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Trump Asks Congress to Symbolically Expunge Both Impeachments From Record

Neutral summary

No president in American history has been impeached twice, and now Donald Trump is trying to do something else no president has done: ask Congress to symbolically erase both of those impeachments from the record. The effort, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, would take the form of a congressional resolution with no legal force whatsoever. It cannot undo the votes, cannot alter the historical record in any binding way, and carries no consequences for how courts or historians treat those proceedings. What it would do is hand Trump a tangible political object: a piece of paper from a Republican-controlled Congress declaring, in effect, that the whole thing never should have happened. The first impeachment, in 2019, charged him with abuse of power over his dealings with Ukraine. The second, in 2021, charged him with inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Both ended in Senate acquittals. The push comes as Trump continues to treat grievance rehabilitation as a governing priority, and it arrives in a Congress populated by Republican members with little appetite to cross him.

What the left says

Left

“Trump Pushes Congress to Erase Impeachments, Including Insurrection Charge”

For left-leaning outlets, It here is less about legislative procedure and more about what the ask reveals. Trump is seeking to use a compliant Republican Congress to retroactively rehabilitate his record on two charges that, in the left's framing, were not partisan overreach but documented accountability: one for pressuring a foreign government to help him politically, another for his role in a violent attack on the constitutional transfer of power. The Guardian's framing foregrounds that this is unprecedented, not just politically unusual, and emphasizes that the January 6 impeachment charge was specifically for inciting an insurrection. Left coverage treats the symbolic resolution as evidence of Trump's authoritarian instinct to rewrite history rather than reckon with it, and frames Republican willingness to go along as an abdication of institutional responsibility. The fact that the resolution carries no legal weight reads, in this framing, as almost beside the point.

What the right says

Lean right

“Trump Moves to Expunge Impeachments He Says Were Politically Motivated”

Right-leaning coverage frames the expungement push as Trump finally getting congressional backing to correct what his supporters have long argued were weaponized proceedings driven by Democratic overreach rather than genuine constitutional violations. The Free Press's adjacent profile of Trump appointee Nick Adams captures the broader tone: this is an administration populated by people who see themselves as insurgents remaking Washington's culture, and the expungement effort fits that self-conception. In the right's reading, both impeachments were politically motivated attempts to damage Trump before and after elections, and a symbolic resolution from Congress is a reasonable, if modest, corrective. That it carries no legal weight is acknowledged but treated as secondary to the political signal it sends. Republican members who back it are cast not as sycophants but as allies finally willing to say out loud what the base has believed all along.

Counterpoint