Impeachment is more popular than ever in this country, especially among college students. A recent study done by Collegereaction.com, found that nearly 76% of college students across the country support impeachment.
Donald Trump has been a businessman far longer than most college students have been alive, and not many know much about his life pre-presidency. Yet college students have seen what he has done as President and have formulated their opinions about him from his first term in office.
After 3 years and numerous scandals later involving the President’s taxes, an illegal payment of a pornstar, and Muller Report. More recently the nation is seeing a new scandal unfold involving his withholding of foreign aid to Ukraine unless they investigated the Biden family.
In nearly every new poll that gets released, Donald Trump’s approval rating has been slowly decreasing since the beginning of his presidency. For example, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Donald Trump Tracker, Trump’s average approval rating across most major polls has dropped to 40 percent overall. The latest scandal with Ukraine has not only lowered Trump’s approval ratings by about 3 percent but also has people talking about the subject of impeachment.
On Oct. 31, the House voted for the impeachment proceedings and it seems many people share a collective misconception surrounding impeachment. The idea that once the President is impeached someone new will take over as President is not the entire case.
Impeachment refers to charging a high-ranking government member with misconduct and begin removing them from office.
After impeachment is voted on in the House, assuming it is passed by majority, the next step is a trial in the Senate which needs a two-thirds majority to convict the President.
The President isn’t the only official that can be impeached, other members of the Government have been impeached, but most of them have been federal judges. Impeachment is not a quick process and will take time for articles of impeachment to be drafted, and even longer to decide if he will be convicted of his crimes in the Senate.
Donald Trump is being backed into a corner by this impeachment talk. On one hand, he needs to fight off this impeachment subject for as long as possible so that he can campaign for his re-election in 2020, but at the same time the longer impeachment is talked about, the lower his approval ratings will fall due to more facts coming out about his involvement to Ukraine.
On the night of Nov. 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and the course of American life would be dramatically shifted seemingly overnight. For the people that voted for him, there was rejoice, they had found an answer to the problems they were facing in their daily lives. They loved how he spoke freely and wasn’t afraid to challenge the political establishment. His claims of draining the swamp of Washington and returning jobs to the working-class Americans resonated with many people who hadn’t seen much change under Obama.
Yet, at the same time, there were many who felt that the election of Donald Trump would be disastrous to the social fabric of this country and immediately thought the election of this President would tear the country apart.
One area that people feared Trump would especially damage was race and race relations.
Senior Electrical Engineering Major Alex Martinez said,
“I believe Donald Trump has not improved race relationships but rather has damaged ally relationships. I think the approach and beliefs of his ideas towards some of the race relationship issues contradicts with not only the natural rights of human beings, but as well as the foundation previous governments have paved for him.”
One way you can see the immediate effects of Donald Trump’s election is the increase in attendance of HBCU’s due to tensions between white students and students of color. They have sought to find a “safe haven” from white supremacist propaganda and hate incidents that have become an alarming and increasing trend across college campuses. San Diego State is not immune to these hateful incidences such as the one that occurred early in the fall semester.
Though there is no correlation to Donald Trump’s presidency to the rise of hateful incidences, in the last 4 years there has been a rise in the number of hate groups throughout the United States.
While the results of Trump’s Presidency are still being debated, one thing is for certain, college students of all political demographics are beginning to turn against the President and his ideals. With the General Election almost a year away, Trump must find a way to connect with college voters or else he will have a problem swaying the younger vote in 2020.