President Donald Trump
The Ireland-based gambling website Paddy Power thinks it’s highly unlikely Trump lasts his first term in office without being impeached.
The odds are currently 4/7 that the president is impeached before inauguration day 2021. To put that in perspective, oddsmakers at Paddy Power think it’s nearly twice as likely Trump will be impeached as it is that he will serve four years in office.
Paddy Power has additional ominous betting odds for the White House. Of the three years Trump has remaining in his presidency, the betting site has impeachment most likely in 2018.
The odds that Trump is impeached in 2018 are nearly even at 5/4.
For a sitting president, that doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture.
The odds get exponentially better for Trump if he emerges from 2018 unscathed, as the site puts the odds at 7/1 that Trump is impeached in 2019 and 50/1 in 2020.
If the president wants slightly more optimistic odds, he should look to PredictIt, a New Zealand-based prediction market which allows betting on major political events around the globe.
On the topic of Trump being impeached in his first term, the market is a bit more bullish on the president’s survival.
The site, which does it’s betting differently than Paddy Power, allows for a 35-cent bet on Trump’s impeachment and a 65-cent bet on Trump completing the entirety of his term. That would put the odds at approximately 2/1.
The House of Representatives, which has the sole power to impeach a president, got started in 2017 as Democratic Texas Rep. Al Green introduced and forced a vote on articles of impeachment against the president.
The vote failed overwhelmingly, but it did garner the support of 58 Democrats.
The odds of the president being impeached are likely dependent on two factors. The first major factor is the FBI investigation, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Should the investigation yield bombshell revelations against the president or his close confidantes, a bipartisan coalition of representatives could see fit to reintroduce impeachment with a broader base of support.
The second factor is the 2018 midterms, which could potentially see the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. Should Democrats win control of the chamber, they could be emboldened to humiliate the president by voting to impeach him.
Trump may be safe for now, but he may very well spend the next few years nervously looking over his shoulder. That is, if he makes it a few years.
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