History will record that the most devastating rebuke to former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial was delivered by a leading Republican Senator who had just voted to acquit him.
Trump cannot be forgotten because his transgressions must not be allowed to stand. And he will not be held accountable without more contention and division and quite likely violence.
“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking” the January 6 seige on the U.S. Capitol, declared now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
McConnell, of Kentucky, seemed to see as clearly as anyone the rank culpability of the nation’s unfittest President, a man so lacking in principle he was prepared to sacrifice the life of his abjectly subservient veep, Mike Pence, and other members of Congress to his insane determination to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
“Pence was in serious danger,” McConnell noted. “Even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, their President sent a further tweet, attacking his own Vice President.” He called Trump’s behavior “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
Despite this clarity, McConnell and forty-two other Republican Senators refused to hold Trump accountable, creating the same inevitability of future transgressions as did his first impeachment. McConnell’s thin reed of an excuse was that Trump was no longer President—after McConnell blocked him from being tried while he was still in office.
Within a month, the dexterous McConnell had changed his tune entirely, saying he “absolutely” would support Trump should he be the party’s 2024 nominee. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, also did a 180 from his post-insurrection expression of disgust with Trump (“Count me out,” he thundered. “Enough’s enough”) to his familiar groveling: “I’ve never felt better about President Trump’s leading the party than I do right now.”
Such profiles in cowardice are ubiquitous among the GOP, now firmly established as the party of corruption, delusion, sedition, and prideful ignorance—including the wholesale rejection of public health measures that have sought to stem the tide of COVID-19.
The party’s disdain for science and disregard for public safety have already cost countless lives and will continue to exact a terrible toll in the months to come. Many if not most of the more than half-million U.S. deaths from the coronavirus could have been prevented, if not for the bad example and dereliction of duty—there’s that phrase again, thank you, Mitch McConnell—of Trump and other Republicans.
And the most terrible thing of all is that, as much as most Americans would like to put Donald Trump in the rearview mirror, that is not possible.
Not now. Not yet.
Relegating Trump to the dustbin of history, where he belongs, is not possible because he has never been held accountable for his gross misconduct and outright criminality. In fact, while he is unlikely to regain public office, Trump rightfully sees the latest round of bootlicking from Republicans not just as a vindication but as an invitation to whoop up more mayhem.
Even McConnell acknowledged that justice demands that the former President be held accountable—albeit by someone other than himself. Trump “didn’t get away with anything, yet,” he warned. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation and former Presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
So now start the investigations, including a 9/11-style commission announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to look into the January 6 insurrection. Georgia prosecutors have opened a criminal probe into Trump’s attempt to pressure state officials into falsifying vote totals to reverse the state election result. And the Manhattan district attorney’s office, armed with tax records that the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court refused to suppress, is looking into what one prosecutor called “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” involving Trump’s business dealings.
Now, too, come the lawsuits, from past victims of the former President’s lawlessness, including women who plausibly accuse him of sexual assault. Trump, his crooked lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and two of the hate groups involved in the January 6 insurrection are also being sued by the NAACP, on behalf of plaintiffs including Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, for violating civil protections in the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.
Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, in March filed his own suit, calling the January 6 Capitol riot “a direct and foreseeable consequence of [Trump’s] false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and [his] express calls for violence.” (Trump spokesperson Jason Miller responded by calling Swalwell “a low-life with no credibility.”)
Trump cannot be forgotten because his transgressions must not be allowed to stand. And he will not be held accountable without more contention and division and quite likely violence. In the meantime, the Party of Lincoln stands for nothing so much as fealty to its master.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who tried in vain to get Trump to call off his Capitol attackers on January 6 (“Well, Kevin,” the President said, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are”), later traveled to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring, as have a number of other Republicans.
There were 147 Republican members of Congress who voted, after the insurrection had occurred, to overturn the election results based on the Big Lie of widespread fraud. None have been held accountable in any way; in fact, they are now gleefully using the distrust they worked so hard to manufacture as a reason for restricting voting access.
Just ten Republican members of Congress voted to impeach Trump, and seven GOP Senators voted to convict him for offenses that, according to McConnell, he had clearly committed. All are paying a price for their courage.
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, among others, have been censured by their state’s Republican parties for voting in favor of Trump’s impeachment. Other lawmakers, including Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, have been censured by individual county Republican parties in their states.
“We did not send him there [Washington, D.C.] to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing,” David Ball, chair of the Washington County Republican Party, groused about Toomey. “We sent him there to represent us.”
And Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who also voted to convict, was publicly attacked by his own family. “Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!” wrote eleven of his relatives in a letter, underlining the word “disappointment” three times. “You have embarrassed the Kinzinger family name!”
Such reactions are coming not just from the party’s QAnon lunatic fringe but from its mainstream.
A poll taken after Joe Biden’s Inauguration found that nearly three in four Republican voters believed that Trump actually won the 2020 election and that Biden’s claim to the presidency was illegitimate. And roughly four in ten Republicans surveyed by the American Enterprise Institute believe “the people” will have to take “violent actions” if elected leaders “will not protect America.”
This delusion and will-to-violence go hand-in-hand. Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, who met with state militia members to hone their “messaging” a month prior to the arrest of thirteen militia members for plotting to kidnap and perhaps kill that state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has declared that the January 6 insurrection was a “hoax” that “was all staged” to discredit Trump. Apparently, in his sick mind, it didn’t work.
Trump, in the eyes of his followers, is still as glorious as ever, worthy of the golden idol statue of him made in China and unveiled at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are now fully engaged in an onslaught of obstructionism against President Biden; not a single Republican in Congress voted for Biden’s enormously popular COVID-19 relief package, which directed essential funds for testing and vaccines, state and local governments, businesses, schools, families, and the unemployed.
Indeed, the Party of Trump appears to have completely abandoned the goal of governing, instead devoting its energies to culture-war-based grievance mongering. Faced with a raging pandemic that continues to kill about 1,000 of their fellow citizens each day—as well as a battered economy and crumbling infrastructure, rampant economic inequality and racial injustice, and the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change—Republican members of Congress are preoccupied with railing about the “canceling” of Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss.
Not all of this dysfunction is due to Donald Trump, but the nation cannot reach a better place until he is held liable for his misdeeds and his infamy in history is secured. The Republican Party, to which the founder of this magazine, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, proudly belonged, has been corrupted to the core and needs to be put out of its misery, at the ballot box.
No wonder the only real policy objective of Trump’s Republican Party is trying to make it harder for certain people to vote.