A few hours into the presentation of the House managers’ case against Donald Trump, for inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Representative Eric Swalwell, of California, played senators an extraordinary new clip of themselves on that awful day. The previously undisclosed security-camera footage was short. There was no sound. It simply showed senators running down a long corridor, to escape from the mob. This was no calm, orderly evacuation. These were members of Congress running for their lives. Swalwell said that he went back and checked to see how close the rioters had come to the senators. The answer was fifty-eight steps. “We all know that awful day could have been so much worse,” he said.
A few minutes later, Swalwell—the son and brother of cops, he noted—played a series of increasingly frantic radio transmissions by members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, as they tried and failed to contain the riot that ultimately injured dozens of officers. “We lost the line. We’ve lost the line,” an officer shouts. “All M.P.D., pull back,” he screams. “Pull back.”
This was the horrible moment when the Capitol was breached. But it was so much more than that, too—a before-and-after moment in our democracy, when Trump’s months-long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of an American election culminated in a deadly but failed attempt to stop Congress from certifying the results. Had Trump finally gone too far, even for his Republican Party to follow? Had he gone too far for the members of the U.S. Senate who were themselves targets of the mob? This week’s impeachment trial will answer those questions, and in so doing offer one last clarifying, horrifying coda to the Trump Presidency.
So, no, we are not moving on. Not yet. Joe Biden has been the President for three weeks now, but the profane spectre of Trump, his unprecedented attack on the election, and the violence that he helped unleash in furtherance of that attack remain the unfinished business of his disastrous Presidency.
The exercise of this week’s Senate impeachment trial might well be the last time that the Trump era is so evocatively re-created: the blustering President and his toxic tweets and rallies, the rampaging thugs whom he urged to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” the Republican senators forced to dodge endless shouted questions about Trump and his false claims. At the heart of it is this painful mystery: Did Trump believe the stolen-election lies that he used to call forth the mob? What did he expect would happen when he told them to walk to Congress and stop the certification of the Electoral College results that would put an end to his Presidency?
I’m not sure what, exactly, to call what we have been watching this week: part trial, part documentary film, part constitutional-law seminar, part Facebook video shared by your politics-obsessed cousin. It’s too soon for history, and there are still so many questions unanswered; if there is to be a full investigation of this tragedy, it hasn’t happened yet. Where the House Democratic managers succeeded most brilliantly was in evoking that day’s feeling of violation and betrayal—and in linking the violence back to Trump’s cynical and premeditated provoking of an insurrection in the heart of Washington. Trump was the “inciter-in-chief,” not the commander-in-chief, the Democrats’ lead manager, Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, said. He was a fire chief who set a fire in a crowded theatre and then watched it burn. “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Raskin said, of Trump, channelling Voltaire. This is the third Presidential impeachment trial of my lifetime. I have watched close to every minute of all three. Never have I seen anything as riveting as the dramatization of the Capitol violence—and Trump’s role in it—that the House managers put on this week.
“I cannot imagine how any senator can vote against removal,” Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, one of just ten House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment, tweeted, during the showing of the videos on Wednesday. On Thursday, many of the strongest denunciations of Trump’s actions in the House managers’ case came from elected Republican officials and Trump Administration advisers, who were shown calling the former President’s actions “disgraceful,” “shameful,” “wrong,” and “one of the darkest chapters in United States history.” After listening to all this, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, one of the few Senate Republicans who categorically spoke out against Trump on that day, told reporters during one of the trial breaks, “I don’t see how Donald Trump could be reëlected to the Presidency again.” That is up to her colleagues, but all too many of them have already signalled where they stand.
And that, as always in the Trump era, is what it comes back to: Trump alone never could have wreaked such mayhem on our democracy, on our Capitol. His mob is not just the thugs who attacked cops with flagpoles on January 6th; it also includes some of the elected officials inside the besieged building, the ones in suits who advanced and promoted Trump’s election lies, just as they had advanced and promoted so many of his other lies for the previous four years. Of course, they are standing by him now.
After watching the managers’ presentation, Senator Ted Cruz—the Texas Republican whose objection to Arizona’s electoral count was being debated when rioters forced the senators to flee—told reporters that, no matter how horrific the video is, the managers had proved nothing of Trump’s guilt. “I think the end result of this impeachment trial is crystal clear to everybody, which is that Donald Trump will be acquitted,” he said. Senator Roy Blunt, of Missouri, asked if he had changed his mind, changed the subject, telling reporters that congressional Democrats had supported riots in Seattle, Portland, “and other places.” CNN’s Manu Raju reported that, although several Republican senators were “shaken” by the footage, they were not inclined to waver from their votes to acquit. (“Apparently shaken, but not stirred,” the Democrat Doug Jones, who lost his Alabama Senate seat in November, said.) On Wednesday evening, Trump’s chief Senate defender, Lindsey Graham, as if seeking to erase his brief apostasy in voting against Trump’s election lie on the night of the riot, called the managers’ case against Trump “offensive and absurd.” David Schoen, Trump’s combative new lawyer, liked that line so much that he used it himself. The accusations against Trump, he told reporters on Thursday, were not just unproven; they were “offensive.”
Next, it will be Schoen’s turn to present a case. I’m sure he and Trump’s other lawyers will dismiss all that we have seen from the managers about the events of January 6, 2021, as sensationalistic rehashing of the day’s violence, inflammatory, and beside the point. They will portray Trump as a paragon of First Amendment-protected free speech. They will portray Democrats as hypocrites, perfectly willing to unleash a mob when it suits them. The reason I know that they will say this is because they already have. All indicators suggest that this is just the defense that many Republican senators are looking for.
In the five weeks since the attack on the Capitol, those who unleashed and enabled the rioters had every chance to apologize, to pull back, to offer regrets and make amends. They did not. Trump did not, and neither, it’s sad to say, did almost any of his fellow-Republicans. Many, like Graham, have gone in the other direction. The security-camera footage from the Capitol shows us that these senators ran for their lives. But they did not, and still do not, have the will or the courage to run from Trump and from the lies with which he has enveloped them and their Party.
The unprecedented second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is not yet over, though it soon will be, and the outcome is, once again, not much in doubt. A year ago, when Trump faced his first trial, Mitt Romney was the only Senate Republican to vote for his conviction. This time, despite the trial taking place at the actual scene of the crime, Romney was joined by only five other Republicans in voting to allow the trial to proceed. Whether or not those six ultimately vote to convict, the final number of Republicans is sure to be well below the two-thirds majority required for conviction. We lost the line. We lost the line, indeed.
