International Business Times :
A combination of controversy, scandal and low polling numbers have prompted oddsmakers at a U.K. betting house to predict President Donald Trump would likely either be impeached or resign – or both – before the upstart politician’s first term in the White House officially comes to an end in 2020, according to a new report. The odds for an impeachment to happen were given a 4/5 chance of happening as of Friday, according to Inverse, a website that describes itself in part by asking ” What could happen next? “
Ladbrokes, which has been accepting bets over Trump’s future in Washington, said in February that the fact that there was even a market for such wagers was indicative of the president’s fate.
“The money is showing no signs of slowing down and we’ve been forced to cut Trump’s impeachment odds accordingly. We’ve taken five times the amount of bets on him failing to see out his full term than on him doing so,” Ladbrokes spokesperson Jessica Bridge said at the time. “Ladbrokes didn’t even offer odds on Obama being impeached or resigning, which speaks volumes about the current President.”
The odds for dates when Trump would be “replaced” by were as follows: 7/2 for 2017; 9/2 for 2018; 8/1 for 2019; 16/1 for 2020; 7/4 for 2021; 33/1 for 2022; 40/1 for 2023; 50/1 for 2024; and 5/1 for 2025 or after that.
It was impossible to tell exactly what prompted the odds, but the wave of controversies that started with Trump’s candidacy in 2015 has followed him into the White House during a tenure that hasn’t even been three full months yet. Most Americans have disapproved of his actions while president aside from those he’s taken on the economy, according to a poll released late last week.
But it may be the alleged links to Russia – which have dogged Trump and his administration for months – that have contributed the most to speculation over how viable it was that the president would complete his first term. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who Trump mocked for being a prisoner of war in Vietnam, on Sunday called once again for a committee to transparently investigate the connection to Russia.
“The fact is that we know for a fact the Russians tried to change the outcome of our election, attacking the very fundamentals of democracy,” McCain told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We need to know how, we need to know why, and most of all we need to know what to do to prevent this kind of activity, which they continue to carry on in free nations around the world.”
