What does it mean to impeach a president?
Impeachment is the constitutional process for charging a sitting federal official — including the president — with serious misconduct, described in the Constitution as "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." It is often misunderstood, so it helps to separate the two stages:
- Impeachment (the House). The House of Representatives investigates and votes on "articles of impeachment." A simple majority is enough to impeach. This is essentially a formal accusation — like an indictment.
- Trial and conviction (the Senate). The Senate then holds a trial. Removing the president requires a two-thirds supermajority to convict — a very high bar. Only conviction removes someone from office.
The most important point: impeached is not the same as removed
This is where most confusion comes from. Being impeached does not mean a president has been thrown out of office. It means the House formally charged them. The president stays in power unless the Senate convicts by a two-thirds vote. Every impeached president in U.S. history was acquitted by the Senate — so no president has ever actually been removed through impeachment.
The three presidents who were impeached
Andrew Johnson (1868)
The first president ever impeached. Johnson, who became president after Lincoln's assassination, clashed bitterly with Congress over how to rebuild the South after the Civil War. The House impeached him in 1868, largely over his removal of the Secretary of War in defiance of a law Congress had passed. The Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict, so he finished his term.
Bill Clinton (1998)
Clinton was impeached by the House in December 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, stemming from an investigation into his personal conduct. The Senate acquitted him in February 1999, with neither charge coming close to the two-thirds threshold. He served out the rest of his second term.
Donald Trump (2019 and 2021)
Trump is the only president to be impeached twice, both times during his first term. The first impeachment, in December 2019, involved his dealings with Ukraine; the Senate acquitted him in February 2020. The second, in January 2021, came one week before his term ended and centered on the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Senate acquitted him again in February 2021 — the vote was 57 to 43, short of the 67 required to convict.
What about Richard Nixon?
Many people assume Nixon was impeached, but he was not. During the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment in 1974 — but before the full House could vote, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, becoming the only president to leave office that way. Because he resigned first, he was never formally impeached.
Why has no president ever been removed?
The answer is the two-thirds Senate threshold. Convicting a president requires 67 of 100 senators, which in practice means a large number of the president's own party must vote against them. That level of cross-party agreement has never happened in a presidential impeachment trial. The Founders deliberately set the bar high so that impeachment could not be used as a routine political weapon against a president by a bare majority.
Impeachment efforts during Trump's second term
Since President Trump began his second term in January 2025, several individual members of the House of Representatives have introduced articles of impeachment against him, and dozens of lawmakers have publicly called for impeachment or for use of the 25th Amendment. Much of this activity followed foreign-policy and military decisions in 2025 and 2026; the resolutions allege, among other things, that the president used military force abroad without congressional authorization.
As of August 2026, however, none of these resolutions has been adopted by the full House, which is the step required for an actual impeachment. Because impeachment begins with a majority vote in the House, whether any of these efforts advance depends heavily on which party controls the chamber — a question the November 2026 midterm elections will help decide. In short, filings and public calls are not the same as an impeachment: unless the House votes to adopt articles, no third impeachment has taken place.
Impeachment vs. the 25th Amendment
These two are often mentioned together but work very differently. Impeachment is for misconduct and runs through Congress. The 25th Amendment is about a president's inability to do the job (for example, due to illness) and is triggered by the vice president and Cabinet, not by Congress in the same way. Neither has ever been used to permanently remove a sitting president.