WATCH: The Professor Who Predicted Trump’s Win Now Reckons He’ll Be Booted

The 2016 United States election was, above all else, an unbelievable failure in punditry and journalism – thanks to an overreliance on polls and conventional wisdom, few in the media called a Trump victory. I include myself in this! But I’m just some dickhead in Australia punching out the yarns, not a Washington DC Very Serious Person on six figures guiding the national narrative.

One bloke who did call it was American University professor Allan Lichtman, who has successfully called every election since 1984 – making him, as the New York Times put it, the “only major political historian” to predict a Trump victory.
He’s been milking that for the media, and now he’s out slinging his other prediction: Trump will cop an impeachment within a year. To his credit, this isn’t something he just dreamed up now that he’s been all over everyone’s TV – he was saying it before the election too.
He popped up on CNN to litigate that point again:

His argument is twofold: firstly, Trump has played fast and loose with the law for some time, giving possible grounds for impeachment; secondly, the Republicans in Congress think he’s a loose cannon and would way prefer a solid conservative like Mike Pence in the driver’s seat.
Both points are undoubtedly true, but I doubt that’d happen. Trump ran and won on a strong anti-establishment platform, and you’d be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if establishment Republicans went ahead and booted him within a year.
Given that Trump’s potential cabinet is looking like it could pick up a fair few establishment hires – John Bolton for possible Secretary of State, really? – then they may not really have any impetus to boot him at all. But notch this one up as a prediction from a bloke who has done pretty well with predictions nonetheless.
Source: CNN.
Photo: Getty Images.

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