Trump in the dock
The US House of Representatives was expected on Wednesday to pass a vote charging Donald Trump with “incitement of insurrection”, following the storming of the Capitol by a mob of his supporters last week ( see page
22). It would make him the first president to be impeached twice.
To lead to sanctions, the impeachment would have to be followed by a two-thirds majority vote in favour of his conviction in the Senate, which is currently in recess until after Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, is said to be open to convicting the president later this month, and several other senior party members have voiced support for the move. Trump appeared in public for the first time since the Capitol siege this week, dismissing the impeachment drive as “ridiculous”, and insisting that his words to followers before their march on Congress had been “totally appropriate”.
What the editorials said
The peaceful transition of power has long been “fundamental to America’s understanding of itself”, said The Guardian. The presidential inauguration is meant to be a “moment of civic celebration” that transcends politics. This makes Trump’s conduct all the more egregious. Last week’s riot was not “a one-off piece of performance theatre that got out of hand”. It was the natural culmination of a sustained attempt by the president to overturn the election. Congress was right to launch impeachment proceedings. “This cannot be allowed to stand,” agreed The New York Times. The political system must bring Trump to account, to deter any future chief executive from seeking to follow his appalling example.
The president’s actions on 6 January were impeachable, said The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t make impeachment a good idea. Rather than stigmatising behaviour that most Americans already regard as completely beyond the pale, the process risks overshadowing the start of Biden’s presidency and granting Trump more time in the spotlight to play the victim. Better just to leave Trump to “repair in new irrelevance to Mar-a-Lago”.
What the commentators said
Trump has been rightly condemned for whipping up supporters before the Capitol riot, said Jonathan Turley on The Hill. But did his “reckless” remarks meet the definition of incitement under the criminal code, which Congress traditionally uses to weigh impeachment offences? I think not. Trump never actually called for any violence. His rhetoric was comparable to that of Democrats such as Maxine Waters, who urged supporters to harass members of Trump’s cabinet in public, or Ayanna Pressley, who insisted amid the Black Lives Matter marches last year that “there needs to be more unrest in the streets”. Whether Trump is brought to book remains to be seen, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. The same goes for enablers such as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who urged the Capitol crowd to undertake “trial by combat”. But the violence has at least shocked GOP leaders into cutting ties with Trump.
The riot brought home to Republicans the price of ceding their party to Trump, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (although nearly 150 of them still refused to certify Biden’s victory). But the damage goes beyond just the GOP. It’s America’s image that has taken the biggest hit: a gleeful Tehran took it as evidence of “how vulnerable and fragile Western democracy is”. It is in the interests of America and the world that Republican moderates wrestle back control of their party, said Janan Ganesh in the FT, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. The party has long indulged the growth of paranoid elements on its right flank. Trumpism didn’t start with him – it can be traced back to the McCarthyite 1950s. Reformers will be up against the “structural vagaries” of a political system that gives a disproportionate influence to rural states; and also up against a media market that, by offering lucrative book deals and jobs on cable news, incentivises even outgoing politicians to “stay on good terms with the angry base”. All things considered, the odds of moderates salvaging the GOP aren’t good. “If only the implications could be confined to the party, or even the US.”
What next?
The FBI has warned that far-right groups are planning protests in all 50 state capitals before Biden’s inauguration. Members of Congress were told that 4,000 “armed patriots” plan to surround the Capitol. Up to 15,000 National Guard troops have been called up to defend the ceremony.
Were all 50 Democrat senators to vote for Trump’s conviction, 17 Republicans would need to join them to secure the requisite two-thirds majority. If they did so, it would then only require a simple majority vote to disqualify Trump from standing for office again.