After Donald Trump’s eerily Nixonian firing of FBI director James Comey the odds on his impeachment have sky-rocketed.
Comey was investigating the potential collusion of Trump associates and Russian interference with the U.S election, and his reward for looking into the integrity of U.S politics was to get canned.
The current events echo President Nixon’s Saturday Massacre where he ordered the firing of independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate Scandal.
These actions were seen as a gross abuse of presidential power and ultimately lead to Nixon to being impeached in 1974 – a predictable pattern that bookies are cashing in on.
Here is Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal calling for a special prosecutor against Donald Trump…
The odds reflect a 60 per cent chance of the billionaire being impeached during his first term in office for Irish bookmaker Paddy Power.
A Paddy Power spokesman said:
In the past 24 hours alone we’ve seen money for Trump to be impeached in his first term, resulting in us cutting the odds from 10/11 into 4/6.
We can attribute this to the news of Comey’s sacking. [That] is the shortest we’ve been for Trump to be impeached in his first term.
This ‘constitutional crisis’, as Blumenthal called it, has caused U.S trader on politics share-betting site, Predict It, to put the chance of Trump being in office at the end of 2017 at just 82 per cent, down from a recent high of 87 per cent two days before the Comey announcement.
Betfair saw a huge £100,000 bet on Trump leaving before the end of his term, which helped shift odds from 15/8 to 11/10.
A Betfair spokeswoman said:
The odds for 2017 plummeted from 9/1 to 3/1 immediately after the announcement. They’ve since resettled at 5/1 now.
2020 or later is still the favourite but the odds have drifted from a clear odds-on chance to just even money since the FBI sacking.
Around 2000 punters have placed bets on Betfair that 2017 will be the year that Trump will leave office
With Trump’s recent actions undermining the credibility of everyone above the FBI for allowing Comey’s dismissal, we could be edging towards an impeachment.
