‘Remember this day forever’
Democrats close impeachment case with a warning to Americans about Trump’s threat to future of U.S. democracy.
WASHINGTON—Toward the end of the two-day presentation of the case against Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, Rep. Jamie Raskin, who led the House managers prosecuting the case, asked, “Is there any political leader in this room who believes that if he is ever allowed by the Senate to get back into the Oval Office, Donald Trump would stop inciting violence to get his way?”
After the roughly 12 hours of presentation by the managers to establish what had happened leading up to and on Jan. 6, when the former president’s supporters overran the Capitol building in a murderous riot, Raskin was steering the discussion of the stakes of the trial towards the future.
“Would you bet the lives of more police officers on that?” he asked. “Would you bet the future of your democracy on that?”
His colleague Rep. Ted Lieu, was also looking ahead, not to a Trump victory, but simply to a campaign. “I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose. Because he can do this again.”
This was among the reasons they were arguing Trump should be prevented from ever holding office again — not just to hold him accountable for the insurrection they argue he incited, but to keep him from becoming a repeat offender.
Throughout the trial, observers have fixated on predicting the future — but they weren’t looking so far ahead. If you turned on cable news or read most reports, what you’d see alongside every quotation from the trial was a handicapping of the odds of conviction. To find him guilty, the Senate requires a two-thirds majority, which means 17 Republicans would need to vote to convict. The consensus — bolstered by hallway interviews with Republican senators — is that it’s not very likely.
Everyone seems to want to project a winner while the game is still underway. But it’s worth taking in the trial argument, regardless of the eventual verdict.
The case presented against Trump on the charge of “incitement of insurrection” is compelling. It is damning. And it highlights an urgent concern for anyone who cares about American democracy.
The presentation was riveting, more like a multimedia thriller tale than a drab constitutional law lecture. It was a crime drama played out in video, photos, audio clips and highlighted text that was full of violence, suspense, tears, fear and anger.
The House managers argued that for much of his term, Trump had indulged and encouraged violence among his supporters, and that for much of a year, he focused his supporters on a “big lie” — that the election was being stolen and their action was required to protect the country. The managers showed how he took extraordinary measures to try to overturn an election he had lost, and that when all else failed, he summoned his supporters to Washington specifically to act on the day and time when the vote against him was to be certified in Congress. They showed how he helped plan key elements of the rally himself, including the march to the Capitol. Then, on the day, he sent those supporters to the Capitol, with instructions to “fight like hell.”
The presentation showed convincingly that the rioters understood themselves to be acting on the orders of the president as they stalked the Capitol trying to stop the vote certification — and threatening to kill vice-president Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others.
This violence, the House managers argued again and again, was not only foreseeable but actually predicted by news outlets and security officials. They said that any claim Trump couldn’t have anticipated it is ridiculous.
And they pointed out that for hours after it began, Trump neither condemned the violence nor asked his supporters to stop. Even at the end of the day, his message — “Remember this day forever!” — seemed to celebrate the patriotism of the insurrectionists and congratulate them.
That particular message was cited again and again. “This is a day that will live in disgrace in American history,” Raskin said.
The prosecutors were making their arguments to more than one jury. There were, of course, the senators in the room, who will ultimately vote on a verdict.
But Raskin and his colleagues were also speaking directly to the American people watching at home, who will eventually render a verdict on the Republican senators and their response to Trump’s leadership. With their votes, those senators will show whether they continue to embrace Trump and those of his followers who would inflict this kind of violence. There’s plenty of speculation that those senators are afraid of provoking the part of their party’s base that Trump has inflamed — not just afraid of losing their votes, but afraid for their lives. If that fear influences their votes, the insurrection will indeed have succeeded, at least in part.
And there’s one other jury: that of future historians, for whom the House managers are compiling a record of what happened, and why, and how, and who was to blame.
History will remember Jan 6. 2021, as Trump said people should, and it will remember the trial that followed.
The unanswered question is whether it will look at this trial as the end of a troubling chapter of Trump-inspired political violence, or as a missed opportunity to stop more years of antidemocratic violence to come.