Updated August 21, 2026 · 9 min read · by Sam Smith
In November 2025, President Trump posted on Truth Social that six Democratic members of Congress were guilty of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" after they filmed a video telling service members to refuse illegal orders. Weeks later, Rep. Al Green forced that post onto the House floor as the first article of an impeachment resolution. The House did not vote to impeach. It voted, 237 to 140, to make the resolution go away. And through all of it, one Kalshi contract barely moved: the market on whether Trump is actually removed from office before his term ends still sits near 15 cents. That gap, between a loud impeachment story and a quiet market, is the whole thing worth understanding here.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi prices the chance that Trump is impeached and removed from office before January 20, 2029 at about 15 cents, which reads as a 15% chance. Removing a president is a two-step process, and the second step is the wall: the House can impeach with a simple majority, but the Senate then has to convict by a two-thirds vote, 67 of 100 senators. Republicans hold 53 seats, so roughly 20 Republican senators would have to vote to convict their own party's president. That has never happened to any president in American history. We showed the market to five AI models without letting them see the price, and they landed near 3%, far below the market. Below is exactly why the market holds a higher number anyway, and what would have to break for it to be right.
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The Market
| Venue | Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of August 2026) |
| The Contract | "Will Trump be impeached and removed from office?" Resolves YES only if the sitting president is impeached by the House and then convicted by the Senate, which removes him, before January 20, 2029 |
| The Catch Most People Miss | Impeachment by the House alone does not resolve this YES. Only a Senate conviction does, and conviction takes a two-thirds Senate vote (67 of 100) |
| Current YES Price | About 15 cents, roughly a 15% implied chance (last-traded level as of August 21, 2026) |
| Prices As Of | August 21, 2026, last-traded level, read at build time |
| Note On Quotes | The contract runs until January 2029 and trades thinly day to day. The 15-cent level has held as its recent trading range rather than jumping around on headlines |
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The Record: What Actually Happened
Impeachment has been in the news repeatedly this Congress, so it is worth being precise about what is real and what is not. Several impeachment resolutions have been filed against Trump in the current House, including versions from Rep. Al Green and others. Filing a resolution is easy and mostly symbolic. Passing one is not, and none has passed.
The furthest any of it has gone was a forced floor vote in December 2025. Its lead charge grew out of Trump's November 20, 2025 posts accusing six Democratic lawmakers, several of them military and intelligence veterans, of sedition after they urged troops to refuse unlawful orders. "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" Trump wrote, in a line reported across CNN and other outlets. The lawmakers named were Sens. Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, and Chrissy Houlahan.
When Green forced the vote, the House tabled it 237 to 140: 47 Democrats voted "present," including party leadership, and 23 Democrats joined every Republican to set it aside. The 140 members who voted to keep it alive were up from about 79 on a similar motion in June, so the appetite grew over the year. But it did not come close to a majority, in a chamber where a majority is only the first step.
Here is why the market shrugged: this contract is not a referendum on how angry Washington is at the president. It is a question of Senate math. The most incendiary episode of the year plus a forced House vote still produced a tabled resolution and a contract that treats removal as a long shot, because the binding constraint sits in the Senate, not in the volume of the outrage.
Why The Arithmetic Says Almost Zero
Two facts do most of the work.
First, no president has ever been removed by impeachment. Three presidents have been impeached by the House and then tried by the Senate: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump, who was tried twice, in 2019 and again in 2021. Every one of those Senate trials ended in acquittal. Trump's closest brush was February 2021, when the Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict him, still 10 votes short of the 67 needed.
Second, the current Senate makes 67 votes for conviction even harder to picture. Republicans hold 53 seats, Democrats 45, and two independents caucus with Democrats, an effective 47. To convict a Republican president, essentially every Democrat plus about 20 Republican senators would have to vote to remove the leader of their own party. Even the 2026 midterms do not open a real path: only about 35 Senate seats are on the ballot, so no single election can hand either side a two-thirds majority. A Democratic House could impeach again, but impeachment is not removal, and removal is the only thing this contract pays on.
Why The Market Still Holds 15 Cents
So why is the price 15 cents and not 3? Time, and the value of the unknown. This contract does not resolve until January 2029, roughly 29 months out. Over a window that long, a market is not pricing this month's Senate roster; it is pricing every path a presidency can take across the next two-plus years, including scenarios no current record can rule in or out. On a long-dated contract, traders rarely push a "no" outcome all the way down to a couple of pennies, because holding a position that ties up money for years carries its own cost, and because genuine uncertainty about the far future has real value.
That is the honest reading of the split. The models are pricing the arithmetic in front of them, which is close to a wall. The market is pricing the calendar, which is long. Both can be defensible at once, and where they disagree is exactly the interesting part.
The Panel's Verdict
We asked the panel to price this market blind, with no view of the 15-cent quote, working only from a fetched fact card covering the impeachment mechanism, the Senate composition, the historical record, and the 2026 impeachment votes. Five of the panel's eight models were available for this run.
Market: about 15¢ · AI blend: 3% (seat median). The panel prices removal well below the market.
| Model | YES probability | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable | 3% | Conviction requires about 20 GOP senators to remove their own president; there is zero precedent for removal, and 2026 Senate math keeps 67 votes out of reach without a massive shock. |
| Claude Opus | 2% | Removal needs 67 Senate votes; roughly 20 Republicans defecting to convict their own party's president has never happened and is unreachable through 2029. |
| Claude Sonnet | 2% | Removing a president takes 67 Senate votes, and about 20 Republicans breaking against their own party's president is historically unprecedented. |
| GLM | 3% | Senate conviction needs 67 votes and about 20 GOP defections; no president has ever been removed, and Trump's closest vote was 10 short. |
| DeepSeek | 3% | Removal requires about 20 GOP senators to convict; no president has ever been removed, and prior impeachments show partisan loyalty makes 67 votes near-impossible barring a catastrophe. |
| Blended Verdict | 3% | seat median of the five available models (method always disclosed) |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 84% on 508 graded calls · Claude Opus 85% on 578 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 84% on 556 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,367 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,392 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
Model estimates generated August 21, 2026, price-blind, from the fetched data card described above, after a revision round in which each model read the others' anonymized reasoning. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial or trading advice. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money.
Every number above is stored and graded against the actual result when this market settles. Our running record on every event we have priced sits on the full graded scoreboard. Five of the panel's eight seats returned an estimate within the run window; the blend is the seat median of those five.
More live boards from the same panel: 2026 House Popular Vote Odds, where the market's most likely result is a Democratic win of 8 to 10 points at 27¢, and Florida Governor Odds: Donalds vs Jolly, where Kalshi prices Republicans at 81¢ to hold the governor's mansion. Prices fetched August 21, 2026.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
The panel's number is low, but it is not frozen. Four concrete things would move it, and only one of them moves it up much.
- The House Actually Passes Articles Of Impeachment On A Floor Vote (not files them, not tables them). That turns impeachment from hypothetical into real and would nudge the number up, though the Senate wall still stands. Direction: up, modestly.
- A Wave Of Republican Senators Publicly Break With The President, the way double-digit defections would have to precede any conviction. A criminal conviction, a 25th-Amendment move, or a scandal large enough to crack party loyalty is the only realistic engine for that. Direction: up, and this is the one that matters.
- The 2026 Midterms Reshape The Senate on November 3, 2026. Even a strong Democratic year cannot reach 67 seats in one cycle, so this caps the ceiling more than it raises it. Direction: up slightly, then capped by arithmetic.
- Trump Leaves Office By Any Other Route, or simply serves out the term to January 20, 2029 with no conviction. Either way the "impeached and removed" path closes and the contract resolves NO. Direction: down, toward zero.
The Settlement Timeline
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Nov 3, 2026 | Midterm elections; a new House and Senate are seated in January 2027, resetting the vote math |
| Ongoing | Any new articles of impeachment would need a House floor majority first, then a Senate trial, to affect this contract |
| Jan 20, 2029 | The contract's end date. If no Senate conviction has occurred by then, it resolves NO |
We re-score this board when the story moves. As of August 21, 2026, the panel sits at 3% against a market near 15 cents.
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The Bottom Line
The headline version of this story is loud: death-penalty posts, forced floor votes, a stack of impeachment resolutions. The market version is quiet, and quieter for a reason. Impeaching a president and removing one are different acts with very different odds, and the second one runs into a two-thirds Senate that has never once convicted a president. The blind panel prices that wall at about 3%. The market holds 15 cents because it is pricing more than two years of unknowns on top of the wall, not the wall alone. When this settles, the number will be graded in public like every other call we make, and you will be able to see which read was closer.
To be explicit: these are model estimates for information and entertainment, not financial advice and not a recommendation to trade any contract. This analysis advocates for no party and no outcome; it reports documented, sourced facts and what the market did with them. Kalshi lists CFTC-regulated event contracts for adults 18+ where legal.
