Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, has correctly predicted the results of all presidential elections since 1984. After being one of the few public figures to predict Donald Trump’s presidency, he now thinks Trump will

be impeached.

Lichtman said that his system of prediction — the Keys to the White House — depends on a series of 13 true or false questions. When more than six of the questions are answered false, his system predicts that the current political party in the White House will not be reelected. He said that because there are limited examples of past impeachment, he couldn’t use the same system to predict Trump’s impeachment.

“Predictions about impeachment are not based upon a scientific model, but on my gut,” Lichtman said. “There is not [a] scientific model that can predict impeachments because there have only been two of them throughout the course of American history — there aren’t enough examples to do a complete analysis.”

Lichtman said that his prediction of Trump’s impeachment stems from what he’s seen so far in the presidential election and he doesn’t think Trump’s behavior will change from his campaign. He also expects that Congress would prefer Mike Pence to be president because he is less of a wild card than Trump.


“Throughout his career Trump has played fast and loose through the law, and that will transfer to his presidency,” Lichtman said. “Republicans love control and they may well decide to have Mike Pence: a down the pipe, controllable, standard issued, Christian-conservative, as president.”

Lichtman said that although the public may think that Pence has a lot of controversial opinions, they may not seem all that controversial within the Republican party.

LS freshman Edward Liu identifies himself as a non-partisan and said that he could see Trump being a more capable president than Pence. Liu said that it’s difficult to predict impeachment, and he would only support the decision if there was

copious evidence.

“I would only support an impeachment of any president if there is convincing evidence showing that there are incapable or have committed inexcusable mistakes,” Liu said. “Impeaching a president due to partisan conflict or public pressure

is unacceptable.”

Liu said that although Trump has severely damaged the nation’s interest, he doesn’t think that Congress has any grounds to impeach Trump.

Tisch senior Jack Kapulsky is the treasurer of College Republicans and said that he also predicted Trump would win, and doesn’t think that Lichtman’s success in predicting the result of the election is anything special.

“It’s not a big deal that this man predicted Trump would win,” Kapulsky said. “Many of us regular people who saw through the lies of the NY Times, HuffPo, etc., and don’t get our news solely from left-wing outlets knew this was coming and tried to warn our peers only to be dismissed and laughed at.”

Kapulsky said that the notion of Trump being impeached at this point in time is just baseless fodder for liberals to eat up. He thinks that it would have been far more conceivable for Hillary Clinton to be impeached if she had won, as the Clinton Foundation is still under federal investigation. He said that neither Pence nor Trump would be a better president — they balance each other out.

“Trump is more socially liberal and a charismatic avenger for the country whereas Pence is more conservative and reserved, but a much more experienced politician,” Kapulsky said. “I don’t see the value in contemplating what it would be like if one were out of the picture, because I think they will very much be running the country codependently.”

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Nov. 21 print edition. Email Jemima McEvoy at [email protected]