Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it.
One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can no be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.
Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election neither can they take by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.
It’s as pertinent today as it was then.
Republicans used to claim Lincoln as theirs but they have forfeited that claim. They have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Today they are the party of whining, entitled, arrested development and intellectual rot and if they were around in 1861 they would all have been on the other side.
And now they have let the violent genie out of the bottle again.
“Top Republicans want to bury President Trump, for good,” Axios reported Wednesday morning, hours before the House impeaches Trump for a second time. “But they are divided whether to do it with one quick kill via impeachment, or let him slowly fade away.”
“House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy would love a Trumpless world, but doesn’t want to knife him with fingerprints,” Axios reports. McCarthy and his “fade-away caucus sees a danger that the impeachment-conviction route is, as a prominent conservative put it, ‘making him Jesus. … Truly stupid.'”
Trump allies warn that any Republican who votes to impeach or convict Trump will never win election again, though a Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday morning found that 40 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now say they would vote for Trump if he ran in the 2024 GOP primary, down from 53 percent in November. “President Trump’s role in fomenting last week’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is negatively impacting his future political prospects — even among his base,” said Morning Consult’s Kyle Dropp.
Honestly, “it’s hard to know where other Senate Republicans are on this,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes writes in Politico‘s Playbook. But if Mitch McConnell is ready to convict, “it seems like we may have — very belatedly — arrived at the moment that McConnell and the Trump-era GOP have desperately tried to avoid: a Goldwater to Nixon moment in which the party decisively breaks with the criminal, dangerous president. Of course, anyone taking that side of the bet for the last four years would be dead broke by now, so I suppose I’ll believe it when I see it.”
McConnell has now stated he will not bring the Senate back in session before the 19th which means anytrial will be held in the new congress. I have no idea what that will look like or if there will be any appetite to try the former president once he’s gone. There are good reasons to do it if Republicans are prepared to convict — they may be able to deny him the ability to ever run again. And he should be convicted for what he did in any case.
It’s impossible to predict where we will be in week. Things are moving very quickly. Donald Trump is capable of anything and his cult is organizing for more violence as we speak. So it’s possible there will enough Senators to convict by the time they get to it. McConnell is said to be leaning toward conviction himself, presumably so that he can get Trump out of politics. Maybe he’ll whip for that over the next week.
But I will be surprised if it goes down that way. Once Trump is back at Mar-a-lago, still cut off from his followers by twitter and facebook, they will probably decide they can let him “fade away.” I think that’s a mistake. He is nothing if not resilient. And his followers already love him like Jesus so there’s no margin in trying to prevent it.
The first line of Trump’s obituary has been written: “Donald Trump, the onlypresident in history to be impeached twice, died today…”
Ten Republicans voted with the Democrats to impeach him making it the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history, including Liz Cheney, a member of the House leadership. Now it goes to the Senate and while Mitch McConnell won’t take up the trial before the leadership changes on January 20th, he has said he hasn’t made up his mind about whether to convict.
The Republicans who want to purge Trump, and I’m sure quite a few of them do, are happy to pass the ball to the Democrats and let them do their dirty work. As usual.
And after Trump there is a whole lot of clean up to be done.
The media are falling all over themselves with excitement! McConnell thinks impeachment may be a good idea! Liz Cheney, one of the most extreme right-wingers in Congress, says she’ll impeach. Woo hoo!
Do I really need to point out the patently obvious?
Republicans aren’t supporting impeachment because Trump incited an insurrection. They’re doing so because the insurrection failed. If that mob had actually succeeded in derailing the Biden certification vote not a single Republican congressperson would dare call for his impeachment.
But let’s be overly generous and give both Mitch and Liz a widdle pat on the head. You’re being such good kids! Now get the hell out of the way.
Fawning over these prodigal sons and daughters by permitting them to hog the limelight right now rehabilitates them and provides them status— and that is dangerous. These are enablers who, until Trump failed, did not do much more than voice the mildest of peeps (if that)
The people we really need to focus on right now are Adam Schiff, Gerald Nadler, Katie Porter, Madeleine Albright, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Eric Swalwell, Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, and so many others across the political spectrum who recognized early and consistently that Trump was an existential threat and did something about it.
It’s a bit startling to hear that Mitch McConnell is contemplating voting to impeach Trump but it really shouldn’t be. I’m sure Mitch was truly appalled by the Trump Insurrection last week. After all, Trump’s mob physically threatened him and trashed the building where he has spent his life working to make Americans miserable. Here’s what Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has to say about it:
For years, Trump has commanded fealty among his party. Fearful of a presidential tweet or a primary challenge — or worse — congressional Republicans have danced around addressing Trump’s worst impulses. The few who have deigned to criticize him forcefully often found themselves without a political base and bowed out of office. The party has occasionally rebuked him en masse, but generally on niche issues, including foreign policy, that wouldn’t necessarily animate such a backlash.
But we saw something different Tuesday: the emergence of what appears to be a genuine political effort to move the party beyond Trump and Trumpism. An attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week, which even some top allies have attached to his rhetoric about a “stolen” election, has infused some Republicans with heretofore-unseen moral indignation and desire to turn the page.
Three House Republicans of varying stripes were the first to signal that Democrats’ looming impeachment this week would be a bipartisan affair. Rep. John Katko (N.Y.) comes from a difficult Upstate New York district. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) has been a frequent and increasingly vocal Trump critic. Likewise Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who injected some political heft into the effort as the No. 3-ranking House Republican.
Cheney’s decision was the biggest of those three, by virtue of her stature in the party and the fact that she comes from one of the most pro-Trump seats from the 2020 election. Wyoming gave Trump more than 70 percent of its vote just two months ago.AD
The number of GOP impeachment supporters in the House is still small — and seems likely to remain so — but what matters is the Senate, where their votes would be required and where members are more apt to take principled stands.
That’s why Cheney’s announcement wasn’t the most significant development Tuesday night. That distinction would belong to the signals emanating from the office of the top Republican in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The Washington Post has confirmed that McConnell believes Trump probably committed impeachable offenses with his conduct before the siege of the Capitol. Mind you, McConnell hasn’t committed to voting against Trump, but the fact that he’s even considering it sent shock waves through Washington.
McConnell’s move could be understood a number of ways, including as a genuine matter of conviction. He played along for a time, but McConnell went out front among congressional Republicans in declaring the presidential election over, so it’s not like he’s a newcomer to denouncing Trump’s effort to overturn the election.AD
But even if that’s the case — and whatever you think of McConnell — he’s a skilled political operator. It’s difficult to view this as anything other than a calculated threat. Trump is staring down the barrel of becoming the first president in history to be impeached twice, and McConnell’s reported posture indicates he could also be the first to actually suffer a conviction vote in the Senate. That could mean an early removal from office or some kind of post-presidential sanction, but either way it would be a historic black mark on Trump’s legacy. McConnell seems to be leaving it up to Trump to decide whether he wants to go through all of that.
Whether that’s because McConnell truly intends to bring his party along with such an effort and try to get 67 votes in the Senate remains to be seen. Perhaps he’s truly hedging his bets. Perhaps he’s wielding this to prevent Trump from doing something even more drastic in his final days in office. We still don’t have McConnell on the record, so we’re left to read between the lines.
But it’s clearly a power play. Reports indicate McConnell views this as a chance to move the party beyond Trump and the long shadow he could cast over it in the years to come. But Trump could just as easily try to call a bluff.
Of course it’s a power play. I’m sorry to say that the sad, cynical truth is that Trump facilitated McConnell’s agenda but now he’s done and no longer of use to him, particularly since he screwed the pooch on the Georgia election. McConnell has always known that going forward, the Trump cult is a problem.
As for Cheney, she’s got presidential ambitions and she made the bet a while back that the smart move was to be an anti-Trump, right wing hawk. I’ve always wondered why more of these people didn’t see the upside to taking that position. Nobody but Cheney, and maybe Sasse to a certain degree, were willing to take the other side of the bet that Trump would flame out. That has always surprised me. Wouldn’t you think there was at least a 50-50 chance of that?
Anyway, I think there is a sincere feeling that Trump is a maniac after what he did last week and continues to do today. But there is also political calculation. Trump is a loser, he screwed up Georgia and now he is on the run from corporate America. If any of them really want to be rid of him, now is their opportunity.
It’s an amazing turn of events that one year ago today we were on the cusp of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate and today the House of Representatives is poised to do it again. They will pass another Article of Impeachment against Donald Trump — this time with a bipartisan vote — for the crime of inciting an insurrection. That will make Donald Trump the first president in history to be impeached twice.
Nobody expects more than a handful of Republicans to sign on, despite the clear evidence we’ve all seen, but there will be a few which is more than we had the last time. The fact that a losing incumbent president would have done something so heinous that he would be impeached a week before he was set to leave office is something none of us could have imagined. During the first impeachment trial, we were told by Republicans that the president had done nothing wrong but even if he did we were so close to an election that we should let the people decide. Well, they decided. And we all know what happened next. There have been two months of non-stop, absurd, overwrought lies, which turned many of Trump’s voters (who were already indoctrinated with wild conspiracy theories) into raving hysterics, egged on daily by Trump himself. January 6th was the inevitable consequence.
The second impeachment vote may just end up being a historical footnote and Trump will likely make his ignominious exit on January 19th, having already announced that he will not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration — clearly not wanting to spoil his perfect record as the greatest sore-loser the world has ever known. He may have a pardon spree in his final days, including one for himself and his family and I would not put it past him to issue a mass pre-pardon for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol. Who knows if any of that is legal, but those questions have never stopped Trump before.
Up until his post-election tantrum and his incitement to riot last week, Trump might have been able to count on rich friends and Republican donors giving him some back-up simply because as the likely frontrunner for 2024 with a potential for a blockbuster rematch. He likely would have maintained tremendous clout within the GOP.
But he blew it and he is now not only facing legal threats, but his personal financial future is also seriously threatened.
The backlash to his actions in the past week among corporations, banks and Wall Street has been swift and severe. Aside from “Big Tech’s” decision to ban Trump and remove right-wing apps that were involved in plotting violence from their platform, major firms from Coca Cola to Marriott to Morgan Stanley suspended political donations to Republican politicians who contributed to the insurrection.
Furthermore, the Trump Organization itself is going to bear the brunt of this withdrawal of support from the business community. The company was already in trouble. It was previously reported that Trump holds a tremendous amount of debt that’s coming due very soon and for which he is personally liable. Had he won the election or even if he had maintained his hold on the Republican establishment and kept a slight modicum of respectability, he would probably have been able to refinance that debt fairly easily. That’s no longer going to be possible. Deutsche Bank, which holds a big piece of the debt, has reportedly decided not to do business with him. Two other banks have closed his accounts and have stated they will no longer work with him. Investment banks that might have held their noses and helped him out will no longer need or want to take the risk on someone who is so publicly damaged.
Meanwhile, his company was already reeling from a resort and hotel business in deep distress from the COVID pandemic and is now suffering from a global recoil from his brand name. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that the city will terminate decadeslong business contracts with Trump, costing the Trump Organization about $17 million a year in profits. Trump’s hotel in D.C, which has hosted so many people from all over the world currying favors and hoping to mingle with the elite MAGA crowd, will now have a new landlord: the Biden Administration, which is highly unlikely to stonewall the congressional investigations into its corrupt contracts.
The PGA canceled the 2022 Golf Championship that was scheduled for his Bedminster golf club (which reportedly upset Trump more than anything else that’s happened this past week.) No doubt his resorts all over the world will be hemorrhaging members, upscale professional types who can no longer afford to be associated with him and expect their employers to be sanguine about it. The Washington Post additionally reports that Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate brokers who handle the leasing for many of the Trump Organization properties says it will no longer do business with them. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick even turned down a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump this week.
Trump was warned by his good friend Tom Barrack after the election that he needed an “elegant” exit if he hoped to save his business, according to the Post. He refused and now he is described as “shell shocked” by what’s happened. All of this leads to a very important question: If Trump cannot refinance his debt through normal channels and no one wants to bail him out otherwise, what will he do?
It was always a very dangerous risk for a man like Trump, having had access to all the nation’s secrets, to leave the White House and travel the world seeking flattery and favors from foreign adversaries. After all, he did that even as president. But there were at least some restraints on the information he would share. In the near future, fresh from this disaster, deep in debt and seeking revenge, is it not at least possible that he could market some of what he knows in exchange for help from some shady state-owned banks such as Turkey’s Halkbank for which he already went out on a limb? Or perhaps he could find some willing ears from VEB, the Russian state-owned bank that was involved earlier with some Trump development deals. And there are the variousMiddle East entities with whom he and son-in-law Jared Kushner have cultivated such close relationships. Surely they’d love to sit and have a nice long private chat with a loquacious ex-president who desperately needs cash.
As a former president, Donald Trump will be a serious national security risk no matter what. But now he has more incentives than ever to parlay what he knows into a financial windfall. There is some comfort in the reports that he was distracted and bored during intelligence briefings but it wouldn’t be surprising if he paid closer attention than we think. He knows a financial opportunity when he sees one.
Realtor and radio host Jenna Ryan (left) and friends in front of the private jet hired to take them from Denton, Texas to last week’s Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.
“These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West.” You know, “repectable people.” Or maybe not.
Adam Serwer reviewed the CVs of some of the common clay who arrived, at the outgoing president’s invitation, for last week’s overthrow-the-government party. They included business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, and stay-at-home dads. And a few Proud Boys and “militia” members.
In a large crowd, Serwer writes, there were bound to be some of modest means as well as more middle-class Americans. But:
The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.
The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.
There’s ample precedent for this. When the Ku Klux Klan formed during Reconstruction, according to the historian Eric Foner, its leadership “included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers. ‘The most respectable citizens are engaged in it,’ reported a Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau agent, ‘if there can be any respectability about such people.’”
Respectable people can be very dangerous. President Ulysses S. Grant responded to the outrages of the KKK in the Reconstruction South by sending the military to crush the Klan and the newly formed Department of Justice to prosecute it. For a time, the effort was successful.
For a time. When federal troops withdrew, reactionary white backlash returned against sharing power with freed Blacks (men only at the time). “They terrorized, murdered, and intimidated Black voters and their white Republican allies in order to excise them from the polity and restore Black people to a state of near-slavery.”
And there Black Americans stayed until Civil Rights Era reforms abolished the formal aspects of the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction. The informal legacy remains. The right-wing backlash against reforms of the 1960s persisted for another 60 years, culminating last week in the sacking of the Capitol by self-described patriots, very respectable people.
Patricia McCloskey and husband Mark made national news in June 2020 when they threatened Black Live Matter protesters in their tony St. Louis, Mo. neighborhood.
Trump wore out his welcome in some countries years ago.
Security experts will analyze the Trump Insurrection of Jan. 6 for decades. Historians will interpret and re-interpret it for centuries. More immediate is the need to prevent the armed protests being planned by Trump’s loyalists (royalists?) for Jan. 16-20 in the capitols of all 50 states and again in Washington, D.C. In the near term, however, how does the country put this malevolent genie back in the bottle, or at least deprive the insurrectionist MAGA movement of the oxygen needed to sustain it?
Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a national security expert, explains for The Atlantic how Donald Trump, president and promoter of domestic terrorism, has fed the violence that erupted in Washington, D.C. last week:
Trump has gotten away with all of this by never quite acknowledging what he was doing. He is a master of a technique that I have described as stochastic terrorism—the incitement of random but utterly predictable acts of violence for political gain. He portrays himself as a victim and rallies his troops to fight for him, but does so in a way that never directly exposes his responsibility. Fight, he tells them, to protect his political standing. And that is what some of them did on January 6.
Viewing Trump’s insurrection through a counterterrorism lens unlocks some insights about how to deradicalize his most violent supporters. Successful efforts to fight terrorism begin at the top. An ideology may survive and linger, but to curtail a terror threat requires what counterterrorism experts call “leadership decapitation.” (The meaning is figurative.) Society is more likely to heal when an extremist group’s ideological leader is isolated and damaged in the eyes of his supporters.
Voters kicked off that effort on Nov. 3. But Trump’s drive to manifest his own reality by insisting up is down, black is white, and his landslide loss was a win have helped keep the helium from totally escaping his balloon. Today, the House will vote to impeach him a second time. This time, a few Republicans will join the Democrats’ effort. Miraculously, a few found Jesus after the insurrectionist mob failed to find and lynch them.
The past week has already seriously damaged Trump. Social media firms have cut him off from his favorite propaganda tools. Controversial perhaps, says Kayyem, but “deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members.” Losing the Oval Office will not help either.
Corporate donors for now have pulled support from Republicans who backed Trump’s efforts to overturn election results. Trump’s business partners and lenders are fleeing. Real estate brokers that help manage his properties no longer want his business. Already hundreds of millions in debt personally, Trump’s business teeters. The Trump brand and the Trump Organization is toast.
All the while, law-enforcement agencies have been identifying and making very public arrests of people who forced their way into the Capitol and were pictured on surveillance video or social media. Those mugging for Instagram may have believed that they were cosplaying a revolution and that Trump would protect them, but would-be recruits to Trump’s movements will be more aware of the potential legal consequences of committing violence in his name.
And immediate economic consequences. MAGA revolutionaries have returned home to find their employment terminated. Legal consequences may follow.
Kayyem concludes:
During his political career, Trump has given comfort to and conferred logistical coherence upon a coalition that will not die without him—but also will not thrive. The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.
A certain kind of radical wrote online in advance of the Jan. 6 insurrection, “Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
Who says things like that? Who even thinks it? Over one man, much less over career criminal, huckster, and fraud Donald J. Trump? Kayyem views the Trump insurrection through a counterterrorism lens because that is her training. But there is far more going on that will not evaporate once Trump is defrocked.
Trump is a cult leader not just for who he is but for what he represents to the MAGA faithful. He is their last, best chance for preserving the social-racial hierarchy they believe God Himself bequeathed them: male-dominated, white, straight, conservative, and Christian (after a fashion). When Trump speaks of “caravans” of invaders, rapists, and child-traffickers from south of the border, he taps directly into their brain stems. He speaks to inchoate fears of loss of power and social dominance that Republicans have exploited since the advent of the Southern Strategy. Trump juiced those fears with enough fentanyl that followers would die for him. Their fervor may subside somewhat with him out of office and/or in jail, but their fears will not disappear.
Plus, Trump embodies a special kind of power perhaps not appreciated before now. While populists may resent the way wealthy elites float above the rules they prescribe for others, Trump offers for a low, low price that special, Trump-branded grace to Americans of more modest means. Those who stormed the Capitol last week behaved as if somehow they would escape accountability for their actions, as indeed their avatar has his entire life. Like most other Trump products, it may have been another con, but it was heady stuff.
