Trump impeachment petition gathers nearly 4 million signatures: report
ISLAMABAD, (MILLAT ONLINE):A US billionaire and political activist has received nearly four million signatures in three months on his petition to impeach President Donald Trump, according to POLITICO, an American online news service.
Tom Steyer, the investor, has poured millions of dollars into a national campaign of television and digital advertisements calling for Trump’s removal from office.
While impeachment proceedings are difficult to execute, the fact that Steyer’s campaign has gained a significant amount of support over a short period of time demonstrates the opposition to the President, the report said.
Steyer’s campaign spurred headlines in October when his petition, which declares “we need to impeach this dangerous president” ”surpassed the one million signature mark, a milestone Steyer himself initially believed was the ceiling of his impeachment drive.
But now that the number of petition signatures has tripled, transforming an effort dismissed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other high-ranking Democrats as quixotic and irrelevant into a political force that could become “the hottest trove of data in Democratic politics” heading into the 2018 midterm elections and beyond.
In addition to prompting speculation about his own political ambitions, Steyer’s impeachment campaign has played a part in revealing the tremendous and growing grassroots opposition to the president that has been reflected in both opinion polls and repudiations of Trump at the ballot box, the report said.
“We have tapped into something much larger than we thought,” he was quoted as saying.
“Donald Trump has brought us to the brink of nuclear war, obstructed justice, and taken money from foreign governments. We need to impeach this dangerous president. Sign on now,” reads the petition on its website.
Experts say the petition could serve as a campaign goal for those running in next year’s midterms, which serve as the first nationwide referendum on Trump’s presidency.
According to an Associated Press/NORC poll released this month, Trump, who has labeled Steyer “wacky” and “totally unhinged” ”is the most unpopular first-year president in history. Another recent poll” conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News” found that 41 percent of Americans want Congress to hold impeachment hearings for President Trump.
Analysts here were still uncertain whether the indictments of three former Trump aides, including his ex-campaign chairman, by special counsel Robert Mueller will strengthen this resistance. Mueller is currently investigating whether Trump campaign advisers colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 American election.
“The Mueller indictments put us in a place where impeachment is firmly on the table … from now on, every conversation about the administration has to include when he’s going to be impeached,” Steyer said in an interview with Axios, an American news and information website.