Trump trial looms over Biden’s 100-day agenda
SENATE CONVICTION A REAL POSSIBILITY POST-JANUARY 20
US President-elect Joe Biden’s ambitious first 100 days agenda is already overshadowed by the looming Senate trial of his soon-to-be predecessor Donald Trump.
The pandemic continues to hit new peaks, the vaccination programme is stumbling, and there are fears that the economic recovery from the cratering of 2020 could backslide.
Biden, who will be sworn in on January 20, plans to tackle all of this at the same time, putting aside one of the darkest periods in American history.
But the new president will also have to contend with the almost evenly split Senate holding an impeachment trial.
Trump was impeached on Wednesday for inciting insurrection, when he egged on supporters to march against Congress on January 6. The mob rampaged through the Capitol building, leaving five dead.
What happens next?
In the Democrats’ dream scenario, the Senate would have convened in emergency session to conduct a lightening trial before January 20, forcing Trump to step down. But the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said there wasn’t time and the rush would be unfair to the president.
As of January 20, McConnell will lose his leadership, ceding to Democrat Chuck Schumer, who is vowing to press ahead.
However, McConnell’s statement that he is open-minded on Trump’s guilt raises the possibility that Trump could still end up being convicted.
If this happened, a second simple majority vote would be enough to bar the real estate tycoon from trying to come back as president in 2024.
In his first remarks since the impeachment, Biden issued a carefully worded plea late Wednesday for the Senate to help him manage the juggling act.
“I hope that the Senate leadership will find a way to deal with their Constitutional responsibilities on impeachment while also working on the other urgent business of this nation,” Biden said.
Not since the dark days of the Civil War and its aftermath has Washington seen a day quite like Wednesday. In a Capitol bristling with heavily armed soldiers and newly installed metal detectors, with the physical wreckage of last week’s siege cleaned up, but the emotional and political wreckage still on display, the president of the US was impeached for trying to topple American democracy.
Somehow, it felt like the preordained coda of a presidency that repeatedly pressed all limits and frayed the bonds of the body politic. With less than a week to go, Trump’s term is climaxing in violence and recrimination at a time when the country has fractured deeply and lost a sense of itself. Notions of truth and reality have been atomised. Faith in the system has eroded. Anger is the one common ground.
As if it were not enough that Trump became the only president impeached twice or that lawmakers were trying to remove him with days left in his term, Washington devolved into a miasma of suspicion and conflict.
A Democratic member of Congress accused Republican colleagues of helping the mob scout the building in advance. Some Republican members sidestepped magnetometers intended to keep guns off the House floor or kept going even after setting them off.
Historians left speechless
All of which was taking place against the backdrop of a pandemic that, while attention has drifted away, has grown catastrophically worse in the closing weeks of Trump’s presidency.
Historians have struggled to define this moment. They compare it with other periods of enormous challenge like the Great Depression, Second World War, the Civil War, the McCarthy era and Watergate. They recall the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate and the operation to sneak Abraham Lincoln into Washington for his inauguration for fear of an attack.
“I wish I could give you a wise analogy, but I honestly don’t think anything quite like this has happened before,” said Geoffrey Ward, one of the nation’s most venerable historians. “If you’d told me that a president of the United States would have encouraged a delusional mob to march on our Capitol howling for blood, I would have said you were deluded.”
If you’d told me that a US president would have encouraged a delusional mob to march on our Capitol howling for blood, I would have said you were deluded.”
Geoffrey Ward | Prominent US historian
As if it were not enough that Trump became the only president impeached twice or that lawmakers were trying to remove him with days left in his term, Washington devolved into a miasma of suspicion and conflict.
‘Extraordinary moment’
Jay Winik, a prominent chronicler of the Civil War and other periods of strife, likewise said there was no exact analogue. “This is an extraordinary moment, virtually unparalleled in history,” he said. “It’s hard to find another time when the glue that holds us together was coming apart the way it is now.”
“The historical moment when we were a model is basically over,” said Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian of authoritarianism. “We now have to earn our credibility again, which might not be such a bad thing.”
At the Capitol on Wednesday, the scene evoked memories of Baghdad’s Green Zone during the Iraq War. Troops were bivouacked in the Capitol for the first time since the Confederates threatened to march across the Potomac.
Abandoned by loyalists
Unlike Trump’s first impeachment for pressuring Ukraine to help tarnish Democrats, some in his party abandoned him this time. In the end, 10 House Republicans joined every Democrat to approve the sole article of impeachment, led by Liz Cheney of Wyoming,
the third-ranking Republican. It was a testament to how much the party has changed under Trump that the Cheney family, once considered ideological provocateurs themselves, emerged in this moment as defenders of traditional Republicanism.
Some took a nuanced line
Other Republicans sought to draw a more nuanced line, agreeing that Trump bore responsibility for inciting the mob while maintaining that it either did not amount to an impeachable offence or that it was unwise, unnecessary and divisive to pursue just days before President-elect Joe Biden takes the oath of office.
“That doesn’t mean the president is free from fault,” Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican minority leader and one of Trump’s most stalwart allies, said. “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”
Lessons for Republicans
Still, the fealty that so many House Republicans demonstrated for a president who lost reelection and has done so much to damage their own party was striking.
“If the overwhelming majority of the elected representatives to one of the two American parties cannot reject the hold of a demagogue even after he overtly schemed to reverse an election and in doing so threatened their very lives, well, we have a long road ahead,” said Frank Bowman, an impeachment scholar at the University of Missouri School of Law.