Will Trump be impeached and removed from office?

The core issue is that this market is not asking whether Trump could be impeached; it is asking whether he could be impeached and then removed from office. Those are very different hurdles. Impeachment by the House can happen in a politically charged moment, but removal requires a two-thirds Senate conviction, which is extraordinarily difficult in a polarized system and has never happened to a sitting president. That institutional barrier is the main reason the baseline probability should stay low even if political conflict intensifies.

The strongest case for Yes is that Trump is unusually polarizing, which raises the chance of serious misconduct allegations, intra-party fracture, or an event so severe that some Republicans abandon him. If Democrats control the House and the Senate margin is narrow enough, a major scandal could create a path to impeachment and, in a tail event, conviction. Still, that path depends on multiple things breaking at once: a substantive scandal, sustained public pressure, and enough Republican senators willing to defect. Historically, those conditions almost never align.

The current market price of 17% looks too high relative to the institutional and historical realities. A 17% implied probability would suggest removal is a realistic medium-frequency outcome, but the Senate threshold makes it more of a rare tail event than a central forecast. Markets often overprice dramatic constitutional outcomes because impeachment news is highly salient and traders may conflate impeachment proceedings with actual removal. My estimate is closer to 5%, reflecting that impeachment alone is plausible but removal is still the bottleneck.