Yes. He was.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik don’t think so. No, really. They have introduced resolutions to “expunge” Trump’s impeachments from the historical record “as if such Articles of Impeachment had never passed the House of Representatives.” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy supports the resolutions.
Here is Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post:
Now, if the House does what Greene and Stefanik propose, he will surely claim that his two impeachments simply never happened. Our collective memory must be playing tricks on us. The House of Representatives didn’t really accuse him — twice — of high crimes and misdemeanors. Those hubbubs we dimly recall must have ended in unanimous resolutions praising his rugged good looks and his really big brain.
This notion of impeachment expungement is so laughable that it’s easy to chuckle and guffaw past what’s so serious about it. The biggest threat to our democracy, in my view, is the fact that we no longer agree on even the most basic facts. If some of us believe it’s raining right now and others believe it’s a sunny day, how can we possibly come to the right decision on whether to invest in umbrellas or sunscreen?
Now, to flatter Trump’s vanity and help him politically, Greene and Stefanik want to create a kind of alternate-universe timeline in which President Donald the Great was never really impeached — because, considering his Greatness, how could he have been? The right-wing media echo chamber will treat the expungement as legitimate, which would make the impeachments somehow illegitimate. And the nation’s information gap, already a canyon, will further widen.
For the record, expunging a presidential impeachment is not a thing. It has never been attempted because it makes no sense. Both of Trump’s House impeachments led to trials in the Senate, as the Constitution instructs. Is the Senate supposed to pretend that those trials, which ended in acquittals, never happened? What about the pages in the Congressional Record that chronicle the impeachment proceedings? Would they be ripped out and destroyed? Sent to Mar-a-Lago for Trump to hoard in one of his cardboard boxes, with his golf shirts and his newspaper clippings?
Read Robinson’s entire piece here.
Expunge away! Historians will have the last say. These resolutions are just another part of the story historians will tell. Let’s also remember that some of the world’s worst dictators also tried to rewrite the past.