Politics

Steyer’s Impeach Trump Campaign Scrounges For Support On Long Road Trip

No featured image available

Billionaire Tom Steyer is taking his impeach President Donald Trump campaign on the road to find people willing to oust the president for allegedly colluding with Russia.

Steyer’s campaign will hold 30 town hall meetings across the country. Most of these conferences will target district lawmakers unwilling to press for Trump’s removal. Steyer, a prominent anti-Trump liberal financier, staked out his campaign during the latter part of the president’s first year in office.

The town hall meetings — they begin Thursday in Ohio, a state Trump won handedly — are designed to shame voters into holding their representatives responsible for not doing more to push Congress into drawing up impeachment charges against Trump.

“Despite Trump’s overt dereliction of duty, the majority of our representatives in Washington D.C. refuse to hold him accountable,” Steyer said in a statement Thursday. “If for some reason they can’t see their way clear to doing their sworn duty, they should resign, or we will replace them.”

Steyer, who dumped millions of dollars on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, often suggests without evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to win the presidency.

He used various social media platforms in October 2017 to launch a “need to impeach” Trump movement. More than four million people have signed his petition so far, but House Democrats are not overjoyed with the move.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called an impeachment campaign impractical and suggested it distracts from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and could jeopardize Democratic efforts to take back Congress in 2018.

Steyer backs Mueller’s investigation but thinks there is an “open and shut case that [Trump] has met the criteria for impeachment.” Steyer’s “Impeach Trump” tour kicks off less than a week after his political group, NextGen America, announced a $30 million campaign structured around pushing young people into voting.

Steyer personally spent more than $163 million in the last two election cycles, supporting Democratic candidates and liberal causes, like fighting global warming — the California billionaire has very little to show for his efforts.

He spent about $86 million in the 2016 election cycle, pushing for Democratic re-elections. Republicans, however, held onto both chambers of Congress, won the presidency, and saw state legislature and governorship gains. NextGen spent roughly $56 million in 2016, according to campaign finance data.

NextGen spent nearly $21 million in the 2014 election cycle but only had a 38 percent rate of supporting winning candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Steyer spent more than $73 million of his personal fortune that election cycle only to see Republicans take control of the Senate.

Follow Chris White on Facebook and Twitter.