On August 23, in an interview with Fox News, President Trump declared that impeaching him would be a disaster for the markets and for the country. “I tell you what,” he started, “if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash, I think everybody would be very poor.”

Almost immediately, the political and financial press settled on a consensus response: the market and economy-friendly aspects of Trump’s agenda are already enacted; moreover, the markets managed to do pretty well when President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998. Therefore, there’s nothing to worry about. The good times will end someday, but it won’t be because Donald Trump is impeached.

In a sense, this is a truism. As things stand today, the Republicans look likely to lose the House, but may well keep – or even increase their majority – in the Senate. And that means that the Democrats will be able to file impeachment charges against the president, but, barring some new and shocking revelation, they’ll never convict him. And that means that they’ll never remove him from office. Donald Trump will all but certainly serve at least one full term.

In another sense, however, markets DJIA, +0.19% should not get too comfortable. Even with conviction being a near impossibility, the impeachment process may prove problematic.

Here’s the thing: there’s no question that Bill Clinton and his experiences provide a precedent for what the Trump administration may endure with a Democratic House. But by looking at his impeachment alone, political observers are ignoring the genuinely relevant part of the Clinton presidency.

It is important to remember that Bill Clinton – like Donald Trump – was under investigation almost from the moment he arrived in Washington. Clinton’s impeachment didn’t start for more than four years after Robert Fiske was appointed as special prosecutor to investigate Whitewater and Vince Foster’s suicide. That means that when the Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 midterms, Clinton was in the same position as Trump will presumably be staring next January, running for reelection while facing a hostile House. And so that’s where we might do best to look for foreshadowing.

Clinton, like Trump, was ideologically unmoored. He was concerned first and foremost with the preservation and extension of his presidency. Party politics and policy took a back seat to his own ambition. In practice, this meant that Clinton spent the second half of his first term rejecting his own party’s positions and embracing those that were much closer to the Republicans’. In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” That same year, he signed the Defense of Marriage Act and welfare reform. More relevantly to markets, he cut federal spending as a percentage of GDP, and, just after his reelection, signed the Tax Relief Act of 1997, which slashed capital gains taxes. All of which is to say that after the Republicans took the House but before his impeachment, Bill Clinton helped enact a good chunk of the opposition party’s agenda.

While there’s no guarantee that Trump will follow in Clinton’s footsteps, there’s also no guarantee that he won’t. Indeed, he was a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009 and even as a Republican is a recent convert to the gospel of conservatism. More to the point, he has, according to Vanity Fair, already blamed any possible midterm losses on Congressional leaders, while declaring that the “real” election is in 2020.

In 1995, when Newt Gingrich took control of the Speaker’s gavel, he and his new majority pushed a market friendly agenda that included lower spending, less regulation, and the aforementioned capital gains tax rate cut. If and when Nancy Pelosi takes the gavel again, she has already promised to try to undo last year’s tax law, to push federal spending even beyond its current record high, and to reverse Trump’s regulatory cuts.

Clinton abetted Gingrich in his efforts. Could Trump do the same with Pelosi? Don’t bet against it.

Steve Soukup is the publisher and managing partner of The Political Forum, an independent research provider that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community. He focuses on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad.