Donald Trump called for Hakeem Jeffries to be impeached on Sunday night, escalating a feud that began after the House Democratic leader blasted the Supreme Court as illegitimate. Trump, 79, repeated that attack in a Truth Social post, then added a photo of Jeffries holding a baseball bat that the Democrat had previously posted himself.
Trump wrote that Jeffries was a “Low IQ individual” who had said the Supreme Court was “illegitimate,” and asked, “After saying such a thing, isn’t he subject to Impeachment?” He then reminded readers, “I got impeached for A PERFECT PHONE CALL,” a reference to the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. “Where are you Republicans?” he wrote. “Why not get it started? They’ll be doing this to me!”
The clash traces back to Jeffries’s remarks on Apr. 29 after the court ruled on Louisiana’s congressional map. The Supreme Court issued a 6-3 majority opinion finding the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and said the state could not use it as drawn. Jeffries said the decision was “designed to undermine the ability of communities of color all across this country to elect their candidate of choice,” and argued the court “isn’t even really the Roberts Court” but “the Trump Court.”
Trump struck back the next day, posting on Apr. 30 that “Hakeem Jeffries just called the Supreme Court of the United States an illegitimate Court!” He called Jeffries a “Low IQ individual” and demanded that he “withdraw the statement, IMMEDIATELY!” Jeffries’s office later pointed to an X post in which he responded by attaching a screenshot of Trump’s message and diagnosing the president with “Jeffries Derangement Syndrome.”
Trump’s repost of the bat photo added a sharper edge to the exchange. Jeffries had originally posted the image on Instagram in July 2025 with the caption, “Protecting your healthcare is as American as baseball, motherhood and apple pie,” and used the same photo on Facebook to say, “House Democrats will keep the pressure on Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill.”
The episode matters because the insult exchange is no longer just rhetorical. House members cannot be impeached and can instead be expelled by a two-thirds vote, making Trump’s demand more of a political threat than a constitutional one. Jeffries has already signaled he sees Trump’s conduct as evidence of deeper instability, telling Scott MacFarlane in April that Trump was “unhinged” and “out of control,” and adding, “something is really wrong” and “at minimum, we need a wellness check.”
The immediate question is not whether Trump’s impeachment call can succeed. It cannot. The question is whether the president is turning a court fight over voting rights and Louisiana’s two majority Black districts into a broader campaign against one of his sharpest critics, with the Supreme Court decision, the party response and the November political fight all now tied together in one public feud.