The Inevitable
By Michelle
Goldberg
NYT , January 15, 2021
The House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report
quotes, at length, the speech that Donald Trump gave to his devotees on Jan. 6
before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.
“We’ve got to
get rid of the weak congress people, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz
Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” said President Trump. He
urged his minions to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the place where Congress
was meeting to certify the election he lost: “Because you’ll never take back
our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be
strong.”
A week later, Representative Cheney, the
third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, would vote to get rid of him,
joining nine of her fellow Republicans in backing impeachment. “The President
of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of
this attack,” she said in a statement, adding, “There has never been a greater
betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the
Constitution.”
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Trump now becomes the first president in American
history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the
Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is
different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates
a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always
deserved.
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When a mob
incited by the president ransacked the Capitol, killing one policeman and
pummeling others, it also tore down a veil. Suddenly, all but the most
fanatical partisans admitted that Trump was exactly who his fiercest critics
have always said he was.
Banks promised
to stop lending to him. Major social media companies banned him. One of the
Trump Organization’s law firms dropped it as a client. The coach of the New
England Patriots rejected the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the P.G.A.
pulled its namesake tournament from a Trump golf course. Universities revoked
honorary degrees. Some of the country’s biggest corporations, along with the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pledged to withhold donations from congressional
enablers of his voter fraud fantasy. Bill de Blasio announced that New York
City would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run two ice rinks and
other concessions worth millions annually.
Trumpists often
whine about being ostracized — Melania Trump being snubbed by Vogue seems a
particular sore point — but watching all these institutions reject the
president now is a reminder of how many didn’t do so earlier.
At the beginning of the president’s reign, I expected
this moment of widespread repudiation to come quickly. But Trump survived the
special counsel investigation. He survived his first impeachment. When he
seemed poised to retain his political influence even after losing a
presidential election, I despaired of a reckoning ever coming at all. “When
this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it,” David Frum tweeted in 2019.
Two weeks ago, that seemed like wishful thinking.
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There’s a bleak
sort of relief in the arrival, after everything, of comeuppance. The question
is whether it’s too late, whether the low-grade insurgency that the president
has inspired and encouraged will continue to terrorize the country that’s
leaving him behind.
“This was an
armed violent rebellion at the very seat of government, and the emergency is
not over,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the Democrats’ lead impeachment
manager, told me. “So we have to use every means at our disposal to reassert
the supremacy of constitutional government over chaos and violence.”
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The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump,
it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an
election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing
to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the
way. As he told Breitbart in 2019,
in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t
play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very
bad, very bad.”
Image
Credit...Mark
Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Jan. 6 wasn’t
even the first time Trump cheered an armed siege of an American capitol; he did
that last spring when gun-toting anti-lockdown activists stormed the Michigan
statehouse. Later, after news emerged of a plot to kidnap and publicly execute
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Trump said, “I mean,
we’ll have to see if it’s a problem. Right? People are entitled to say maybe it
was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.”
It is shocking
that Trump didn’t act when Congress could have faced a mass hostage-taking, or
worse. It is not surprising.
Throughout his presidency, Republicans pretended not
to hear what the president was saying. For the last few months, Republican
election officials in Georgia have spoken with mounting desperation of being
barraged with death threats as a result of Trump’s ceaseless lies about the
election, but national Republicans did little to restrain him. There was no
exodus away from the president and his brand when, during the debates, he
refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power and told the Proud Boys to “stand
back and stand by.”
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The far-right
took heart from the president’s winks and nods, retweets and outright displays
of support. “Donald Trump, ever since his campaign, throughout his four years
in office, has done nothing but pander to these people,” Daryl Johnson, a
former senior intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, told
me.
Now a private
security consultant, Johnson was caught in a political tempest during the Obama
administration, when, at D.H.S., he wrote a report warning of a “resurgence in
right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity,” including
efforts to recruit veterans. Republicans were apoplectic, seeing the report as
an effort to brand conservatives as potential terrorists. Johnson’s unit was
disbanded and he left government.
Under Trump,
political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would
only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former
F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that
the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists.
“There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that
targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.
The violent far
right appears to have been emboldened by the experience of being treated as
valued constituents. “The problem existed before him, but it’s really
flourished even more under his administration,” Johnson said of Trump.
This is a
departure from previous patterns, Johnson said: Right-wing extremist activity
usually abates during Republican administrations, when conservatives feel less
existentially threatened. But Trump kept the far-right’s paranoia and sense of
grievance at a constant boil, and gave them permission to act. The people at
the Capitol who said they were there because the president wanted them to be
weren’t necessarily delusional.
Answers
to your questions about the impeachment process:
The current impeachment proceedings are testing the bounds of
the process, raising questions never contemplated before. Here’s what we know.
·
o
HOW
DOES THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS WORK? Members
of the House consider whether to impeach the president — the
equivalent of an indictment in a criminal case — and members of the Senate
consider whether to remove him, holding a trial in which senators act as the
jury. The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has
committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The House vote required only a simple majority of
lawmakers to agree that the president has, in fact, committed high crimes and
misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority.
o
o
DOES IMPEACHING
TRUMP DISQUALIFY HIM FROM HOLDING OFFICE AGAIN? Conviction in an impeachment trial does not
automatically disqualify Mr. Trump from future public office. But if the Senate
were to convict him, the Constitution allows a subsequent vote to bar an official from holding “any office of honor, trust or
profit under the United States.” That vote would require only a
simple majority of senators. There is no precedent, however, for disqualifying
a president from future office, and the issue could end up before the Supreme
Court.
o
o
CAN THE
SENATE HOLD A TRIAL AFTER BIDEN BECOMES PRESIDENT? The Senate could hold a trial for Mr. Trump even after
he has left office, though there is no precedent for it. Democrats who control
the House can choose when to send their article of impeachment to the Senate,
at which point that chamber would have to immediately move to begin the trial.
But even if the House immediately transmitted the charge to the other side of
the Capitol, an agreement between Republican and Democratic leaders in the
Senate would be needed to take it up before Jan. 19, a day before Mr. Biden is
inaugurated. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said
on Wednesday that he would not agree to such an agreement. Given
that timetable, the trial probably will not start until after Mr. Biden is
president.
But there’s no
reason to believe that the threat will recede when Trump is gone. Johnson
believes it’s going to get worse, and he’s not alone. A recent federal intelligence
bulletin warns, “Amplified perceptions of fraud surrounding the
outcome of the General Election and the change in control of the Presidency and
Senate,” along with fear of what the new administration has in store, will
“very likely will lead to an increase in DVE violence.” DVE stands for
“domestic violent extremists.”
Already, Washington looks like a war zone. Joe Biden’s
inauguration next week will be closed to the public. Representative Peter
Meijer, one of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, said on MSNBC that
he and some of his colleagues are buying body armor:
“Our expectation is that someone may try to kill us.”
Image
Credit...Mark
Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
The end of
Trump’s presidency has shaken American stability as even 9/11 did not, and
that’s before you factor in around 4,000 people a day dying of Covid-19.
Making Trump
face consequences for trying to overturn the election will not, by itself, stop
the disorder he’s instigated. But it may be a precondition for making the
country governable. “The time to stop tyrants and despots is when you first see
them breaking from the demands of law,” said Raskin. Trump, he said, “has been
indulged and protected for so long by some of his colleagues that he brought us
to the brink of hell in the Capitol of the United States.”
An animating
irony of Trumpism — one common among authoritarians — is that it revels in
lawlessness while glorifying law and order. “This is the central
contradiction-slash-truth of authoritarian regimes,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an
N.Y.U. historian and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” She
cited Mussolini’s definition of fascism as a “revolution of reaction.” Fascism
had a radical impulse to overturn to the existing order, “to liberate
extremism, lawlessness, but it also claims to be a reaction to bring order to society.”
The same is
true of Trump’s movement. Central to Trump’s mystique is that he breaks rules
and gets away with it. To reassert the rule of law, said Ben-Ghiat, “showing
the world that he cannot in fact get away with it” is crucial.
That is part of
the work of the second impeachment. This impeachment may be as much a burden
for Democrats as for Republicans; a Senate trial would surely postpone some of
the urgent business of the Biden administration. It has gone forward because
Democrats had no choice if they wanted to defend our increasingly fragile
system of government.
The very fact that Raskin will lead the prosecution of
Trump in the Senate is a sign of the solemnity with which Democrats are
approaching it. As you’ve perhaps read by now, Raskin recently
suffered the most gutting loss imaginable. Tormented by depression, his
25-year-old son, “a radiant light in this broken world,” as Raskin and his
wife wrote in a eulogy,
took his own life on Dec. 31, “the last hellish brutal day of that godawful
miserable year of 2020.”
Raskin buried
his son on Jan. 5, the day before he went to the Capitol to count the electoral
vote. His youngest daughter didn’t want him to go; he felt he had to be there
but invited her and his other daughter’s husband to come with him. When the mob
breached the building, Raskin was on the House floor, and his daughter and
son-in-law were in an office with his chief of staff. “The kids were hiding
under a desk,” he said. “They had pushed as much furniture as they could up
against the door, but people were banging at the door.”
That day,
Raskin began working with his colleagues to draft both an article of
impeachment and a resolution calling on Mike Pence to invoke the 25th
Amendment.
I asked him
why, after all he’s endured, he wanted to lead the effort to bring Trump to
trial. “I’ve devoted my life and career to the defense of our democracy and our
people,” said Raskin, who was a constitutional law professor before he was a
congressman. Then he said, “My son is in my heart, and in my chest I feel him
every day. And Tommy was a great lover of human freedom and democracy and he
would want me to be doing whatever I’m asked to do to defend democracy against
chaos and fascism.”
It is not yet
clear who Raskin will be up against. Prominent law firms have refused to
represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports
that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don’t want to do so
anymore. For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to
this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity. The
answer appears to be twofold: Committing sedition, and losing power.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since
2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in
2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
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