When the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee was asked by TIME in May about the prospect of impeaching President Donald Trump, he declined to commit, warning that every impeachment he had witnessed during his decades in Congress had left its target politically stronger. Adam Smith of Washington is prepared to take that risk. With Democrats hoping to reclaim control of the House in Tuesday's midterm elections, Smith says that he now supports impeaching Trump and is inclined to also back proceedings against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, making him one of the most senior Democrats to endorse such a course.
"Trump has become beyond dangerous. He is just completely out of control in what he says and how he is governing," Smith told TIME in an interview a week before the election. "I think we have to try, even if it doesn't succeed." Smith's endorsement is particularly significant because he would be in line to chair the Armed Services Committee if Democrats win the House, putting him at the center of investigations into the Pentagon's handling of the war with Iran, its approach to Ukraine, and military operations in Latin America.
His position comes as Democrats prepare for the possibility of reclaiming congressional power with little agreement over how aggressively to confront the President. Interviews with more than two dozen Democrats reveal a party broadly convinced that Trump has engaged in conduct warranting impeachment, but deeply divided over whether another attempt to remove him would be an effective use of its authority. Trump's two previous impeachments ended in Senate acquittals, and even a Democratic victory this week is unlikely to produce anything approaching the two-thirds majority required for conviction.
Smith, who has served in the House since 1996, noted previously that he was one of the few House members to have sat through three impeachments. "Every single time the person impeached got stronger after they were impeached than before," Smith told TIME in May, arguing that Democrats needed to consider what another impeachment could realistically achieve rather than pursue it simply to demonstrate their willingness to confront Trump. "I want to make sure that if we're going down that road it's going to help defeat Trump and his poisonous ideology," he said at the time.
Since then, he says, Trump's increasingly conciliatory posturetoward Russian President Vladimir Putin, his decisions involving American support for Ukraine, and his public rhetoric have convinced him that the President's continued tenure presents an extraordinary danger. "The Ukraine stuff definitely had a profound impact," Smith says. "When I saw how close he was getting to Putin and shutting off support for Ukraine, being more pro-Putin.
I mean, that's a big part of it." He also cites Trump's increasingly "unhinged speeches," including remarks about rising gasoline prices amid the war in the Middle East. Smith’s willingness to embrace impeachment puts him at odds with more cautious Democrats who want the party to prioritize addressing the economic concerns that have dominated the campaign, while establishing an investigative record that might ultimately lead to impeachment. He acknowledges the formidable obstacles to removing Trump but argues that the political environment has changed since the President's first term.
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