A growing number of US House Democrats have been pushing the US House Democratic Party leadership to at least commence an impeachment inquiry which does not have to result in an impeachment of President Donald J. Trump based on his felonious acts as enumerated in the FBI’s 3/22/2019 final report regarding its Trump-Russia probe which spanned 22 months, led by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller III.

To date over 900 federal prosecutors from both the Republican and Democratic Parties have gone on the record to assert that based on the FBI’s Mueller findings, if Donald J. Trump were not president, he would have been criminally indicted.

Ever since the end of March 2019, the US Attorney General William Barr showed his true colors of being President Trump’s lackey who heads the powerful US Department of Justice (DOJ). He managed to prove that he can’t be counted to mete out justice fairly when he deliberately acted to mis-characterize the FBI’s Mueller report which was totally countered by the FBI’s redacted findings that were made public about 4 weeks later. The unfortunate fact is that while millions watched on their TVs, the Attorney General Barr whitewash the FBI’s report that he received around 3/22/2019, few peoples will take the time to read the 448 page FBI report delivered 4 weeks later.

This reality has left the US Congressional House Democrats as representing the only governmental entity which has the Constitutionally based power to ensure that President Trump is held liable for his criminal acts via impeachment. Many feel that it’s their duty to take this step.

But, the Democratic Party House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in leadership roles have been pleading with their members for a delay before any consideration is given to starting an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, in order to first educate the American peoples by holding public hearings with key witnesses, where House Democrats can better inform the public regarding the president’s felonious acts. She feels that it’s important to create a consensus among the citizenry, as the commencement of even an impeachment inquiry can be a divisive process, exacerbating an already divided country.

In addition, the speaker worries about recently elected Democrats who narrowly won in districts where the constituency had also voted in favor of President Donald Trump. Starting the impeachment inquiry without solid backing from the US public could toss the current Democratic Party majority in the US House of Representatives in the US Congress to the Republican Party candidates in 2020.

However it would be a nightmarish political short term decision to delay the start-up of the impeachment inquiry if President Trump were to win reelection in 2020. How would the Democrats deal with the inevitable fall-out of this very possible outcome as per the below 2020 election models?

How will Democrats in the US Congress explain why they didn’t take this step of at least commencing an impeachment inquiry which doesn’t have to result in an impeachment vote against the president, during the summer of 2019 based on the FBI’s 3/22/2019 Mueller report which details the impeachable offenses committed by President Trump as being equal to or exceeding the seriousness of those crimes that were filed against President Richard Nixon in 1974?

Remember the US peoples didn’t start to be supportive of President Nixon’s impeachment until the last month, April 1974 at 57% but the public’s approval for impeachment started at 19%.

Let’s review the Watergate Impeachment era which partly explains why Speaker Pelosi worries about the political costs of commencing an impeachment inquiry, as per excerpts from the 5/17/2019 VOX report by Nicole Hemmer:

“Conservatives at the time (Watergate era) refashioned the scandal into a tale of Democratic hypocrisy and media hostility — a narrative that many Republicans have adopted once again to explain away the emerging Trump scandals.”

“In perhaps the boldest stroke of all, when the evidence of Nixon’s wrongdoing became undeniable, the right attributed the president’s crimes to the growing institutional power of the presidency — making Watergate, in a sense, a “liberal” scandal after all.”

“Until the very end, Watergate gave Nixon a stature on the right that he had previously lacked. And even after Nixon’s resignation, the right never quite accepted the liberal narrative of the impeachment as a heroic moment for investigative journalism and a cleansing moment for American politics.”

Conservatives did not see Watergate as a triumph of the independent press

“Watergate brought conservatives back into the fold. The emerging scandal absorbed the administration not long after Nixon’s second term began. For a generation of mainstream journalists, the scandal would confirm the power of the press to serve as a check on corruption, no matter how powerful the perpetrator. For conservatives, however, the scandal and the press’s role in prosecuting it looked much different. They saw the press as trying to undo the decisive results of the 1972 election. And if the media was so terrified of Nixon, then maybe there was something to the man after all.”

“Consider how conservative radio host Clarence Manion framed the role of the media in the early days of the Watergate hearings. In an interview with Dan Lyons, an anticommunist Catholic writer, Manion directly attacked the freedom of the press. That noble-sounding phrase, he argued, was something journalists hid behind to appear uniquely vulnerable to government overreach; in fact, the media held the cards.

“The result,” he told his listeners, “is that a gullible public is caught in the talons of a power that ironically disguises itself as freedom.” Lyons echoed the charge, arguing that Watergate had indeed exposed a dangerous concentration of power — but in the press, not the executive branch.”

“As the rest of the nation followed the unfolding story of corruption and cover-ups, the Watergate-as-liberal-conspiracy narrative quickly took hold in conservative media. After listening to the Lyons interview, Paul Harvey, the radio personality, repeated the attack in his nationally syndicated broadcast. How, he wondered, could the American people accept an all-powerful media capable of turning “a prosecution into a persecution”? And when Sen. Jesse Helms appeared on Manion’s show, he railed against “the incredible New York Times-Washington Post syndicate, which controls to a large degree what the American people will read and learn.”

Why would Democrats and the media take the extraordinary step of colluding to take down the president, given that they hadn’t tried to take down Eisenhower nor gone after Nixon so intensely in his first term? Conservatives became convinced that liberals were alarmed about the realignment of American politics that Nixon seemed to represent — distressed by the decline of what had seemed like liberal cultural and political hegemony during the post-war period, extending through the ‘60s (despite the rift over Vietnam).”

“Indeed,” the editors at National Review wrote, in July 1973 “the target is really not Nixon himself or this or that aide, but, rather, the ‘new majority’ threatening to break the liberal hold on political power. Sen. Helms echoed the charge. “Watergate,” he told Manion in the fall of 1974, “by a process of selective indignation, became the lever by which embittered liberal pundits have sought to reverse the 1972 conservative judgment of the people.”

And that extended to more than just getting Nixon out of office. Many on the right believed the Watergate investigations were part of an effort to get Nixon to govern as a liberal.”

“In 1973, Nixon returned to the liberal policies he had abandoned. He committed himself even more strongly to policies like the Family Assistance Plan (a form of guaranteed income for families making less than $25,000 in today’s dollar), signed a new act that limited the president’s ability to control spending, and forged new arms-control agreements. But conservatives began to interpret these policies in a new light. They saw them as moves forced upon Nixon by the nefarious liberal forces that were making such a big deal of Watergate.”

“No longer was he an opportunist tacking in whichever direction led to power, but rather a president whom elites were driving to the left, against his will. As Manion put it, “The deafening decibels of the Watergate fall-out have driven our harassed President of the United States far off of his original, carefully charted course of official action.” From the outbreak of the scandal until the resignation, conservatives became Nixon’s most ardent supporters.”

“There was a further shift in conservatives’ views of Nixon after the release of the infamous tapes, when the evidence of misconduct simply grew too great to ignore. Concerns about liberal bias persisted, of course. (Regnery wrote a friend, “The most ominous thing about Watergate … is that it clearly demonstrates that the press and the bureaucracy, working together, can destroy the president, and from now on, every president is going to have to take this fact into account.”)

“But there was a bigger lesson to draw from the scandal, one that dovetailed beautifully with conservative ideology. Watergate, they argued, was what happened when government, including the presidency, grew too big. When National Review did a final rundown of Watergate after the resignation, publisher Bill Rusher concluded that the main cause of the crisis was “a presidency whose steadily growing power has for 40 years been the most serious danger facing the American society.”

Trump’s argument that the scandal is a Democratic attempt to undo the election results may resonate

“The response of conservatives to Watergate echoes, and therefore helps clarify, something that confounds contemporary political observers: why the right continues to support Trump in remarkably high numbers — seeing anti-Trump conspiracy where others see incompetence and scandal.”

“Since the election, there’s been a sharp disjuncture between conservatives on the one hand, and liberals and moderates on the other. Usually independents’ opinion hovers somewhere between Democrats and Republicans. But Democrats and independents cluster together in their disapproval of Trump, while Republicans hold him in high esteem. (Some recent polls do finally show their approval weakening.)”

“Those same partisan and ideological dynamics were in play during Watergate; indeed, Watergate helped to sharpen such divisions.”

“Today, with a much more powerful conservative media aggressively defending the president, and with even more rigid partisanship and polarization (Republicans today are far conservative than Republicans in Nixon’s era), it could take a truly dramatic revelation to cause Republicans to abandon Trump.”

The following models demonstrate the reality of a possible 2020 win by President Trump…

As per May 27, 2019 Axios publication, “3 forecast modelers predict Trump will win in 2020″