Trump celebrates acquittal by taunting Democrats
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump celebrated his acquittal on two articles of impeachment Wednesday by taunting Democrats via Twitter.
Just minutes after the Senate vote, Trump tweeted out a 30-second video of a Time magazine cover with the blaring headline: “How Trumpism Will Outlast Trump.” It included mock Trump campaign signs for the next several presidential elections.
Trump announced he would make a public statement about impeachment from the White House at noon today.
Trump has talked with people for days about what he might say after acquittal, said aides who were not authorized to discuss the conversations.
He even brought up the topic at a lunch with television anchors to discuss the State of the Union speech. One participant said he talked more excitedly about his impeachment speech than he did the State of the Union.
Meanwhile, Republicans cast the Senate vote as an exoneration of Trump while Democrats accused the GOP-led Senate of refusing to hold the president accountable for his actions.
“The sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J. Trump,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.
Grisham also took aim at Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump of abuse of power. “Only the president’s political opponents – all Democrats, and one failed Republican presidential candidate – voted for the manufactured impeachment articles,” she said.
Brad Parscale, manager of Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement that Trump has been “totally vindicated” and that it’s time “to get back to the business of the American people.”
“The do-nothing Democrats know they can’t beat him, so they had to impeach him,” Parscale said, arguing that Trump’s reelection campaign has gotten bigger and stronger as a result of impeachment. “This impeachment hoax will go down as the worst miscalculation in American political history,” he said.
On Twitter, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway expressed her reaction to the vote with the hashtag “#AcquittedForever.”
The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. suggested that now that impeachment is over, “maybe Democrats can actually come to the table and try to do some work for the American people for a change.”
“But I won’t hold my breath,” he added.
Trump Jr. also called for Romney to be expelled from the Republican Party.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., criticized the Senate verdict, saying Trump and Senate Republicans “have normalized lawlessness and rejected the system of checks and balances of our Constitution.
“Our Founders put safeguards in the Constitution to protect against a rogue president,” Pelosi said. “They never imagined that they would at the same time have a rogue leader in the Senate who would cowardly abandon his duty to uphold the Constitution.”
With the Senate vote, “the president remains an ongoing threat to American democracy, with his insistence that he is above the law,” Pelosi said.
House Majority Leader Steny, Hoyer, D-Md., called the Senate vote “a sad day for our republic.”
“I worry for the future of our republic if its chief executive cannot be held in check by representatives of the people and the states, particularly one who has already demonstrated a disdain for the rule of law and the role of an independent judiciary,” Hoyer said.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2016 campaign, noted that Republican senators pledged an oath at the start of the impeachment trial to defend the Constitution.
“Today, 52 of them voted to betray that oath – and all of us,” she tweeted. “We’re entering dangerous territory for our democracy. It’ll take all of us working together to restore it.”