Bar Mr. Trump from office
The former president knowingly stoked an insurrection. The Constitution is clear: He is unfit to serve again.
AWhite House aide’s firsthand account of Donald Trump and his inner circle’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol makes it devastatingly clear: The increasingly volatile and violent president was well aware that an armed mob had come to Washington at his behest and attacked Congress, yet he spent critical hours resisting entreaties to stop the violence he had so recklessly caused.
Together with what the Jan. 6 committee has already revealed — and it is not done — it is apparent that Congress and the U.S. Justice Department need to prepare for what the Constitution provides and the rule of law demands: a finding that Mr. Trump fomented an insurrection, and that he is disqualified from ever holding public office again.
That must be the first order of business, keeping an insurrectionist from regaining the power he sought to usurp through violence after public deceptions, frivolous lawsuits and intense pressure on state officials to help him subvert the election had failed. There will be plenty of time for the much more arduous and necessarily methodical process of prosecuting Mr. Trump and those who aided and abetted this attack on our democracy — and for Mr. Trump and his lawyers to do all they can to stall and gum up the criminal justice system with delaying tactics.
Americans had already heard how legal officials and advisers in Mr. Trump’s orbit — people like his once-loyal attorney general, William Barr, acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, told him there was no evidence of the widespread election fraud he’d been claiming since before the election was held. They heard how violent right-wing groups came armed to the rally Mr. Trump called for Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the results of the Electoral College. They heard, once again, frightening descriptions of the violence, the breaching of the Capitol, the attacks on police officers, the hunt for congressional leaders and calls to hang Vice President Mike Pence. And they heard how, in the days before Mr. Trump left office, people who had helped try to undermine the election, including members of Congress, sought presidential pardons from the insurrection’s own leader.
On Tuesday, they heard even more, this time from someone who witnessed the high-level drama in the administration firsthand. Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, detailed how Mr. Meadows warned her that “things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,” and how John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, feared things “could spiral out of control” if Mr. Trump didn’t finally concede his loss. Yet Mr. Trump would not.
The president shrugged off reports of guns being sighted in the crowd at the rally, and even demanded that metal scanners be removed so that the crowd could be larger, declaring, “They’re not here to hurt me.” Many people had refused to go through the metal detectors, she said.
Ms. Hutchinson recounted, too, how Mr. Trump, who told the crowd he would march with them, was incensed that aides insisted he return to the White House on the advice of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who had warned, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” — including, she said, obstruction of justice, defrauding the electoral count, and inciting or encouraging a riot. She repeated a story told to her that day by a top Trump adviser and a Secret Service agent: How Mr. Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the vehicle and reached for the throat of the chief of his security detail. And later, how a White House valet said the president had thrown a platter and ketchup at a wall — not, it turns out, the first time the president had gone into such a wild rage.
Even after the violence erupted, Mr. Trump refused to call off the mob. Mr. Meadows, Ms. Hutchinson recalled, said, “He thinks Mike (Pence) deserves it.” With members of the Cabinet preparing to discuss invoking the 25th Amendment provision to declare the president unfit to serve, Mr. Trump finally issued a video at 4:17 p.m. calling on the crowd to go home, telling the rioters that “we love you” and that they were “very special.”
The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, makes it clear that no one can hold a national or state office if, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution, they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Mr. Trump created and promoted the fiction of a stolen election, summoned an angry mob to Washington, dismissed warnings that they were armed, sent them to the Capitol to “fight like hell,” and for hours refused to call them off, until it appeared that his own Cabinet might force him from power.
It is time for others with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s betrayal of his oath and his dangerous deceptions to muster the courage Ms. Hutchinson showed in coming forward. It is time for the Republican Party to stop defending the indefensible.
And it is time for our leaders to stop playing the coy game that Mr. Trump and far too many of his allies in Congress and the Republican Party seem to think this is, that as long as he keeps telling the outrageous, thoroughly disproved lie that the election was fraudulent, his purported “sincerity” somehow immunizes him, and them, from responsibility. Our nation’s legislative and criminal justice systems can’t tie themselves up in knots or wring their hands parsing this transparently self-serving nonsense. The courageous Ms. Hutchinson said it best when she recalled her reaction to Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Pence: “It was unpatriotic. It was un-American.”
And whether Mr. Trump is simply untruthful or seriously unhinged, he is clearly unfit ever to serve again.