What it’s like to be impeached

News breaks that Trump will get a small political victory amid what’s about to be a bad week for his presidency: He convinced a Democratic congressman who opposes impeachment, Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, to switch parties. (Van Drew officially becomes a Republican the day after Trump is impeached, with Trump announcing it from the Oval Office.)

Two days before his impeachment, Trump starts off his week with a governors’ round table. He tries to keep the focus on the stock market but can’t resist calling impeachment a “hoax” in front of reporters. “He sees all of the hoax that happens,” he says, defending his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s recent trips to Ukraine, “when they talk about impeachment hoax or the Russian collusion delusion.”

We learn Trump has made 15,412 false or misleading claims since being in office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker database. “That’s an average of more than 32 claims a day,” the fact-checkers write, noting that his false and misleading statements increased as impeachment grew more likely.

“I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives.”

“Look, it’s a hoax. The whole impeachment thing is a hoax. We look forward to getting on to the Senate,” he tells reporters in as he meets with Guatemala’s president that day.

Trump starts the morning watching “Fox and Friends” and tweeting defenses of himself, nearly four dozen times by the afternoon.

Between 8:30 p.m. and 8:50 p.m., the House impeaches Trump on both counts, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

At the moment he is impeached, Trump is 17 minutes into a rally in Battle Creek, Mich., the district of the one conservative member of Congress who voted to impeach him, Rep. Justin Amash (I). According to The Post’s Ashley Parker, an aide held up a large card telling him the vote tallies of his impeachment as the president continued to talk. “Whoa, wow,” he said.

Over two hours, he slams or insults half a dozen Democrats, and went after one Michigan Democratic family particularly hard. He was angry at Rep. Debbie Dingell, the widow of longtime congressman John Dingell, who died earlier this year. Trump takes issue with Dingell voting in favor of impeachment after he said she was grateful to him for his role in her husband’s memorial. Then he suggests John Dingell could be in hell. “Maybe he’s looking up. I don’t know.” There is a mix of groans and laughter in the crowd.

Trump also threatens Democrats will lose their jobs for impeaching him. “This lawless, partisan impeachment is a political suicide march for the Democrat Party. Have you seen my polls in the last four weeks? It’s crazy. You know why? Because people, you know, we have an election right down the road.”

Trump tries to make light of the House vote in public remarks. “I don’t feel like I’m being impeached because it’s a hoax. It’s a setup. It’s a horrible thing they did,” Trump tells reporters at the White House when asked what it’s like to be the third president to be impeached. He mentions a USA Today poll that shows him leading all the top Democratic candidates in a hypothetical match up in Iowa, misleadingly saying it reflects the entire nation.

But Trump “seems to understand the severity of his historical sentence,” The Post’s Parker writes in a debrief. “His tweets and pronouncements and public statements have the feel of someone trying to scream away the one thing that can’t be undone.”

The House votes on and approves a renegotiated trade deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, a huge legislative priority for Trump that will go to the Senate for approval next year, probably after it holds his impeachment trial.

“He’s energized,” his daughter Ivanka Trump tells CBS’s Margaret Brennan in a portion of an interview released Friday. She says her father’s anger expressed in that letter to Pelosi isn’t mutually exclusive from being motivated. “You can be angry at a process that is unjust . . . But it’s still energizing. And it focuses you on — really it draws into relief the stark contrast in priorities.”

Trump plans to end the week with a couple more legislative victories, signing a bill that creates a sixth branch of the military focused entirely on space (which will be called Space Force) and provides paid family leave for 12 weeks for federal workers. He will head to his adopted home state, Florida, for the holidays. Before he leaves, Pelosi invites him to give a State of the Union to Congress in February, when he might be in a Senate impeachment trial. He did not immediately respond.

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