Summary of the day
That’s it from the blog today. Thanks for following along with our coverage of the fallout from the impeachment trial.
Here’s how the day unfolded:
- Republicans considered the future of the party now that Donald Trump has been acquitted of incitement of insurrection. Some of Trump’s closest allies, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, embraced the fact that the former president remains the most dominant force in the party. “The Trump movement is alive and well,” Graham said today. But the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said that he is open to supporting anti-Trump Republican candidates in primaries if he does not believe they could win a general election.
- The seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump faced criticism from other members of their party. Senator Bill Cassidy was censured by the executive committee of the Louisiana Republican party, and some Trump loyalists suggested those who supported convicted should be expelled from the party.
- The House impeachment managers defended their decision not to call any witnesses in the Senate trial. The Senate voted to allow the managers to request witness testimony yesterday, but the managers instead chose to simply add a Republican congresswoman’s statement to the official trial record without calling any witnesses. “I know that people are feeling a lot of angst, and believe that maybe if we had this, the senators would have done what we wanted,” impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett told CNN this morning. “We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines.”
- The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, characterized the impeachment trial and Trump’s acquittal as a “kerfuffle”. “The clear message that we get from the proceedings in America is that after all the to-ings and fro-ings and all the kerfuffle, American democracy is strong and the American constitution is strong and robust,” Johnson said on CBS News’ Face the Nation.
The Guardian’s US politics live blog will return tomorrow morning, so tune back in then.
Updated
Now that he has been acquitted, Donald Trump is free to run for president again in 2024, but he has certain strategic disadvantages when it comes to launching another White House bid.
The AP explains:
[A]fter being barred from Twitter, the former president lacks the social media bullhorn that fueled his political rise. And he’s confronting a Republican Party deeply divided over the legacy of his jarring final days in office, culminating in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. Searing video images of the day played on loop during his impeachment trial, which ended Saturday.
Trump remains popular among the GOP base, but many Republicans in Washington have cooled to him. Never before have so many members of a president’s party — seven GOP senators, in his case — voted for his removal in a Senate trial.
Some may work to counter efforts by Trump to support extreme candidates in next year’s congressional primaries.
In a statement yesterday, Trump celebrated his acquittal in the Senate trial and said his movement “has only just begun,” signaling he plans to remain a dominant force in the Republican party for years to come.
Former Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said that the party needs to reconsider whether Iowa and New Hampshire should vote first in the presidential primary.
“The status quo is clearly unacceptable,” Perez told the New York Times. “To simply say, ‘Let’s just continue doing this because this is how we’ve always done it,’ well, Iowa started going as an early caucus state, I believe, in 1972. The world has changed a lot since 1972 to 2020 and 2024. And so the notion that we need to do it because this is how we’ve always done it is a woefully insufficient justification for going first again.
“This is the Democratic party of 2020. It’s different from the Democratic party in how we were in 1972. And we need to reflect that change. And so I am confident that the status quo is not going to survive.”
A number of Democrats have argued that Iowa and New Hampshire, two largely white states, do not reflect the racial diversity of the party and thus should not be the first and second voting states in the presidential primary.
That criticism intensified after the disastrous Iowa caucuses in 2020. Joe Biden may also be particularly open to the idea of changing the primary schedule, given that he performed dismally in Iowa and New Hampshire before going on to win the Democratic nomination.
According to the AP, Nevada Democrats have already been making the case to party leaders that their state should vote first in the presidential primary.
Updated
Joe Biden congratulated the prime minister of Italy, Mario Draghi, a day after the new leader was sworn in.
“Congratulations, Prime Minister Mario Draghi. I look forward to working closely with you to deepen our strong bilateral relationship, cooperate during your leadership of the G20, and address global challenges from COVID to climate change,” Biden said on Twitter.
Congratulations, Prime Minister Mario Draghi. I look forward to working closely with you to deepen our strong bilateral relationship, cooperate during your leadership of the G20, and address global challenges from COVID to climate change.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 14, 2021
Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief, was sworn in yesterday, after the coalition formed by former prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s fell apart over disagreements on how to spend the money that Italy will receive from the EU’s coronavirus recovery fund.
Draghi interestingly faces a challenge not entirely dissimilar to Biden’s. The new prime minister has promised to be a unifying force in a divided country, and he is now tasked with overseeing a coronavirus vaccine distribution program and reinvigorating a struggling economy.
Updated
The decision by 43 Republican senators to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial has been condemned by many observers as a racist vote which upholds white supremacy.
In his speech before the riot, Trump exhorted his followers to “fight” the vote and called his mostly white audience “the people that built this nation”. His efforts to overturn the election results concentrated in cities with large populations of Black voters who drove Biden’s win.
I am an American for whom it took 2 constitutional amendments and a (now gutted) federal law to ensure that my vote would be counted, who watched mobs furiously tried to stop the votes of folks who look like me from being counted, first in my hometown and then at the US Capitol. https://t.co/RKNEjPQevV
— Kimberly Atkins (@KimberlyEAtkins) February 13, 2021
Kimberly Atkins, a senior opinion writer at the Boston Globe, tweeted that the mob was trying to stop the votes of Black people like her from being counted.
Atkins said: “When this is done at the urging of the president of the United States, the constitution provides a remedy – if members of the House and Senate abide by their oaths. A republic, if you can keep it. Is it a republic for me?”
The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah, said: “White supremacy won today.”
“History will reflect that leaders on both sides of the aisle enabled white extremism, insurrection and violence to be a permissible part of our politics,” Attiah added. “America is going to suffer greatly for this.”
Updated
Seven Senate Republicans voted to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection, but only one of them is facing voters again next year.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is up for re-election 2022. The other six Republicans who supported conviction were either just r-eelected or plan to retire soon.
Speaking to Politico yesterday, Murkowski said she knew that her vote to convict may complicate her reelection bid, but she argued she had made the moral decision by finding Trump guilty.
“If I can’t say what I believe that our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?” Murkowski said.
“This was consequential on many levels, but I cannot allow the significance of my vote, to be devalued by whether or not I feel that this is helpful for my political ambitions.”
The senator added she was “sure that there are many Alaskans that are very dissatisfied with my vote, and I’m sure that there are many Alaskans that are proud of my vote”.
But Murkowski has something working in her favor: Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, so they do not hold traditional party primaries. That means Murkowski does not have to live in fear of a pro-Trump challenger ousting her in a primary, as her colleagues do. The elimination of that threat may have made Murkowski’s decision a little easier.
Updated
The Guardian’s Daniel Strauss reports:
Donald Trump will be 78 in 2024 and has not committed to running again. But his post-acquittal statement did preview a resumption of a more visible role in US politics in the coming months.
“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun,” Trump said. “In the months ahead I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people. There has never been anything like it!”
Trump’s allies argued that he remains the center of the Republican universe.
“Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican party,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, told Fox News Sunday. “The Trump movement is alive and well.”
At the same time, there are indications that unity remains elusive within Republican ranks. In an interview with Politico, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader who excoriated Trump after the impeachment trial but nonetheless voted for acquittal, indicated he would wade into primaries in which a Trump-backed candidate seemed set to win.
“My goal is, in every way possible, to have nominees representing the Republican party who can win in,” McConnell said. “Some of them may be people the former president likes. Some of them may not be. The only thing I care about is electability.”
McConnell added: “I’m not predicting the president would support people who couldn’t win. But I do think electability – not who supports who – is the critical point.”
Some conservatives are wondering whether Donald Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial may have sealed the Republican party’s fate as it careens toward extremism.
Here’s what CNN analyst Ronald Brownstein wrote about the future of the GOP:
Congressional Republicans have crystallized an ominous question by rejecting consequences for Donald Trump over the January 6 riot in his impeachment trial and welcoming conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia into their conference: Has the extremist wing of the GOP coalition grown too big for the party to confront?
Sanctioning Trump or Greene offered the party an opportunity to draw a bright line against extremist groups and violence as a means of advancing political goals. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans conspicuously rejected the opportunity to construct such a barrier through their decisions to oppose impeachment or conviction for Trump over his role in the US Capitol attack and to support Greene during the recent Democratic effort to strip her of her committee assignments. ...
While Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has called conspiracy theorists like Greene a ‘cancer’ on the party and denounced Trump’s role in the riot, the recent decision by House Republicans to accept the Georgia Republican into the conference, and the overwhelming refusal by House or Senate Republicans -- including McConnell -- to sanction Trump, suggests the party has very limited appetite at this point for any serious effort to excise that disease. And that could provide more oxygen to the White nationalist extremist groups that have viewed Trump as a galvanizing figure and already gained strength during his presidency.
The House impeachment managers said yesterday that they decided not to call witnesses in the Senate trial in part because they feared the request could hold up the proceedings for months.
Impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett told reporters yesterday that some of the witnesses they wanted to talk to, who could testify to Donald Trump’s actions and mindset on 6 January “were not friendly ... to us and would have required subpoenas and months of litigation”.
If the trial were held up for months as subpoenas were issued and then litigated, Senate Republicans may have had the opportunity to grind Joe Biden’s agenda to a halt because the chamber is not supposed to conduct other business while an impeachment trial is underway.
In the end, it seems Democrats chose to prioritize Biden’s agenda, specifically his coronavirus relief package, over their desire to uncover more details about the Capitol insurrection that resulted in five deaths.
Rather than calling any witnesses, the impeachment managers simply added the statement from Republican congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler about Trump’s 6 January call with the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to the official trial record.
That decision was criticized by some liberals, who argued Democratic lawmakers had missed out on a prime opportunity to uncover more details about that violent day and potentially win more Republican votes for conviction.
Impeachment managers have responded to that criticism by noting that Trump would almost certainly have been acquitted in the end anyway, given that it would take 17 Republican votes to convict him.
Updated
The House impeachment managers are defending their decision not to call witnesses in the Senate trial, allowing the proceedings to come to a quick end yesterday.
Impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett addressed the “angst” among some liberals, who complained that Democratic lawmakers caved on the witnesses issue.
"We didn't need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines."
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) February 14, 2021
Del. Stacey Plaskett, one of the House impeachment managers for former Pres. Trump's second trial, reacts to the Senate vote acquitting the former president. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/caivjlDfYs pic.twitter.com/jRk3qkHZwd
“I know that people are feeling a lot of angst, and believe that maybe if we had this, the senators would have done what we wanted,” Plaskett told CNN this morning.
“We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines. We believe that we proved the case, we proved the elements of the article of impeachment. It’s clear that these individuals were hardened, that they did not want to let the [former] president be convicted, or disqualified.”
Lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin echoed that logic on NBC, saying: “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”
Updated
Senate Republicans are apparently not eager to face questions over their votes to acquit Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection.
Closing out Face the Nation this morning, anchor Margaret Brennan noted that the show asked more than 24 Republican senators for interviews today.
“We did offer invitations to over two dozen Senate Republicans to join us today. No one accepted,” Brennan said.
A note to our viewers: pic.twitter.com/ShMasgqR4z
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) February 14, 2021
After the impeachment trial ended yesterday, Republicans who voted to acquit Trump said their votes were largely based on jurisdictional concerns.
The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the 6 January insurrection, but he said he voted to acquit because he did not think it was constitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a president who had already left office.
The Senate held a vote on the constitutionality of the trial on Tuesday, and the chamber voted 56-44 that the trial was constitutional, but many Republicans seemed to ignore the outcome of that vote when deciding whether Trump was guilty.
Updated
On a non-impeachment note, the US is celebrating Valentine’s Day today, and even the country’s most senior officials are getting in on the fun.
Kamala Harris shared a photo of Joe Biden’s recent visit to her office, where he pointed out a window that was once decorated by his wife.
“During a @POTUS visit to my office (his old office), he showed me where - on Valentine’s Day in 2009 - @FLOTUS wrote ‘Joe loves Jill’ on all the window panes. I love that story! To @POTUS, @FLOTUS, and all Americans: #HappyValentines,” Harris said in a tweet.
During a @POTUS visit to my office (his old office), he showed me where - on Valentine’s Day in 2009 - @FLOTUS wrote “Joe loves Jill” on all the window panes. I love that story! To @POTUS, @FLOTUS, and all Americans: #HappyValentines pic.twitter.com/zMrsPePxGC
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) February 14, 2021
Updated
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over the blog for the next few hours.
Washington in general, and the Republican party specifically, is still trying to figure out the path forward now that Donald Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial.
The Senate voted to acquit Trump of incitement of insurrection yesterday. Seven Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in finding Trump guilty of inciting the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, but those 57 votes fell short of the 67 needed to convict the former president.
Now that he has been acquitted, Trump is free to run for the White House again in 2024 if he so chooses. The verdict guarantees that Trump will continue to wield a lot of power over Republican lawmakers and voters over the next few years.
The blog will have more updates and analysis of the fallout from the impeachment trial coming up, so stay tuned.
Updated
Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, has said she does not believe all teachers in the US need to be vaccinated before returning to in-person classes.
“I’m a strong advocate of teachers receiving their vaccinations, but we don’t believe it’s a prerequisite for reopening schools,” said on Sunday during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. However, she added that those who are in higher-risk categories should be allowed to teach from home until they receive a vaccination.
“We have in the guidance clear language that specifies that teachers that are at higher risk ... teachers and students that are higher risk, and their families, should have options for virtual activities, virtual learning, virtual teaching,” she said.
Updated
Richard Burr’s vote to convict Donald Trump did not bring down the former president but it may have made Lara Trump “almost certain” to be nominated for the US Senate, key Trump ally Lindsey Graham said on Sunday.
“Certainly I would be behind her because she represents the future of the Republican party,” the South Carolina senator said of the former president’s daughter-in-law, adding that the future should be “Trump-plus”.
Burr, a former chair of the Senate intelligence committee, will retire as a senator from North Carolina at the end of his current term.
On Saturday, he and six other Republicans voted to convict Trump on a charge of insurrection linked to the US Capitol attack. It made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan ever but he was acquitted nonetheless.
Burr’s state Republican party condemned what it called his “shocking and disappointing” vote.
Lara Trump is married to Eric Trump, the former president’s second son. She has been reported to be interested in running for Senate in her native state.
“The biggest winner I think of this whole impeachment trial is Lara Trump,” Graham told Fox News Sunday. “My dear friend Richard Burr, who I like and I’ve been friends to a long time, just made Lara Trump almost a certain nominee for the Senate seat in North Carolina to replace him if she runs.
“Now certainly I would be behind her because she represents the future of the Republican party.”
You can read the full article below:
Guardian US columnist Lawrence Douglas says Republicans did not just acquit Trump – they let themselves off too.
Whatever else we might think about the Republicans’ vote of acquittal, it answers a question that millions of Americans have been pondering since Donald Trump took office four years ago. At what point would congressional Republicans say “enough”? Having first indulged and then endorsed Trump’s trampling of constitutional norms and abuse of the presidency, when would Republican lawmakers say, “No more”?
Now we have our answer. Never. If Trump’s act of inciting a mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to subvert the certification of a fair and democratic election does not constitute impeachable conduct, then it’s hard to imagine what does. Still, history will record that the vast majority of Republican senators voted to acquit, a group that included eleven lawmakers who, two decades ago, agitated for President Clinton’s removal.
You can read the full article below:
Rahm Emanuel, who served as Barack Obama’s chief of staff as well as Chicago mayor, says Donald Trump will be out for revenge against Republicans who have crossed him.
He told ABC’s This Week that Trump “won’t run [for president in 2024], but he is going to spend the next two years on retribution ... He is going after every Republican that either said something bad, or voted against them.”
Rahm also suggested Republicans’ decision to ignore Trump’s flaws contributed to their loss of power in Congress.
“[Republicans] didn’t want to cut him off. He made a Faustian bargain with them. And that’s what’s coming to the Republican party,” Emanuel added. “1932 ... was the last time a party – that is the Republicans – lost the presidency, the Senate and the House. That’s how far back you go for this moment in time to have a corresponding point in history.”
Updated
Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, says that schools need more financial help before they can reopen fully. Fauci was appearing on ABC’s This Week and said that a new stimulus bill was crucial to give schools the resources they need to ensure the safety of pupils and teachers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I think that the schools really do need more resources and that’s the reason why the national relief act that we’re talking about getting passed – we need that”, Fauci said during his appearance on Sunday morning. “The schools need more resources.”
Fauci has been keen for schools to reopen when it is safe to do so, citing the negative effects on children’s development from studying at home.
“I think it can be done. I mean, obviously it’s not a perfect situation, but it’s really important to get the children back to school in a safest way as possible. Safe for the children, but also safe for the teachers and the other educators,” Fauci said.
There has been concern in the US – and around the world – that some vaccines may be less effective against new strains, such as the South African variant. However, Fauci expressed confidence in vaccines, even against new strains of the virus.
“We do know that it evades the protection from some of the monoclonal antibodies and it diminishes somewhat the capability and the effectiveness of the vaccine to block it. It doesn’t eliminate it but it diminishes it by multiple fold. There’s still some cushion left so that the vaccine does provide some protection against it,” Fauci said.
Illinois senator Dick Durbin is the latest of a number of Democrats to say Mitch McConnell’s decision to vote against convicting Donald Trump in his impeachment trial was crucial.
“We were never going to reach 67 votes in the Senate without Mitch McConnell voting guilty. So he went up on the floor afterwards, he basically gave the speech that [lead impeachment manager] Jamie Raskin would have given to the Senate, and then tried to justify his vote for acquittal,” Durbin told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. Despite his decision not to convict, McConnell gave a withering speech after the trial condemning Trump’s conduct.
Durbin said the trial meant that Trump’s conduct around the riots would be recorded forever. “I think Jamie Raskin and the House managers made that record with clarity, even, let’s be honest with you, even Mitch McConnell acknowledged that last night, in his speech,” Durbin added. “So we have that record and that’s the important historic record to show this generation of doubters and any future generation.”
Some have suggested Democrats were keen to speed up the trial so they can push through Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief bill as soon as possible.
“That wasn’t the element here. And I do want to make this point: we are working with President Biden on the priorities of the American people, dealing with this pandemic, dealing with the economy, providing cash payments to American citizens to help them through this tough period,” Durbin said. “So what we did with this impeachment trial was not at the expense of President Biden’s priorities. We’ll be returning to them quickly when we come back to Washington.”
It was always unlikely that enough Republican senators would join Democrats to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. But Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager in Trump’s trial, insists the process was still worth the effort, calling it “a dramatic success in historical terms.”
“We have no regrets at all. We left it totally out there on the floor of the US Senate, and every senator knew exactly what happened. And just go back and listen to McConnell’s speech,” Raskin said on Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press.
“Everybody was convinced of the case we put forward, but, you know, as the defense lawyer said, just pick any one of these phony constitutional defenses, and then you can justify it,” he added.
“It could be first amendment, it could be bill of attainder, it could be due process. I mean all of them are nonsense. I thought that I successfully demolished them at the trial but, you know, there’s no reasoning with people who basically are, you know, acting like members of a religious cult and when they leave office should be selling flowers at Dulles Airport.”
Raskin believes that Trump will continue to influence US politics, despite his loss in November’s election. “He’s obviously a major political problem for the Republican Party, and as long as he’s out there, attempting to wage war on American constitutional democracy, he’s a problem for all of us,” he said.
Updated
Guardian columnist Lloyd Green has written about the future of the Republican party after Donald Trump’s acquittal on Saturday:
What was once the proud party of Lincoln and Reagan is now a Trump family rag – something to be used and abused by the 45th president like his bankrupt companies, namesake university and hapless vice-president, Mike Pence.
If the impeachment trial established anything, it is that Trump risked turning Pence into a corpse and ultimately went unpunished. That hangman’s noose was built to be used.
Yet even the former vice-president has remained mum and his brother, Greg Pence, a congressman from Indiana, voted against impeachment. Talk about taking one for the team.
In the end, devotion to a former reality show host literally trumped life itself. The mob belongs to Trump – as the Capitol police can attest. So much for the GOP’s embrace of “law and order”. When it mattered most, it counted least.
You can read the full column below:
Delaware’s Democrat senator Chris Coons suggested fear of backlash from voters stopped more of his Republican colleagues from voting to convict Donald Trump at his latest impeachment trial.
“I’m fairly certain there would have been a vote to convict with a secret ballot,” he said on Sunday during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. “Ultimately it’s in the hands of the American people. But I do think the Republican Party is deeply divided right now. And I’m grateful for the seven Republican senators and 10 Republican House members who stood up for the Constitution and stood up to President Trump.”
Sen. Chris Coons echoes calls for a 9/11-style commission in wake of the impeachment trial: "There's still more evidence that the American people need and deserve to hear." https://t.co/L6vzgDaa8k pic.twitter.com/6zHCURRPfa
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 14, 2021
He also said that senate minority leader Mitch McConnell influence was crucial in influencing his Republican colleagues. “Once Mitch McConnell made it clear he intended to acquit, even despite the compelling evidence, what the House managers needed wasn’t more witnesses or more evidence, what we all needed was more Republican courage,” said Coons.
Boris Johnson calls Trump impeachment a 'kerfuffle'
UK prime minister Boris Johnson has characterised Donald Trump’s impeachment and acquittal on a charge of inciting insurrection against his own government as “toings and froings and all the kerfuffle”.
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Johnson was asked what signal the acquittal of a president who stoked violence while casting doubt on a free election would send to the rest of the world.
“The clear message that we get from the proceedings in America,” the prime minister said, “is that after all the toings and froings and all the kerfuffle, American democracy is strong and the American constitution is strong and robust.”
Five people died as a direct result of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, who the president told to “fight like hell” in his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden, on 6 January.
In the former president’s second impeachment trial, House prosecutors showed chilling footage of lawmakers being hustled to safety by Capitol police.
Members of the pro-Trump mob chanted “hang Mike Pence” as they searched for Trump’s vice-president. Some erected a gallows outside the Capitol.
Constitutional experts have not been as sure as Johnson that the episode painted America’s 233-year-old system of government in such a positive light.
Andrew Rudalevige of Bowdoin College told Axios: “Congress not even pushing back against a physical assault suggests that there’s a lot they will put up with.”
While Trump was in office, Johnson cleaved so close to the president and his populist policies and style that Biden was reported to have called the prime minister “the physical and emotional clone of Donald Trump”.
Asked on Sunday if he was concerned he and the new president might “start off on the wrong foot”, Johnson avoided the question.
“I’ve had,” he said, “I think, already two long and very good conversations with the president and we had a really good exchange, particularly about climate change and what he wants to do.”
Johnson also said the UK was “delighted now, I’m very delighted, to have a good relationship with the White House, which is an important part of any UK prime minister’s mission.”
Read the full story below:
Updated
Barack Obama has marked Valentine’s Day by paying tribute to his wife and daughters: “Happy Valentine’s Day to the three who never fail to make me smile. Your dazzling light makes everything brighter.” Meanwhile, his successor, Donald Trump, issued his own Valentine’s Day message on Twit... Ah.
Happy Valentine’s Day to the three who never fail to make me smile. Your dazzling light makes everything brighter. pic.twitter.com/fMcdwf2j20
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 14, 2021
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once predicted Donald Trump would “destroy” the Republican party before becoming one of his closest allies, says Trump is “excited” about the GOP’s future.
During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham said that Trump “was grateful to his lawyers, he appreciated the help that all of us have provided”. He added that Trump is “ready to move on and rebuild the Republican party, he’s excited about 2022 and I’m going to go down to talk with him next week.”
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell did not vote to convict Trump at the impeachment trial, but gave a withering speech afterwards, condemning the former president. Graham insisted on Sunday that McConnell’s speech was “an outlier regarding how Republicans feel about all this”.
He added that it may come back to haunt Republicans: “I think Senator McConnell’s speech, he got a load off his chest, but unfortunately put a load on the back of Republicans,” Graham said. “That speech you will see in 2022 campaigns, I would imagine if you’re a Republican running in Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire where we have a chance to take back the Senate, they may be playing Senator McConnell’s speech and asking you about it if you’re a candidate.”
As for Trump’s baseless claims that the presidential election was fixed, Graham said they “are not sound and not true” but were also part of “politically protected speech”.
Updated
Bill Cassidy was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump at his impeachment travel. On Sunday, the Louisiana senator appeared on ABC’s This Week and was asked why he voted to convict Trump.
“If you describe insurrection, as I did, it’s an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, we can see the president for two months after the election promoting that the election was stolen, people still tell me they think Dominion rigged those machines, with Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, that is not true, and all the news organizations that promoted that have retracted.
“He then scheduled the rally for January 6th, just when the transfer of power was to take place. And he brought together a crowd, but a portion of that was transformed into a mob. And when they went into the Capitol, it was clear that he wished that lawmakers be intimidated. And even after he knew there was violence taking place, he continued to basically sanction the mob being there. And not until later did he actually ask them to leave.
“All of that points to a motive and a method and that is wrong, he should be held accountable.”
Cassidy, like all seven of the Republican senators who voted to convict Trump, received backlash in his home state. He said that many people in Louisiana agreed with his decision, adding “I was elected to uphold an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The majority of the people in Louisiana want that to be the case. And I have respected that trust. I have voted to support and defend the Constitution.”
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Maryland’s governor Larry Hogan has been on Meet The Press this morning, and has been pretty vocal about how he feels he would have voted if he had been in the Senate, and what the future holds for the Republican party post-Trump trial. He told NBC:
I think the argument was pretty convincing. I’m not in the Senate but I think I probably would have voted with some of my colleagues that were on the losing side. I was very proud of some of the folks who stood up and did the right thing. It’s not always easy. In fact, it’s sometimes really hard to go against your base and your colleagues to do what you think is right for the country.
On the “hostile takeover” of the Republican party, and whether it can be a force without distancing themselves from Trump and his supporters, Hogan said:
I don’t think they can. I think that if they really want to win competitive seats and in purple states and if they want to win suburban districts, if we want to somehow get back the House and the Senate, if we want to win a presidential election. They’re going to have to start building coalitions like we’ve done here in one of the bluest states in the country, where you can have a message that appeals to more people.
Hogan said, however, that he was not ready to abandon the party he said he had spent his whole life working for. Hogan’s father Lawrence was the only Republican in the House to vote for all three articles of impeachment against then-president Richard Nixon in 1974.
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Emma Brockes writes for us this morning that it is hard to know what to be most angry about:
It should have helped, perhaps, that the result was anticipated before the trial even got under way. There was no suspense, no surprise; the votes needed to convict were never there. Nor, seemingly, was the appetite for investigation: both sides agreed at the 11th hour not to call witnesses and draw this thing out.
There is a point, of course, which is to enter into public record a detailed, forensic account of what happened at the Capitol on 6 January, even if it didn’t result in conviction. This hurried process and hasty conclusion instead felt like a shrug, an afterthought, leaving us with little more than a flat sense of disgust and latent fury with nowhere to go.
What to be angry about most? Perhaps it was the absurdity of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who led a blistering attack on Trump minutes after voting to acquit him. This vote, said McConnell, was a result of what he labelled a period of “intense reflection”, which is certainly one way to describe political cowardice.
Or perhaps the most galling figure was Mitt Romney. He was one of the seven Republicans voting against Trump, a stance less evident four years ago when he sucked up to him for a place in the cabinet, or more recently, when he voted to rush through confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court.
If anything, the Republicans who voted with the Democrats on Saturday seemed worse than their Trump-supporting counterparts: these were the people who, one understood, had always had the measure of the man, but while it suited them had gone happily along with him.
Read more of Emma Brockes’ column here: With Trump’s acquittal, it’s hard to know what to be most angry about
Donald Trump may have escaped consequences in Congress for his actions leading up to the Capitol riot on 6 January, but CNN have this piece today reminding us that Trump’s legal woes are far from over. They cite three specific threats that the former president now faces:
Georgia election results
Georgia officials announced that the former President faces two new investigations over calls he made to election officials in an attempt to overturn the state’s election results. A source familiar with the Georgia secretary of state’s investigation confirmed they are investigating two calls, including one Trump made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Business dealings in New York
Trump also faces a criminal investigation in New York where the Manhattan District Attorney’s office is looking into whether the Trump Organization violated state laws, such as insurance fraud, tax fraud or other schemes to defraud. The scope of the investigation is broad, with prosecutors looking into, among other things, whether the Trump Organization misled financial institutions when applying for loans or violated tax laws when donating a conservation easement on its estate called Seven Springs and taking deductions on fees paid to consultants.
The insurrection in Washington, DC
In Washington, federal prosecutors have signaled that no one is above the law, including Trump, and have stressed that nothing is off the table when asked if they were looking at the former President’s role in inciting violence.
In the flurry of court proceedings after more than 200 people were charged with federal crimes, Trump’s influence on rioters has been mentioned both by prosecution and defendants looking to defray responsibility. In a case filed Thursday against a member of the Oath Keepers, prosecutors alleged the woman was awaiting direction from Trump, which is the first time they have made that direct of an allegation.
Read more here: CNN – This is Trump’s heaping list of legal problems post-impeachment
The president doesn’t have anything official in his public diary today, nevertheless we are expecting an executive order to be signed to bring back an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to the White House, as per White House senior director of coalitions media Jennifer Molina
NEW: Today @POTUS will sign an executive order to reestablish the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The office will work with community and faith leaders to tackle the problems in front of us.
— Jennifer Molina (@JenMolina46) February 14, 2021
More details in @EJDionne's column: https://t.co/FDh12F91dH
That EJ Dionne Jr column she referenced explains:
Battles over religion are nothing new in US history, but the Trump years were a ruinous nadir. Trump goaded millions of religious conservatives to embrace the heresy of white Christian nationalism.
Biden has a plan to nudge the nation back toward a more benign and (dare one say it?) constructive engagement with faith. He hopes to encourage greater tolerance and openness across our creedal differences and to embrace the role that churches, synagogues, mosques and the houses of worship of other faith traditions play as solvers of problems and builders of civil society.
He is poised to take a big step on Sunday by signing an executive order returning an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to the White House. This is another instance of what is becoming a through-line in the Biden presidency: restoration combined with transformation.
On the restorationist side, Biden is bringing back an approach to partnerships with faith-based organizations that was pursued by both Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush. But the transformational aspect includes a call for civil society groups, including religious ones, to engage deeply in our ongoing battles against the pandemic, systemic racism and the entrenched problems facing historically disadvantaged communities.
Read more here: Washington Post – Biden bids to be a peacemaker in Americans’ religious wars
President Joe Biden has used the third anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida to issue a statement reconfirming his intention to take action against gun violence in the US. In part the statement reads:
Over these three years, the Parkland families have taught all of us something profound. Time and again, they have showed us how we can turn our grief into purpose – to march, organize, and build a strong, inclusive, and durable movement for change.
The Parkland students and so many other young people across the country who have experienced gun violence are carrying forward the history of the American journey. It is a history written by young people in each generation who challenged prevailing dogma to demand a simple truth: we can do better. And we will.
This Administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call. We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer. Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.
Overnight, former US secretary of labor Robert Reich has written an op-ed for us, saying that convicted or not, Trump is history – it’s Biden who’s changing America:
While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.
Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.
The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.
Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.
This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Importantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.
Read more here: Robert Reich – Convicted or not, Trump is history, it’s Biden who’s changing America
One slightly curious aspect of the trial coverage over the last few days – it was one of the few times in the US you could get to hear someone say “motherfucker” live on the television during the day.
David Bauder, the media writer at the Associated Press, has had a look at the likelihood that news networks could end up with a fine for broadcasting the obscenities as they were used in video clips shown in the Senate chamber.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prohibits broadcasters from airing indecent or profane content between the hours of 6am and 10pm, when children could reasonably be expected to be in the audience.
There’s no exemption for news channels in the rules – though in practice enforcement is unlikely. The first requirement for FCC action is getting a complaint from the public, which would lead the government body to open an investigation. There have been some complaints, an agency spokesman said on Friday.
Repeated obscenities were shouted by members of the pro-Trump mob as they moved toward and inside the US Capitol that day. They included a chant of “fuck the blue,” directed at police officers, and other swear words as the crowd became more confrontational and violent.
Paul Levinson, a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University said “The FCC doesn’t want to get anywhere near what would be considered political censorship.”
News executives who aired the language this week argued that it would be wrong to edit language being used on the floor of the US Senate. In their defense they will point to the fact that many networks bleeped out the offending language when repeating videos later, although they could not intercept the language when it was being broadcast live.
The FCC fined ABC and Fox in 2012 after they aired obscenities blurted out during an awards show, but the supreme court threw the action out, saying the networks could not have anticipated the language. Networks will argue the same thing with the impeachment trial.
The FCC received complaints in 2018 after news programs aired stories about Trump referring to some African and Latin American nations as “shithole countries,” but did not take enforcement action.
Given the explicitness of the language used this week, during daytime hours, Levinson said he believes it’s a watershed moment in broadcast standards. “The fact that this language was put out there,” he says, “is a very important step forward in terms of freedom of expression.”
Bauder reminds us that we can thank the late comic George Carlin for the rules. When his famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” was played on a New York radio station in 1973, it led to a supreme court ruling that affirmed the FCC’s authority to fine radio or television stations for using such words and, potentially, take away their license to broadcast.
The seven Republican senators who broke rank by voting to convict former president Donald Trump at his impeachment trial faced immediate hostility and criticism from fellow conservatives revealing the potentially high cost of opposing Trumpism within the party.
These senators – North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s Mitt Romney, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey – brought the total number of guilty votes to 57. That was not nearly enough to secure a conviction, but easily enough to ensure instant attack from fellow Republicans and others on the right.
The reaction was a powerful illustration of the strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican party even though he is out of office. “Let’s impeach RINOs from the Republican Party!!!” Trump’s son and conservative favorite Donald Trump Jr said on Twitter, using the insulting acronym for Republicans In Name Only.
The instant backlash came from powerful rightwing media figures also. Conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham commented: “Prediction: none of the Republicans who voted in the affirmative today will speak at the 2024 GOP convention.”
For Cassidy, there was almost instant retribution in his own state. Jeff Landry, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, tweeted: “Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote is extremely disappointing.”
The local party agreed and its executive committee unanimously voted to censure Cassidy for his vote. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him,” the Republican Party of Louisiana similarly said in a statement.
Cassidy was not alone, as Burr’s state party in North Carolina also went immediately on the attack. Michael Whatley, North Carolina Republican Party chair, condemned his colleague in a statement, saying: “North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing.”
Read more of Victoria Bekiempis’ report here: Republican rebels who voted to convict feel Trumpists’ fury
One thing you may have missed overnight in all the frenzy of the impeachment outcome – the Biden administration has suffered a very early resignation, with deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo resigning after making threatening and abusive remarks to a reporter.
“We accepted the resignation of TJ Ducklo after a discussion with him this evening,” press secretary Jen Psaki said last night in a statement.
“We are committed to striving every day to meet the standard set by the president in treating others with dignity and respect, with civility and with a value for others through our words and our actions,” she said.
In his resignation statement, posted to social media, Ducklo said: “I used language that no woman should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she was just trying to do her job. It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful, and unacceptable. I am devastated to have embarrassed and disappointed my White House colleagues. I know this was terrible. I know I can’t take it back.”
My statement on resigning from the White House. pic.twitter.com/3Jpiiv75vB
— TJ Ducklo (@TDucklo) February 14, 2021
The conversation in question appears to have occurred when Ducklo was on a call with Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, who was questioning him about his relationship with Axios reporter Alexi McCammond.
Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell appeared to finally break from Trump yesterday, after four years of supporting him and voting to acquit him in both impeachment trials. Alan Fram at Associated Press has analysed the Trump-McConnell relationship this morning.
He notes that McConnell had signaled last month that he was open to finding Trump guilty, a jaw-dropping admission of alienation after spending four years largely helping him or ducking comments about his most outrageous assertions.
McConnell called the 6 January assault a “foreseeable consequence” of Trump using the presidency, calling it “the largest megaphone on Planet Earth.” Rather than calling off the rioters, McConnell accused Trump of “praising the criminals” and seeming determined to overturn the election “or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
The 36-year Senate veteran maneuvered through Trump’s four years in office like a captain steering a ship through a rocky strait on stormy seas. Battered at times by vindictive presidential tweets, McConnell made a habit of saying nothing about many of Trump’s outrageous comments.
He ended up guiding the Senate to victories such as the 2017 tax cuts and the confirmations of three Supreme Court justices and more than 200 other federal judges.
Their relationship, built more on expedience than admiration, plummeted after Trump’s denial of his 3 November defeat and relentless efforts to reverse the voters’ verdict with his baseless claims that Democrats fraudulently stole the election.
It withered completely last month, after Republicans lost Senate control with two Georgia runoff defeats they blamed on Trump, and the savage attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. The day of the riot, McConnell railed against “thugs, mobs, or threats” and described the attack as “this failed insurrection.”
Nevertheless, having declined to recall the Senate to hear the impeachment case while Trump was still in office, McConnell voted not to convict him on the grounds that Trump was now out of office.
One aspect of the impeachment trial that Fox News have gone big on today is the confusion yesterday when House impeachment managers won a vote to use witnesses in the trial, and then did not use any witnesses. In fact, the Fox News website is leading on that at the moment, rather than the verdict, in a piece liberally filled with criticism of the Democrats from their own side:
“This is so weak,” Meena Harris, the niece of Vice President Harris, said. “Just do us the favor of not acting appalled when he runs again in 2024.”
“This is retreat. White flag. Malpractice. Completely unstrategic. They just closed the door on others who may have stepped out, as @HerreraBeutler urged last night,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee Co-founder Adam Green said. “Just when we thought Dems were being bold and strategic. This is grabbing lameness out of the jaws of boldness.”
For his part, House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin defended the apparent u-turn, saying:
“We tried this case as aggressively as we could on the law and on the facts... We got from the president’s lawyers exactly what we wanted which was the entering into the evidentiary record of the statement by our colleague Congresswoman Beutler,” he said. “And we got that I was able to read it before the entire country and it became part of the case. And it became an important part of our case.”
He added: “We could have had 500 witnesses and it would have not have overcome the kinds of arguments being made by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans who were hanging their hats on the claim that it was somehow unconstitutional to try a former president.”
Read more here: Fox News – Dems ‘caved’ on witnesses in Trump impeachment trial, drawing condemnation from left and right
The impeachment trial is not yet quite in the rear-view mirror, but there’s already some areas where state Republican parties are looking ahead – and in California it is removing Gov Gavin Newsom that is their aim.
Associated Press report that the California Republican Party announced Saturday that it is giving $125,000 to the campaign aimed at recalling Newsom.
The infusion of cash comes at a critical time for organizers, who are required to collect 1.5 million valid petition signatures by mid-March to qualify the proposal for the ballot. The funds will go toward hiring workers to gather signatures. So far, that work has fallen largely on volunteers, along with mailings sent to households around the state.
The irony that over on the other side of the country in Georgia Republicans are taking legal action to try and stop volunteers helping with vote-gathering efforts may not be lost on some people.
The funds to try and dislodge Newsom were donated to Rescue California, one of several political committees working to oust his from office. Newsom’s political advisers call the proposal a misguided effort by supporters of former president Donald Trump and other Republicans. The party wrote the check just days after the Republican National Committee gave the state party $250,000 intended to aid the recall drive.
Organizers say they have collected over 1.5 million signatures so far, although it’s not clear how many of them will be disqualified because of technical or other errors. “We expect to collect another 400,000 signatures,” Rescue California campaign manager Anne Dunsmore said in a statement. The Republican contribution “will guarantee that we bring in enough additional signatures to hold Gavin Newsom accountable,” she added.
Dan Newman, Newsom’s chief strategist, said the check confirms the financial partnership between the recall effort and state and national Republicans.
“The facade is gone. It’s never been more clear they’re admitting that the Republican recall scheme is simple partisan politics,” Newman said in a statement. “Republicans have lost every single state election for 15 years, so they’re trying increasingly desperate, distracting and destructive things.”
Polls show Newsom’s popularity has been sliding as residents recoil from long-running coronavirus rules that have shuttered schools and businesses.
Newsom also has weathered a public drubbing for dining out with friends and lobbyists at a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant last fall, while telling residents to stay home. And more recently, an ever-expanding fraud scandal at the state unemployment agency has his leadership during the pandemic under even closer scrutiny.
Although the recall has yet to qualify for the ballot, the Republican field is continuing to take shape. Among the early candidates: former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and businessman John Cox, who lost to Newsom in a landslide in 2018.
We’ve heard a lot of the views of one McConnell during the impeachment process, but the New York Times asked a different one – former federal appeals court judge Michael W. McConnell – how Democrats might have framed the charges differently in order to secure a conviction in the Senate, and he had this to say:
By charging Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime.
The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.
Whether or not Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate vice president Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.
Read more here: New York Times – How Democrats could have made Republicans squirm
The decision by 43 Republican senators to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial has been condemned by many observers as a racist vote which upholds white supremacy.
In his speech before the riot, Trump exhorted his followers to “fight” the vote and called his mostly white audience “the people that built this nation”. His efforts to overturn the election results concentrated in cities with large populations of Black voters who drove Biden’s win.
Kimberly Atkins, a senior opinion writer at the Boston Globe, tweeted that the mob was trying to stop the votes of Black people like her from being counted.
Atkins said: “When this is done at the urging of the president of the United States, the constitution provides a remedy – if members of the House and Senate abide by their oaths. A republic, if you can keep it. Is it a republic for me?”
The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah, said: “White supremacy won today.”
“History will reflect that leaders on both sides of the aisle enabled white extremism, insurrection and violence to be a permissible part of our politics,” Attiah added. “America is going to suffer greatly for this.”
Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen, in his closing statement equated the Capitol insurrection with Black Lives Matter protests last summer, repeatedly referring to those demonstrators as a “mob”.
“Black people can’t object to a knee on our necks or kids getting pepper-sprayed, but whiteness protects its own,” the Rev Jacqui Lewis tweeted after the vote. “This is who America is, and it’s who we’ve always been. And we need to decide if we want to be something different.”
Read more of Amanda Holpuch’s report here: ‘White supremacy won today’: critics condemn Trump acquittal as racist vote
Updated
The few Republican lawmakers who have broken with Trump have suffered a stinging backlash, John Whitesides at Reuters reminds us.
Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and one of 10 who voted for Trump’s impeachment, quickly faced an effort by conservatives to remove her from her leadership post. She survived it, but Trump has vowed to throw his support behind a primary challenger to her.
In Arizona, which backed Biden and elected a Democratic senator in November, the state party censured three prominent Republicans who had clashed with Trump while he was in office - Governor Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, widow of the late Senator John McCain.
When Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska was threatened with censure by his state party for criticizing Trump, he suggested it was down to a cult of personality.
“Let’s be clear about why this is happening. It is because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude,” Sasse said in a video addressed to the party leadership in Nebraska. He was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump on Saturday.
The fissures have led to an open debate in conservative circles over how far right to lean. At Fox News, the cable news network that played a key role in Trump’s rise to power, Fox Corp Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch this week told investors the outlet would stick to its “center right” position.
Trump tore into the network after its early, and ultimately accurate, election-night projection that he lost in Arizona, presenting an opportunity for further-right video networks to draw disaffected Trump supporters.
“We don’t need to go further right,” Murdoch said. “We don’t believe America is further right, and we’re obviously not going to pivot left.”
While Trump maintains control over the party for now, several Republican senators said during the impeachment trial that the stain left by the deadly siege of the Capitol and Trump’s months of false claims about widespread election fraud would cripple his chances of winning power again in 2024.
“After the American public sees the whole story laid out here ... I don’t see how Donald Trump could be reelected to the presidency again,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who also voted for a conviction, told reporters during the trial.
With Trump out of office and blocked from Twitter, his favorite means of communication, some Republicans said his hold on the party could fade as new issues and personalities emerge.
Republican Senator John Cornyn, a Trump ally, said the former president’s legacy had suffered permanent damage. “Unfortunately, while President Trump did a lot of good, his handling of the post-election period is what he’s going to be remembered for,” Cornyn said. “And I think that’s a tragedy.”
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, yesterday decried the decision to acquit Donald Trump of inciting a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January.
The Democrats had argued in the short trial that Trump caused the violent attack by repeating for months the false claims that the election was stolen from him, and then telling his supporters gathered near the White House that morning to ‘fight like hell’ to overturn his defeat. Five people died when they then laid siege to the Capitol.
Dana Milbank at the Washington Post has an overnight op-ed with the quite brutal headline “Trump left them to die. 43 Senate Republicans still licked his boots”. It opens with a look at one of the key moments in the impeachment trial, when it became clear that Trump knew his own vice president was in danger, and looked the other way. Milbank writes:
In the end, the darkest truth of Donald Trump’s crime came to light.
As his marauders sacked the Capitol on 6 January in their bloody attempt to overturn the election, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy called the then-president and pleaded for Trump to call off the attack. Trump refused, essentially telling McCarthy he got what he deserved. Trump was, in effect, content to let members of Congress die.
Trump’s lawyers, in their slashing, largely fictitious defense, claimed that Trump was “horrified” by the violence, hadn’t known that vice president Mike Pence was in danger and took “immediate steps” to counter the rioting.
But Herrera Beutler revealed such claims to be a lie. When McCarthy “finally reached the president on 6 January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol,” she wrote. McCarthy, she continued, “refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”
Read more here: Washington Post – Trump left them to die. 43 Senate Republicans still licked his boots
Several of the Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump yesterday posted directly on social media to explain their decision to supporters – and perhaps to history. The replies have been lively, to say the least.
Sen Bill Cassidy posted a short video clip, explaining that the constitution is more important than any one person.
Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty. pic.twitter.com/ute0xPc4BH
— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) February 13, 2021
Maine’s Susan Collins issued a lengthier statement, in which she said:
This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by president Trump on 6 January 2021. It is instead about president Trump’s failure to obey the oath he swore on 20 Jnanuary 2017. The abuse of power and betrayal of his oath by president Trump meet the constitutional standard of ‘hugh crimes and misdemeanors,’ and for those reasons I voted to convict Donald J. Trump.
My statement on the Article of Impeachment:https://t.co/MiztmfRtXB pic.twitter.com/37KVDSqH91
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) February 13, 2021
Mitt Romney of Utah said in his statement:
Trump attempted to corrupt the election by pressuring the secretary of state of Georgie to falsify the election results. Trump incited the insurrection against Congress by using the power of his office to summon his supporters to Washington on 6 January. He did this despite the obvious and well known threats of violence that day.
My statement on today’s impeachment vote: pic.twitter.com/Hfk8yqToPr
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) February 13, 2021
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey posted a thread explaining his reasoning for his vote – with a very blunt conclusion at the end of it.
His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction.
— Senator Pat Toomey (@SenToomey) February 13, 2021
Here’s another analysis of yesterday’s outcome by our David Smith in Washington:
Donald Trump’s highly anticipated acquittal at his US Senate impeachment trial is the least surprising twist in American politics since … well, his acquittal at his first US Senate impeachment trial a year ago.
On that occasion, with Republicans virtually unanimous in his defence, but this time Trump, already stripped of the trappings of power, suffered a somewhat bipartisan defeat in the Senate and has been spared the prospect of becoming the first American president in history to be convicted only because a two-thirds majority is required rather than a simple majority.
However, Trump and his supporters are likely to claim victory again. The cloud of January gloom that descended on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in sunny Florida after seemingly endless defeats at the ballot box and in courts will have lifted a little.
The historic debate that played out in the Senate last week is also the final proof positive of a claim made by his son, Donald Trump Jr, at the fateful rally before the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January: “This is Donald Trump’s Republican party!”
If the chilling images of havoc that day – with police under attack and Vice-president Mike Pence, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mitt Romney narrowly escaping with their lives – were not sufficient to wrench the party from Trump’s grasp, then surely nothing is.
Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who switched allegiance to the Democrats, commented: “It’s a demonstration that his status as the leader of the Republican party is unchanged, even though the results of the election have shown that his agenda is a losing agenda for the Republican party.”
One explanation is that senators’ actions are ultimately shaped by Republican state parties, which are ever more radically pro-Trump, and by grassroots supporters, who were not necessarily paying much attention to the trial.
Read more of David Smith’s analysis here: Trump’s acquittal seals his grasp on the Republican party
It is still Donald Trump’s Republican Party - at least for now. That’s the view of Reuters’ John Whitesides.
He writes that the former president – who has largely stayed out of sight at his Florida home since leaving the White House – still commands fervent loyalty among his supporters, forcing most Republican politicians to pledge their fealty and fear his wrath.
But after two impeachments, months of false claims that his election loss to Joe Biden was rigged, and an assault on the US Capitol by his supporters that left five people dead, Trump is also political poison in many of the swing districts that often decide American elections.
That leaves Republicans in a precarious position as they try to forge a winning coalition in the 2022 elections for control of Congress and a 2024 White House race that might include Trump as a candidate.
“It’s hard to imagine Republicans winning national elections without Trump supporters anytime soon,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and aide to Senator Marco Rubio during his 2016 presidential primary race against Trump.
“The party is facing a real Catch 22: it can’t win with Trump but it’s obvious it can’t win without him either,” he said.
Trump has not signaled his long-range political plans for after the trial, although he has publicly hinted at another run for the White House and he is reportedly keen to help primary challengers to Republicans in Congress who voted to impeach or convict him. His statement issued after the verdict said:
Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun. In the months ahead I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people. There has never been anything like it! We have so much work ahead of us, and soon we will emerge with a vision for a bright, radiant, and limitless American future.
Just days after the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 70% of Republicans still approved of Trump’s job performance, and a later poll found a similar percentage believed he should be allowed to run for office again.
But outside his party he is unpopular. A new Ipsos poll published on Saturday showed that 71% of Americans believed Trump was at least partially responsible for starting the assault on the Capitol. Fifty percent believed he should be convicted in the Senate with 38% opposed and 12% unsure.
“Whether he does run again is up to him, but he’s still going to have an enormous amount of influence on both the direction of the policy and also in evaluating who is a serious standard-bearer for that message,” one adviser said. “You can call it a kingmaker or whatever you want to call it.”
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that Donald Trump was ‘practically and morally responsible’ for the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January – minutes after voting to acquit the former president in his impeachment trial for that very same act.
His argument, that it was not right for the Senate to impeach a former office holder, was roundly criticised. It was McConnell himself who refused to reconvene the Senate to hear the charges against Trump earlier in January when he was still in office.
House majority leader Nancy Pelosi said the issue of timing ‘was not the reason that McConnell voted the way he did; it was the excuse that he used’.
Welcome to our live coverage of US politics, the day after the 45th president of the republic, Donald Trump, was acquitted in the Senate for a second time after an impeachment trial.
- 57 Senators voted that Trump was guilty of “incitement of insurrection” in the events leading up to the Capitol attack on 6 January. That’s not enough to get the two-thirds supermajority required, and so the former president was, as expected, acquitted.
- The outcome, which was never in doubt, reflected both the still raw anger of senators over Trump’s conduct as his supporters stormed the Capitol last month – and the vice-like grip the defeated president still holds over his party.
- It does, nevertheless, represent the most bipartisan impeachment vote in US history – seven Republicans broke ranks and voted alongside Democratic and independent senators that Trump was guilty.
- President Joe Biden urged Americans to defend democracy following the acquittal, saying: “This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile.”
- In a statement last night, Biden said the substance of the charge against his predecessor over the Capitol riot on 6 January, in which five people died, was not in dispute.
- Donald Trump expressed no remorse and in a statement made no mention of the violence that unfolded in his name, and offered no condolences to those who had given their lives to protect the US Capitol.
- He signaled his desire to remain a political force within the Republican party, and in a sentence liable to excite the conspiracy theorists among his following, he said “In the months ahead I have much to share with you.”
- Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell directly blamed Trump for the insurrection, even though he voted to acquit the former president. “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically, and morally, responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said.
- Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer expressed dismay over the acquittal. The Democratic leader urged Americans to never forget the violence and destruction of the Capitol insurrection. “Remember that day, January 6th, forever — the final, terrible legacy of the 45th president of the United States,” Schumer said. “Let it live on in infamy, a stain on Donald John Trump that can never, never be washed away.”
We’ll have live analysis and reaction as it unfolds on Sunday, so stay tuned…
