"IMPEACH Donald Trump" billboard debuts on Bay Bridge

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The left-wing Courage Campaign paid $1,500 for this IMPEACH Donald Trump billboard on the Bay Bridge for a week. Sept. 25, 2017

The left-wing California-based Courage Campaign is paying $1,500 a week for a looming billboard on the Bay Bridge that calls on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

The rotating billboard, which reads “IMPEACH” on a black background with a scowling photo of the president, started its run on Monday and will run through Oct. 1. The Bay Bridge is the first place in California where this billboard is going up, a spokeswoman for the group told KTVU. 

The goal is to add these billboards in seven Congressional districts where voters chose Hillary Clinton, but sent a Republican to Washington, D.C., organizers told KTVU. 

In the Democratic Bay Area, the billboard received cheerful honks, lots of "thumbs up" on Facebook and comments like this from Andrew Carothers-Laske of Oakland: "He's unfit for office." 

As of Monday morning, Trump had not commented or tweeted about the banner.

Reached by phone Monday morning and speaking in support of Trump, Harmeet Dhillon, San Francisco attorney and committeewoman for the  California Republican Party, told KTVU that "whoever put that up is exercising their Free Speech." And while she said it may seem like a "cute gesture," Trump has committed no impeachable crimes and so the billboard "has no impact in my opinion." 

Others also didn't like the message.

"I don't care for it," added motorist Bob Howard of Walnut Creek. "Trump was elected to be our president and we need to support him."

And despite the criticism on the Left, Trump still has a lot of support from his base. 

A poll from The Economist/YouGov released Wednesday showed that Trump’s base largely approves of the job he’s doing. Fifty-eight percent of people who voted for Trump in November “strongly approve” of the job he’s doing as president, according to the survey. Thirty percent of Trump voters “somewhat approve,” meaning 88 percent of folks who voted for the president have approved of his time in office to some degree.

But those behind the IMPEACH billboard, certainly don't approve of Trump's presidency. 

"From using his position as President to enhance his personal bank account via foreign interests -- in direct violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause -- to revealing classified information to Russia and openly admitting that he fired FBI Director James Comey in order to obstruct the Russia investigation, the case for the impeachment of Donald Trump on legal grounds is a no-brainer,” said Eddie Kurtz, executive director of Courage Campaign. “But after his disgusting and misogynistic rhetoric about women, the nerve to rush to the defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville, and the ease with which he decided to remove DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of young people, there is more than a legal case; there is a moral imperative to act."

This is not the first impeachment effort against the president and it is not the first "impeach" billboard in the country. Last fall, a similar billboard was erected outside the president's country club in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. That billboard was paid for by a group called "Impeach Trump Now."

 

 

KTVU's Allie Rasmus contributed to this report.