Senate Television via AP
Security video shown to senators during the second day of the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump captured the mob inside the Capitol on January 6th.
The House managers prosecuting Donald Trump expanded their case today—most devastatingly by documenting Trump’s failure to call off the insurrection at the Capitol. The question, however, is whether they expanded their theory of the crime to the point that the Republican senators sitting in judgment have an uneasy feeling that, thus expanded, it may now include them.
This afternoon, the House managers started off by documenting that Trump’s rabble-rousing began in mid-2020, airing his tweets and snippets from his speeches in which he told his followers that the only way he could lose would be if the vote were fraudulent. These messages began soon after Trump began falling behind Joe Biden in the polls, and then became his sole object of attention after Election Day. One clip followed another of Trump saying the election had been decided wrongly due to voter fraud; the real incitement, the House managers said, was this Big Lie, as they termed it, repeated not just at the rally on January 6th, but every day, if not every hour, after the race had been called for Biden.
That’s a more accurate depiction of what it was that led the Trumpophiles to storm the Capitol on January 6th. It was an entire chain of incitements, which had to be considered as a whole in judging Trump’s culpability.
Problem is, more than half the Republican senators now hearing the case were part of that chain, too. Most of them refused to accept the results of the election for weeks, if not longer. Mitch McConnell didn’t acknowledge Biden’s victory until the Electoral College formalized it on December 14th, and eight Republican senators voted to contest the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6th—their own form of participation in the insurrection.
The House managers were necessarily careful to distinguish those senators’ outrages from Trump’s. Rep. Joaquin Castro actually hailed McConnell for acknowledging Biden’s victory, omitting any mention of its glaring tardiness. And Rep. David Cicilline noted that even those Republicans who voted, like the Senatorial Eight, to reject the states’ electoral votes were at least fulfilling their oaths to uphold the Constitution, which vests Congress with the duty to certify, or not, the Electoral College count.
But Trump, the prosecutors hammered home, did not uphold his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. They made that point, first, by airing the most violent footage yet of the mob at the Capitol, attacking cops and ransacking the joint in search of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. They detailed Trump’s attacks on Pence—there were 11 in his rally speech that day, and one tweet that came right as the mob was hunting for the veep. They showed a video of one member of the Capitol mob reciting Trump’s tweet to his fellow mobsters over a bullhorn, and the mob responding by chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” They aired clips showing Pence and his family fleeing down a staircase, and Pelosi’s staff huddled behind a barricaded door as the mob sought to break it down.
Then they came to what was both the most devastating particular on their bill of indictments and the one that could only be documented by noting Trump’s relative silence: his failure to call off the mob as it wreaked televised havoc. We have only news accounts of what Trump was doing as the rampage rolled on, which relate from unidentified sources how he was initially delighted at the insurrection, how he resisted his aides’ entreaties that he make it stop through a talk or a tweet. The prosecutors displayed those news accounts to the Senate, as they did real-time televised statements from a Republican House member and Trump buddy Chris Christie, imploring Trump to order the mob to leave.
But the prosecutors didn’t stop there. They noted every Trump tweet and the one Trump phone call of which there’s a record and juxtaposed them with the part of the insurrection that was then airing on television. Just as the mob was threatening to break into the Senate, Trump called newly elected Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville not to inquire about his safety or the state of the riot, but to ask him to object to the certification of more states. (Trump clearly considered Tuberville—the former Auburn football coach who hadn’t been able to identify the three branches of government during his campaign—as the pol of least resistance to any idea Trump floated.) Trump’s first tweet, as I noted, merely furthered his attack on Pence, even as the mob was chanting for his hanging. In his subsequent tweets, he never told the mob to stop the violence and leave.
Trump, the prosecutors hammered home, did not uphold his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
Of the two elements of the House’s case—incitement and dereliction of duty—I can imagine that Trump’s attorneys will contest the first, and have some difficulty contesting the second. Trump simply didn’t tell the mob to stop, and wasn’t even part of the discussion—initiated by Pence—that led to calling in the National Guard. It takes a pretty fair lawyer to change nothing into something when their client did nothing, and pretty fair lawyers are nowhere to be found on Trump’s defense team this time around.
The prosecutors were all clear, articulate, forceful, and effective today. They’ve built their case around the Big Lie of election fraud—a lie that was rejected, they pointed out, first by courts; then by the governors, secretaries of state, and election officials whom Trump attacked and his supporters threatened; then by his own Justice Department, which Trump wanted to invalidate the election; then by the state legislators Trump ordered to supersede their Electoral College voters; then by the senators Trump threatened and cajoled to get them to oppose certifying the Electoral College count; and finally by his own vice president. Stopping the certification by the violence of January 6th, the prosecutors argued, was Trump’s last resort to preserve his power once Pence had announced he wouldn’t overturn the count.
Trump’s Big Lie didn’t persuade the judges or the governors or his own attorney general or the electors or enough of the state legislators or members of Congress to overturn the election result. But it sure persuaded his base. And if only a number of his jurors hadn’t been complicit in spreading that lie themselves, not just in this election but in almost all recent elections where they’ve invoked the nonexistent specter of voter fraud to disenfranchise voters who they fear will vote Democratic, then the prosecutors’ argument would not only be right, but a winning one, too. As it is, too many Republican senators have been and still are part of Trump’s mob, and have spread that lie themselves, to vote to affirm Trump’s guilt.
