Only the truth will keep Trump away
WASHINGTON — And now he’s really gone, acquitted under the rules yet condemned by the facts, nursing his grievances and planning his comeback from isolation at Mar-a-Lago. For the country, the question is how to ensure that Donald Trump remains there while the nation tries to recover from the damage he wrought.
Perhaps it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a character so memorably theatrical in his two-faced behavior that his dialogue might have been penned by Charles Dickens, who best summarized the evidence: “Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty … This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
The acquittal verdict, bizarre after all the damning facts, was a near-certainty even before arguments were heard, when 44 Republican senators voted against proceeding with the trial, most of them claiming that it was unconstitutional to try a former president. I disagree with that judgment, but I can understand (barely) the argument that convicting a former president might, as McConnell put it, mean “empowering Congress to ban any private citizen from federal office.”
By Saturday, it was time to call the question: The Democrats were wise not to extend the proceedings by calling witnesses. That would have opened a door through which would have entered more division and discord, but almost certainly no more Republican votes for conviction. It was time for the Senate to return to the urgent business of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
The trial is over, but the country needs a fuller record of what happened during the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, including the most painful details. Why was intelligence so thin? What coordination was there between Trump’s inner circle and the rally organizers? Did members of Congress or the Capitol Police abet the attackers, knowingly or unintentionally? Was the military so determined to avoid the overreaction of June 1, when peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square were forcefully dispersed, that it underreacted? What did Trump supporters hope would happen next, if the count of electoral college votes was stopped and the election result was in limbo?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has endorsed the call for an independent, bipartisan commission that can investigate precisely what happened and build a platform of facts on which the country can unite and move on. That’s the best protection against a recrudescence of Trump.
In the Republicans’ generally lame defense of Trump, I heard two points that come up nearly every time I talk with his supporters. Both involve claims that Democrats have been hypocritical. Though I disagree, Democrats should have honest answers ready. Not all of Trump’s 74 million voters believe the Democrats and the media are biased, but many do.
The first grievance is that Democrats treated Trump as an illegitimate president from the moment he took office. As Trump’s defense counsel Michael van der Veen put it in his closing argument, “Democrats were obsessed with impeaching Mr. Trump from the very beginning of his term,” and Trump’s lawyers had video clips from 2017, 2018 and 2019 to make their point. In Trump’s telling, he faced a “witch hunt.”
That’s mostly nonsense. Trump brought ruin on himself with his reckless and divisive actions. But it’s true that some Democrats favored “resistance” after Election Day 2016; they opposed treating Trump as a legitimate elected president and insisted that crediting any Trump achievements was “normalizing” him. Trump supporters pointed to this relatively mild resistance and accused Democrats of refusing to accept the 2016 election results — and turned that into an argument for the sedition that culminated on Jan. 6.
The second grievance I hear repeatedly from Trump supporters is that Democrats are hypocrites because they condemn mob violence when it’s from the right, but not the left. Again, to quote van der Veen’s overheated summary, Democrats “repeatedly made comments that provided moral comfort to mobs attacking police officers.”
I don’t find many comments by leading Democrats that actually back up this charge. But there are stray sound bites. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan shouldn’t have said on June 11 that armed protesters occupying downtown Seattle had created a “block party atmosphere” that could foretell a “summer of love.” Whatever the excesses of federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Oregon, Pelosi shouldn’t have called them “storm troopers” on July 17.
Democrats need to be emphatic and impartial in condemning political violence, whatever causes it seeks to advance. The peaceful racial justice protests that followed the killing of George Floyd were a national inspiration; the street violence that sometimes accompanied the protests was wrong. If Democrats fail to make this distinction clearly, they open the door to Trump’s false claim that the “other side” condones violence by its supporters.
A process of reconciliation won’t work without reciprocal honesty. Trump tried to torch our country, as McConnell said and many other Republicans seem to understand. Responsible people need to help put out the fire. Truth is the best way to douse the flames and cool the embers.