“The rioters were wearing Trump hats, carrying Trump flags, they all just watched Trump speak, and they were chanting ‘Fight For Trump!’ Yet who caused it remains a mystery…” –The Daily Show

Like an all-white jury in a KKK trial, there was never any doubt what the outcome would be. “Those jurists are political ancestors of the modern GOP,” Professor Brittney Cooper said on Twitter. But Trump’s second impeachment was even more compromised than that.

A record seven Republicans voted to impeach. But the overwhelming majority of the rest—including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—had either actively or passively supported his months-long effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated with a violent attack on Congress that left seven dead, amidst chants of “Hang Mike Pence.”

In fact, 147 of them had voted to support Trump’s baseless challenges to the election results—challenges that had repeatedly been rejected in more than 60 court cases, all the way up to the Supreme Court. But even those who hadn’t supported Trump’s false claim of a stolen election hadn’t done anything to stop him, either. They sat back and watched as he stoked the rage of his base—rage that came close to killing some of them.

In short, the GOP is now “a party that’s gotten away with an insurrection attempt,” as MSNBC’s Medhi Hassan described it the morning after the vote. What’s more, “A failed coup without consequence is a training exercise,” MSNBC’s Ari Melber warned.

“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said in a speech after the vote. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”

But there was no question, none, that McConnell was practically and morally responsible for Trump getting away with it, since he refused to allow Trump’s trial to begin while he was still in office, and then turned around and voted to acquit, based on the false, discredited claim that he couldn’t be impeached after leaving office. (See sidebar, “Trump’s False Claim That He Can’t Be Impeached.”)

“There is simply no chance that a fair or serious trial could conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in next week,” McConnell said on Jan. 13, when the House voted to impeach.

Thirteen days later, McConnell did a 180. He scheduled a vote on a motion declaring Trump’s trial unconstitutional because Trump was no longer president, and preceded it with a lunch-time presentation to GOP senators by Jonathan Turley, one of the very few law professors who hold that position. The motion failed, but 45 Republicans voted for it—including McConnell—signaling in advance their intention to acquit regardless of the evidence.

“That was kind of sandbagging us,” an unidentified senator told The Hill, which reported the maneuver as having “derailed Trump’s impeachment trial before it started.”  

An Overwhelming Case

The House impeachment managers—lead by former constitutional law professor Jaime Raskin—meticulously mounted an overwhelming evidentiary case, both regarding constitutional questions (see sidebars) and Trump’s culpability, not just for inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, but for months of activity leading up it — baselessly challenging the election, stoking and applauding violence, and cultivating the loyalty of those who eventually carried out the attack—all in an effort to subvert our democracy.  

As Representative Ted Lieu summarized, “What you saw was a man so desperate to cling to power that he tried everything he could to keep it, and when he ran out of nonviolent measures, he turned to the violent mob that attacked your Senate chamber on January 6.”

Aside from Trump’s spurious constitutional claims, his defense centered on falsely pretending that impeachment charges were limited simply to the words in one speech — words that they claimed were being taken out of context. Their response was to take the words of dozens of Democrats out of context. Sure, Trump used the word “fight” his lawyers said, but so did plenty of Democrats — and they played an 11-minute videotape to prove it, with the word “fight” repeated 238 times.

But the Impeachment Managers’ case was about much more than just a few words in one speech. It was about months of preparation before that, and hours of follow-up afterwards, too, all of which amounted to a sustained effort to overthrow the results of the election.  It was not Trump’s words that were the problem. It was his actions.

The jurisdiction question was debated and settled the first day.

“Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity. You get away with it,” Raskin said. “This would create a brand-new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Forty-five Republican senators said, “Sure. Why not?” But they were outvoted, 55-45, and so the trial continued.

The second day laid out the heart of the case—in overview by Raskin and Joe Neguse of Colorado, and in detail by other members of the team.

“This attack did not come from one speech, and it didn’t happen by accident. The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump,” Joaquin Castro of Texas began, “If you look at the evidence, it’s purposeful conduct. You’ll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable.”

His factual account began with Trump’s actions before the election “when he set up his big lie” of a stolen election starting months in advance. “By July President Trump had reached a new low. He was running 15 points behind his opponent, and he was scared.” This is when “He refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power,” Castro said, playing a brief clip from a July 19^th Fox News interview.

This is when Trump began laying the foundations for his coup attempt, as Castro described:

President Trump was given every opportunity to tell his supporters, ‘Yes, if I lose, I will peacefully transfer power to the next president.’ Instead, he told his supporters the only way he could lose the election was if it was stolen. In tweet after tweet he made sweeping allegations about election fraud that couldn’t possibly be true. But that was the point. He didn’t care if the claims were true. He wanted to make sure that his supporters were angry, like the election was being ripped away from them.

“His supporters got the point,” Castro went on to say. “They firmly believed if he lost it was because the election was rigged.” And he ran a tape of Trump supporters being interviewed saying precisely that.

Then, after the election, as votes were being tallied “President Trump began urging his supporters to stop the count…. Trump knew that you can’t just stop counting votes but he wanted to inflame his base . There was a purpose behind this.” And Trump’s efforts only amped up further as his fate became sealed, as armed supporters began showing up, “literally trying to intimidate officials to stop the count just as President Trump had commanded.”   

The Impeachment Managers described every facet of Trump’s efforts to retain power. Particularly chilling was Trump’s escalating attacks on Georgia officials, recounted by Representative Madeleine Dean. Even after he and his family received death threats, Trump doubled down, calling him “an enemy of the people.”

“This was not just one attack or one comment but this was an attack after attack in the face of clear threats of violence,” Dean said. Another Republican election official, Gabriel Sterling, went on television pleading for Trump to knock it off. “Mr. President,” Sterling said. “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone will get hurt. Someone will get shot. Someone will get killed.”

Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett documented Trump’s direct cultivation of his violent supporters. When he declined to condemn the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand down and stand by,” they made that their slogan, used to market merchandise. When a caravan of more than 50 trucks of Trump supporters surrounded a Biden/Harris campaign bus and tried to run it off the road, Trump tweeted a video of the incident, with a fight theme song added, and the message, “I love Texas!”  Clearly delighted, “The president made a public joke of violence,” Plaskett said.

More than just isolated incidents, Plaskett went on to explain how Trump engaged with Women for America First, directing them to organize the January 6 Stop The Steal rally. They had originally planned a rally after Biden’s inauguration. It was Trump who got the date changed, and then repeatedly hyped it to his supporters, promising it would be “wild.”  

“This was months of cultivating a base of people who were violent, praising that violence and then leaving that violence, that rage straight at our door,” Plaskett said. “By the time he called the cavalry of his thousands of supporters on January 6 at an event he had invited them to, he had every reason to know that they were armed, that they were violent, and that they would actually fight. He knew who he was calling and the violence they were capable of. And he still gave that marching order to go to the capital to quote ‘fight like hell and stop the steal.'”

Republican’s Mixed-Message Verdict

In short, the Impeachment Managers mounted an overwhelmingly detailed case showing that Trump was uniquely responsible for the attack on the Capitol, and they went on to show how he sat back and enjoyed the carnage as it unfolded.

In the end, almost all Republican Senators admitted as much, either explicitly, by voting to convict, or by condemning his actions, as McConnell did, or implicitly by failing to defend Trump in their public statements explaining their votes. The vast majority of GOP acquittal votes—30 out of 43—were justified based on McConnell’s phony jurisdictional argument, according to a tally by law professor Brian Kalt. But the Republican Party itself sent a very different message.

The case of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy illustrates this vividly. 

“Our constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” Cassidy succinctly explained. 

In response, the state party censured him just four hours later. The same state party that refused to censure former KKK leader David Duke in 1989. State parties have been the driving engines of the GOP’s anti-democratic drive. On Feb. 8, the Brennan Center For Justice reported, 

“Thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).”

State Republican parties are trying to do what Donald Trump couldn’t: make it impossible for Democrats to win power, no matter how many people may want to vote for them. When asked what the GOP does next, Emory professor Carol Anderson, author of “One Person, No Vote” placed things starkly in perspective. “It doubles down,” Anderson said:

It doubles down in terms of laws that they’re going after to restrict the right to vote, particularly for communities that they don’t believe are viable American citizens. It doubles down in terms of making sure that minority rule is embedded in the systems, and resisting all attempts at change. And it doubles down in terms of increasing the agony of Americans, and in doing so to then try to move, shift that blame for that agony on to the Democrats for not being able to pass legislation to ease the ills of a struggling economy and of COVID-19.