Democrats are expecting to win big on Election Day, but disagreements are already erupting among them over how aggressively to target President Trump for what they say are abuses of power and corruption.<\/p>\n
Democratic lawmakers and strategists are divided over whether to push another impeachment against Trump.<\/p>\n
Senators and leaders in the House are generally opposed to advancing a third impeachment of Trump that has virtually no chance of picking up 67 votes in the Senate \u2014 the number of votes needed to convict.<\/p>\n
A senior Senate Democratic aide warned there is little “appetite” for holding a third Trump impeachment trial in the Senate, after previous impeachment efforts in 2020 and 2021 failed to impact Trump politically.<\/p>\n
Democrats agree there need to be investigations of Trump and his allies next year to hold them to account, but there is little consensus over what to prioritize, according to Democratic strategists and aides.<\/p>\n
But some senior lawmakers are warning that the party can’t get so wrapped up in tracking down the misdeeds of the president and the administration that they get pulled into too many directions or lose sight of addressing high prices and ending the war in Iran \u2014 two of the top issues of this year’s election.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think we can ignore it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) of the need to investigate alleged corruption in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
“More than 90 percent of voters think that government has been corrupted. We just have to be thoughtful and strategic about where investigative work goes and not allow that to distract us from solving fairly immediate cost problems\u00a0that American families feel,” he said.<\/p>\n
Whitehouse would become chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee if Democrats win control of the Senate.<\/p>\n
To keep their hoped-for new House majority \u2014 and possible Senate majority \u2014 from getting sucked into solely partisan battles with Trump over what has already transpired, Democratic leaders in Congress are mapping out positive agendas for the first 100 hours, the first 100 days and the first year of their new majorities, according to sources familiar with internal discussions.<\/p>\n
Yet the desire among Democratic lawmakers to inflict retribution on Trump is strong.<\/p>\n
Some want to delve further into the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal to probe whether the Justice Department violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act by withholding or improperly redacting documents.<\/p>\n
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who would return to the role of majority leader if Democrats capture the Senate, created a special Senate working group in February to plumb Epstein-related information held back from the public by the Trump Justice Department.<\/p>\n
“We are demanding that the Department of Justice and the FBI preserve records on what transpired behind the scenes. We want to know who was involved in the decision to hide the truth,” he declared.<\/p>\n
Other Democrats want to prioritize investigations of the Defense Department and the awarding of lucrative contracts linked to Donald Trump Jr.<\/p>\n
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this year demanding information about decisions at the Pentagon to give loans and contracts to companies “associated with the president’s son” that may have had “conflicts of interest.”<\/p>\n
Some Democrats are pushing for investigations into the Trump family’s massive investments in the crypto industry; the president’s pardon of Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to violating money laundering law; and whether crypto investments provided an avenue for foreign interests to influence the president.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to have to do voluminous oversight work because there is rampant corruption in this administration, and we need to get to the bottom of it,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).<\/p>\n
Some Democrats want to investigate Trump’s pardon record more closely and scrutinize donations that wealthy individuals and families made in hopes of receiving clemency.<\/p>\n
The New York Times reported that Alina Habba Mildon, one of Trump’s former lawyers, earned $50 million to help secure a pardon for the member of a wealthy Venezuelan family, among other duties.<\/p>\n
A Democratic strategist and former House leadership aide said Democratic leaders are looking at a wide array of issues to investigate when they take back the Speaker’s gavel in January.<\/p>\n
“Everything from corporate America and their ties to the Trump administration, Epstein, immigration,” said the strategist, noting that Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who would take over as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been outspoken about investigating conditions at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities and immigration enforcement activities more generally.<\/p>\n
“They’re going to spend their time looking at a variety of issues,” the strategist added, noting Democrats are “running on affordability and corruption” in the midterm election.<\/p>\n
The House-aligned Democratic strategist said there’s little desire among House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (N.Y.) leadership team to move toward another impeachment proceeding, even though there are rank-and-file members in the Democratic caucus who want to.<\/p>\n
“I’ll tell you right now that I have not heard about impeachment, not for Trump,” the source said.<\/p>\n
The strategist said Democratic leaders instead are eyeing a lower-key strategy to hamstring the Trump administration by tying up Cabinet and other senior officials in oversight hearings.<\/p>\n
“That’s what they’re elected to do, to constrain Trump and to ensure that they try to get some of their agenda passed and signed into law,” the strategist said.<\/p>\n
Beyond investigations, Democrats are threatening to make it much tougher for Trump to make appointments to the federal judiciary and the executive branch if they win control of the Senate.<\/p>\n
And they’ve threatened to cut off funding for the war with Iran if Trump doesn’t bring the conflict to a swift conclusion.<\/p>\n
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who is set to become the next Senate Democratic whip, has warned that getting bipartisan majorities to vote for bills to authorize and fund the Pentagon will be “extremely difficult” if the war drags on.<\/p>\n
Some Democrats, however, argue that Trump still needs to face accountability for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election or for mishandling classified documents and conspiring to obstruct justice related to those documents after leaving office in 2021.<\/p>\n
“Donald Trump’s alleged crimes still have not been given justice. There’s been no justice yet for these alleged crimes, which are just so deeply serious, and were stopped midway in the criminal justice process,” said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n
“I still feel there needs to be some reckoning,” he said.<\/p>\n
Blumenthal would be poised to take over as chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations if Democrats win control of the Senate this week.<\/p>\n
Other Democrats say they want to investigate what they say has been a “corrupt relationship” between the Trump administration and wealthy special interests over the past 20 months.<\/p>\n
Murphy says he wants to know more about “an $8 million donation made by R.J. Reynolds to the administration that resulted one week later in flavored vapes being made legal for kids.”<\/p>\n
“We should get to the bottom of the corrupt relationship that exists between corporations in this country and the Trump administration,” he said.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.<\/em> Democrats are expecting to win big on Election Day, but disagreements are already erupting among them over how<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4276,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions\/4276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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