Former Acting U.S. Solicitor General of the United States and Supreme Court Lawyer Neal Katyal boldly predicted at a tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Monday that President Donald Trump won’t even be on the ballot in the 2020 election.
House Democrats are attempting to make the case to the American people that Trump’s conduct in office, especially as regards L’Affaire Ukrainienne, is impeachable. As you can see in the video above (starting around the 2:40 mark), Katyal was asked what he feared the most that could allow for Trump’s reelection.
Katyal expressed no doubt that Trump would be impeached and removed from office.
“So let me first start by disagreeing with the premise. I actually don’t think Trump will be on the ballot in 2020. I think he will be impeached, I think he will be removed from office,” he said, to applause. “I think we are talking about a president who has trampled on the Constitution, sold our interests out to foreign governments, tried to do it secretly. He is corrupt, he’s illegitimate, and I think everyone in America — Republicans and Democrats alike — will come together when they see the facts.”
“I don’t worry about Trump when it comes to 2020. I actually think impeachment may be bad for the Democrats in the sense that Pence is a better candidate, but I think nonetheless the Democratic Party and the Republican Party together are going to come together and remove this unconstitutional aberration from office,” Katyal continued.
Joe Pounder, a conservative Republican and CEO of the America Rising PAC and Bullpen Strategy Group, shot back that Katyal was dead wrong.
“Nothing is going to happen to the president between now and 2020. He’s going to be on the ballot. I think right now he stands a better chance of be reelected in 2020,” he said. “Right now everything is seen as a referendum on Donald Trump. All the attention is focused on him while the Democrats are going through the nomination process.”
“Eventually this race becomes a choice, a choice between two candidates: Donald Trump and whoever the Democratic nominee is. I think once we have that choice, the president stands a really good chance of being reelected,” Pounder added.
Katyal answered that Trump’s campaign “can’t remove the record that this president has.”
“He can be as professional as he wants in his campaigns, he was not a professional president,” he concluded.
You can watch the Web Summit 2019 panel discussion in the player above.
[Image via Web Summit screengrab]
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