected to lose their House majority.

Worth sitting with that for a second. A resolution with the votes to pass would get scheduled before the election. Scheduling it for afterward is itself an admission that the votes aren’t there while members still have to answer to voters.

Legally, this changes nothing. Experts told the Journal the resolution would mean little because the Constitution simply doesn’t provide a mechanism to undo an impeachment that already happened. There’s no precedent for the House voting to expunge a federal impeachment at all, and legal historians have been skeptical that such a vote would have any real effect.

Trump’s own framing, for what it’s worth, hasn’t evolved much since 2019. Asked about it directly, he said it should happen “because I did nothing wrong,” calling the whole thing “a rigged deal” and “a rigged situation.”

This isn’t the first attempt. In June 2023, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed a similar effort, and as far back as Trump’s first impeachment trial, Rep. Lee Zeldin was already calling for the House to “EXPUNGE this sham impeachment” if Republicans won the majority. None of those efforts ever got a floor vote.

So what would actually change if this passes? The talking point. “Twice-impeached president” becomes something Trump’s allies can contest in any debate, ad, or campaign mailer, regardless of whether the underlying facts changed.

Either way, the math works out for Trump. If Republicans lose the House in November, a lame-duck vote on this costs outgoing members nothing. If Republicans somehow hold on, they can push it through with the knowledge voters will tolerate most anything.

The bill doesn’t have bipartisan support, but it does have something better: nothing to lose.

Thousands of Americans Are Giving Up Their Citizenship

The joke people make every four years now has a DMV line.

Erin Klatt left for New Zealand a decade ago and finally made it official this spring, formally renouncing her citizenship at the U.S. consulate in Auckland. The timing made it feel extra symbolic, though afterwards she reported feeling nothing but relief.

Nobody in the government wants to talk numbers. The State Department doesn’t publish renunciation stats, and the IRS says it doesn’t compile them either. Outside trackers put 2025 at 4,889 people, the highest since 2020’s spike of 6,705, with another 15% jump expected this year.

Some of it really is about money. The U.S. is one of the only countries that taxes citizens on income earned anywhere in the world. And in a plot twist nobody saw coming, the State Department actually cut the renunciation fee from $2,350 to $450 in March.

Klatt herself ties it directly to Trump. She said the state of the country, the political situation, and her fundamental dislike of Trump and his policies and the direction the country is heading were what made her finally pull the trigger.

She’s not an outlier in citing this. A consultant who’s handled thousands of renunciation cases over the past decade-plus said that while the vast majority cite tax reasons, there’s a geopolitical layer on top of that now. Regardless of how someone feels about Trump, he’s pushing more people on the left toward giving up citizenship.

“I’m moving to Canada if he wins” has officially graduated from joke to game plan.

Trump’s War on the Press Has a Gender Problem

It took less than a week for the president to insult three different women journalists, and almost no one outside media circles blinked

On June 6, Trump walked out of his own interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence behind his election fraud claims. When she pushed back, he told her she was “either crooked, or you’re stupid.”

It wasn’t an isolated outburst. Last month, a reporter asking about cost overruns on Trump’s ballroom project got told she was “a dumb person,” with a second female reporter in the same exchange called “a stupid person.”

Go back further and the pattern gets uglier: a Bloomberg correspondent told to be “quiet, piggy” while asking about the Epstein files, an ABC reporter branded “the most obnoxious” for asking about reflecting pool renovations, a New York Times reporter called “ugly” for co-writing a story about his age.

There’s a noticeable pattern in who gets the personal, gendered insults rather than just disagreement over coverage.

This is not a story about a president with a short temper. It is a story about what it costs to be a woman doing your job in rooms where the most powerful person in the country has decided that questioning him is a personal insult.

AlterNet America’s journalists don’t watch a colleague get called “stupid” or “ugly” on camera and move on to the next item. We don’t have a newsroom culture where staying quiet is the safe career move, where standing up for the woman who just got humiliated means risking your own seat at the table.

If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, this is a good week to reconsider that. Become a paid subscriber today.

We’ll be here. We don’t flinch when someone tells us to be quiet.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America