Every journey starts with a single step – or is it a single payment to a porn star you slept with, in order to buy her silence?

Donald Trump might be professing his innocence on Twitter, or wading in on South Africa’s land expropriation debate, but behind the bluster, he will be sweating bullets.

Michael Cohen is clearly done with covering up the deep, dark secrets of his former client, outing Trump for directing and coordinating his efforts to hide payments discussed in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Those payments were to porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, and they are a violation of campaign finance laws, one of the eight charges that Cohen pleaded guilty to on Tuesday.

If Trump directed Cohen to break the law, doesn’t that mean he’s deep in the kak? As CNN’s Editor-at-large, Chris Cillizza points out, not exactly:

Probably not. And the reason is that special counsel Robert Mueller’s [below] office has apparently signaled to the President’s legal team that they will abide by longstanding Justice Department regulations that stipulate that a sitting President can’t be indicted. “All they get to do is write a report,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Dana Bash in May. “They can’t indict. At least they acknowledged that to us after some battling, they acknowledged that to us.”

OK, so an indictment might not be on the cards. We came here to talk about impeachment, though, and whether or not that’s something that could realistically happen:

The more likely threat to Trump — and this is as true following the Cohen plea deal and Paul Manafort’s conviction as it was a week ago — is the possibility that the House takes up articles of impeachment against him…

At some point in the (relatively?) near future, Mueller and his team will release the findings of their probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, whether any collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign existed and whether Trump obstructed justice by getting in the way of the investigation.

Is it possible that Mueller will, contra Giuliani [below], push for Trump to be indicted? I mean, anything is possible. But what’s much more likely is that Mueller — in deference to established Justice Department protocols –will simply let the report speak for itself.

Assuming Mueller does that, the political track will be the only way in which Trump could be punished in any meaningful way…

The wild card, of course, is what Mueller’s report ultimately finds. If it fully exonerates Trump, a move toward impeachment would likely be cast as a pure political ploy by Democrats. If it doesn’t clear Trump, however, then Democrats will likely seriously consider the idea of impeachment. The question at that point is whether any Republicans would join them.

Assuming Mueller does that, the political track will be the only way in which Trump could be punished in any meaningful way. One thing it didn’t change is that the real threat to Donald Trump’s presidency in all of this isn’t indictment. It’s impeachment.

In the words of Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber, so you’re telling me there’s a chance?

Unfortunately, an impeachment would need the support of a few good Republicans in the Senate, and those are pretty hard to come by.

Until it becomes obvious that supporting Trump reduces a Republican’s chances of re-election, they’ll continue to feign outrage at some of his actions whilst courting the voters that follow him blindly.

Still, we live in hope, and a Trump impeachment would lead to the single greatest Twitter meltdown of all time.

[source:cnn]