Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer told Rolling Stone in an interview published Friday that it was important to impeach President Donald Trump because otherwise the only way to convince voters to dump him might be a catastrophe like a “nuclear war.”

Steyer took the remark back moments later.

Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson asked Steyer why he was persisting with his campaign for impeachment even though House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) thought the message could hurt the party. Steyer argued that failing to impeach George W. Bush had devastating consequences, and that America could not afford to make the same mistake before a “course correction.”

The relevant portion of the interview is as follows (original emphasis; Rolling Stone comments in bold):

Maybe I wasn’t clear, the idea is that Democrats, returning to power in the House, would have subpoena power. She [Nancy Pelosi] pointed to how she dealt with George W. Bush – whom many wanted to impeach. She believes the decision to take impeachment off the table helped Democrats take the House in 2006, and paved a path to Obama and a deeper correction.

I remember 2006. What happened is that George W. Bush, he put us in two disastrous wars and we were headed toward the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. So if the answer is that we need those three things to happen for a course correction, I’d prefer to move a little quicker. How about that? But I take your point. Maybe we can have, like, a nuclear war and then we get a real course correction.

Wow – that’s…sobering.

We’re trying to do what’s right. And 2006/2008 did not happen because George W. Bush didn’t get impeached, is what I’m saying. I should be a little bit more tempered: I take back that remark about nuclear war. The correction happened because the United States got screwed, and American citizens lost their houses and American citizens lost their lives – and, by the way, there was a terrible climate-related crisis, New Orleans, that the president fumbled. So that course correction was based on the suffering of American citizens. We’re trying to act expeditiously to avoid the suffering of American citizens.

Steyer, who has spent tens of millions of dollars on a campaign to urge Democrats to impeach Trump, said this week that Democrats would lose the 2018 midterm elections unless they promised to impeach the president when they took power.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.