Senate Television via AP
House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) speaks in the U.S. Senate during the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, February 11, 2021.
The Democratic House managers began the third and final day of laying out their case by establishing what prosecutors call the accused’s “pattern and practice.” By this, they meant that Donald Trump had repeatedly both commended and recommended violence by his supporters and refused to condemn it when it happened. They showed clips from his rallies where he urged the crowd to beat his critics, from his “good people on both sides” comments following Charlottesville, and from his mockery of the threat posed to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by those plotting to kidnap her.
Whether or not they succeeded in convincing Republican senators that they should convict Trump, the managers certainly made a compelling case to the American electorate, should Trump be free to run again, of how the next Trump campaign, much less a second Trump presidency, would likely come complete with even more violence than he’s provoked so far. They bolstered this claim by showing how violent extremists view Trump as their leader, a belief that Trump’s instilled by his post-Charlottesville remarks and his “stand back and stand by” endorsement of the Proud Boys.
On their third day before the Senate, the prosecutors turned to the future—to the consequences that allowing a president who violated his oath to defend the Constitution to escape without conviction would have for the future of American democracy and its peaceful transfers of power. If Trump is acquitted and violence and insurrection go unpunished, said lead manager Jamie Raskin, “what makes you think it’s over?”
Cumulatively, the managers’ was a masterful, overwhelming case. They spent the final hour in prebuttals of Trump’s lawyers’ coming defense. Incitement of insurrection couldn’t be defended as free speech, they argued. The constitutionality of trying a former president, they noted, had already been decided; with the law no longer in question, senators now had to vote on the facts in the case.
Whether Republicans actually do vote on the facts in the case remains highly uncertain at best, of course. Those who’ve actually paid attention—and we don’t know how many have—will surely believe that conviction is the proper remedy, not just for Donald Trump, but to ensure the future of American democracy. That’s not to say, however, that even if they’ve been convinced of Trump’s guilt, they’ll vote that way.
That’s largely because they can’t help noting that their political future will be shaped by the rapid descent in the character of their party, which is becoming more delusional by the day. Even as The New York Times has reported that increasing numbers of Republicans—disproportionately, I don’t doubt, those who still dwell in the reality-based community—have left the party since January 6th, the senators also know that Republican state and county committees are casting maledictions on Republican elected officials whose loyalty to Trump is suspect. Perhaps even more disquieting, a poll conducted for the American Enterprise Institute shows that 50 percent of Republicans believe that antifa “was mostly responsible for the violence that happened in the riots at the US Capitol”—despite the fact that all the videos, all the arrests, all the coverage of the insurrectionists make clear that the rioters were right-wing nuts—much like the people now insisting that they were really antifa.
What all this means is that Republican senators are pondering their future in a party from which the sane are fleeing and the delusional remain. Those whose career ambitions overcome their deep sense that Trump’s conviction is not only justified but also necessary for the future of the republic may have trouble with their decisions in what Scott Fitzgerald termed “the real dark night of the soul.” I don’t think their souls will resist all that strongly, however. They’ll likely get through it by telling themselves something like what The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade tells the femme fatale he’s fallen for when he turns her over to the cops for a murder she committed.
“I’ll have some rotten nights,” he says, “but that’ll pass.”
