Will Trump be impeached and removed from office?

**Stage 1 — Blind analysis (ignore market prices)**

The House appears poised to vote on articles of impeachment today; given the reported floor debate and bipartisan heat around recent catalysts (Major Watson's arrest, the ICE shooting, war-powers allegations), the chance the House adopts one or more articles is materially elevated relative to the pre-July baseline. Historically, impeachment by the House is not rare when the majority pursues it aggressively, and the political incentives for House Democrats (and a few Republicans under intense local pressure) to vote for impeachment are strong. I would place the probability of the House impeaching President Trump in the near term (within days-to-weeks) at roughly 60–75% under current signals.

Removal from office, however, is a very different question. Conviction in the Senate requires 67 votes. That is an extraordinarily high bar in modern U.S. politics: even when impeachment occurred in the past (Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, both Trumps previously), convictions were not achieved. For removal to happen the following must occur (each a low-probability link): (A) the House impeaches, (B) the Senate agrees to try the articles promptly, (C) enough Republican senators either defect or vote to convict, or the chamber composition shifts to make 67 votes possible, and (D) the evidence presented convinces a supermajority that removal is warranted. Each of those links is independently unlikely. Estimating conservatively: P(A) ~ 0.65, P(B|A) ~ 0.95 (Senate will likely hold a trial if House impeaches), P(conviction|trial) I assess at ~0.22 conditional on the many possible downstream scenarios (this number rounds together both the probability of extraordinary bipartisan defections *and* a post-election Senate composition that makes conviction feasible). Multiplying gives ~0.14 overall.

Qualitatively, the most realistic pathway to removal is not an immediate conviction in the current Senate but a sequence: the House impeaches now, the issue dominates the fall/winter, the November 2026 Senate elections produce a chamber more favorable to conviction (or produce a political environment where a substantial number of Republicans abandon Trump), and the trial/pressure culminates in conviction. That pathway requires either a large electoral wave or a rare series of GOP defections spurred by damning new evidence. Resignation or 25th Amendment invocation are possible wildcards but are less likely; the question as posed requires both impeachment and removal, which excludes mere resignation without conviction.

Putting these elements together and calibrating against historical precedent and institutional constraints, my independent probability for "impeached and removed before Jan 20, 2029" is 14%.

**Stage 2 — Market calibration (compare to current market: Yes 19% / No 81%)**

The market's Yes price (~19%) is modestly higher than my independent 14% probability. Possible reasons the market sits above my estimate:

- Traders often overweight the momentum signal from a visible House impeachment push; markets react to the immediate event risk and sometimes conflate the probability of impeachment with the probability of removal. - The market may be embedding a nontrivial premium for alternative exit scenarios (resignation, health crisis, or convictions in state/federal courts) even though the contract specifically requires *impeached and removed*; overlapping exit markets (the news notes a 29% implied chance of exiting before 2029) can bleed into the impeachment/removal contract's price. - Some participants may assign higher probability to a post-Nov 2026 Senate flip or to a wave of GOP defections if new disclosures appear (the market is often more sensitive to tail events than my structural read of institutional constraints would justify). - Volume is substantial; active political hedging by institutional players (e.g., funds or advocacy groups) can push prices away from objective fundamentals.

Given those factors, the market is not wildly misaligned from my view — it is about 5 points higher than my independent estimate. That spread is consistent with market participants pricing more weight on fast-moving electoral uncertainty and tail-risk scenarios. If you prefer a conservative play, the market price slightly overstates removal risk relative to the institutional difficulties. If you expect the November 2026 cycle to produce a large realignment or expect explosive new evidence that would cause broad GOP defections, the market's premium could be justified.

Practical implication: the market is somewhat optimistic for Yes relative to my model; I would favor selling Yes (or buying No) at 19% versus my 14% fair, unless you assign higher-than-consensus odds to a post-midterm Senate flip or to dramatic new evidence producing cross-party defections.