Unless...

Tin sign from Desperate Enterprises, $10.56 down from $14.99.

I'm really shaken by this, via NPR:

Americans are split, 49%-46%, on whether they approve of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and independents at this point are not on board, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds.

But the pollsters warn that the new developments could change public opinion quickly, especially with 7 in 10 saying they are paying attention to the news.

You bet it could. The number favoring has never been anywhere near this close to 50% before, let alone higher than the number opposing. It looks like a really new world, and your congresscritters, who either are or aren't seeing similar developments in their own constituencies, know if it is or isn't. This was taken Wednesday night, after Pelosi announced the formalization of the impeachment inquiry, before the whistleblower complaint was released. It could move very fast indeed.

Or it could be just more statistical noise—one poll never tells you the truth about anything, don't get too excited—but if it's a real phenomenon and sustains itself, I'm seriously starting to imagine we could end up removing Trump from office, in the way I was suggesting last March, a month or so before the Mueller Report arrived, when I discovered this chart:

It seemed impossible that 67 senators would vote to remove Nixon until, suddenly, it wasn't, and public opinion (on whether he should be removed in this chart, not whether he should be impeached) tracked the change, as the drama of the tapes unfolded. I don't think, at this point in my own memories, most people ever had a clear sense of what crimes Nixon had committed, but as they watched him trying to obstruct justice in real time, from stonewalling to presenting the redacted transcripts to folding as the Supreme Court weighed in, they had a very clear understanding that he had something serious to hide, and that's when House Judiciary made its move and announced that it was preparing a formal impeachment. Nixon was gone in weeks.

The current situation is certainly different, but it shares some key aspects: We're seeing the big reveal of the document Trump was covering up, and told exactly how it was covered up, with the transcript of the Trump-Zelenskyy call being removed to a special higher-security electronic system (Jackie Speier says "an inappropriate server" on NPR as I'm typing), and the House of Representatives intensifies its scrutiny in a very dramatic way.

And then there's Fox News:

According to a Vanity Fair report on Thursday, the right-wing network is divided over whether to stay loyal to Trump or to jump ship amid the Ukraine scandal and the House’s impeachment inquiry.

An unnamed Fox employee described the situation to Vanity Fair as “management bedlam.”

“This massive thing happened, and no one knows how to cover it,” the employee said.

Four unnamed sources told Vanity Fair that Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch is already planning what direction the network will take when Trump’s presidency comes to an end.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who joined Fox Corporation’s board of directors in March, has reportedly been urging Murdoch to cut ties with Trump altogether. (Via TPM)

How Ryan must hate Trump for wrecking his own ambitions, come to think of it!

And then there's the current Speaker. I've been howling with rage and bewilderment at her apparent insistence on limiting the impeachment case to the one issue and getting it over with as soon as possible; under the assumption that the case will fail in the Senate, that seems to ensure that it won't do anything at all but get buried in the graveyard next to the Mueller Report before the presidential campaign gets underway, instead of destroying the Republican party, which is what the Trump presidency really ought to do.

But if there was really a chance of removing Trump, it would be exactly the right approach to getting Republicans and especially Republican senators to go along, allowing them to base their vote on the most neutral national security grounds, and giving them a chance to recover and find a nominee for next year (I've been saying for a while that Rubio in particular is running, in a much smarter race than Weld or Sanford, in complete contempt for his voters, with his stupid Bible Twitter and refusal to condemn any Republican, on the off-chance that this could happen), if they have enough encouragement from their own voters. And there are a few things Nancy knows more about than I do.

Old GOP strategist Mike Murphy has told MSNBC that if there were a secret ballot in the Senate 30 Republican senators would vote to remove Trump, and former GOP senator and Trump victim Jeff Flake on Fox News topped that:

Appearing at the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival, Flake, a frequent critic of the president, offered his own reaction and predicted that close to three dozen Republican senators would back impeachment.

"I heard someone say if there were a private vote there would be 30 Republican votes. That's not true," Flake said during a Q&A. "There would be at least 35."

If they think it's to their advantage, they'll drop him in about 15 seconds. That's always been true, they're Republicans, but the sticking point has been that they will never think that as long as Trump's rabid base continues to exist, and what could change those people? What could do that, as I've said before, is Trump looking like a weakling, and I believe he just did that, by surrendering the transcript and the whistleblower complaint, as Nixon gave up the tapes, showing that he's not above the law, in such a dramatically timed way (he's obeyed the law before, of course, but in a slower tempo, and he's never backed down from a confrontation with "Liddle' Adam Schiff"). I'm not going to put a number on it, but I think it just started becoming possible.