Yeah, I should’ve known that an impeachment seven days after the president incites an insurrection is as fast as this government is ever gonna get.
Still, given that the process didn’t start until after the weekend was over, the second impeachment of Donald Trump did conclude remarkably fast, in less than 24 hours, after it officially started. It actually had ten Republicans on board, which is the most defections from the defendant’s party in any presidential impeachment case. And since there have only been four impeachments of a president in American history, and Trump has made history by being impeached twice, he has also attained an achievement in having half of them all by himself.
Not like it matters that much, since Mitch McConnell (in direct contrast to his Operation Warp Speed-like maneuvering to fill Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat) is not convening the Senate until at least January 19, so while it is legal to impeach a president after he has left office, those of us who think Trump should get kicked out and Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Collect $250,000 are going to be disappointed. Actually disappointment isn’t the issue, it’s how much damage Putin’s little boy can still do in six days.
“Mr. President, you’ve just become the first president to be impeached twice after inciting insurrection! What are you going to do NEXT?”
“I’m gonna start a nuclear war, so I can go for the hat trick!”
In a certain respect it’s actually better for the prosecution (Democrats) that the Senate trial proceed after the government changes hands, because with the Senate tied, a Democratic Vice President (Kamala Harris) as legal head of the Senate, gives that party the majority, meaning the prosecution case isn’t going to have the legs cut out from under it right at the get-go the way McConnell did in the last impeachment. (But on the bright side, Republicans, it looks like the president gets impeached every January from now on.) On the other hand, you still need 67 Senators to convict, meaning 17 Republicans (or 18, if Democrat Joe Manchin wants to uphold his conservative reputation). And the likelihood is against that, precisely because the stakes are that conviction would lead to a second vote to bar the former president from any future Federal office (which requires only a simple majority) the internal Republican Party support for Trump in both his 2020 challenge and a future 2024 campaign is still a majority. It’s also assumed that if Trump is no longer in the picture that Republicans will see less need to act so boldly against him. The problem with that “let’s just move on” posture is precisely that Trump will never give up the spotlight willingly, and the Party has brought itself to this crossroads precisely because they would not confront him. The fact that some Republicans (including McConnell and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski) are willing to even entertain the idea of convicting him on that basis indicates that they’re foresighted enough to get him out of the picture. But ultimately this Senate trial, like the last one, is less the Democratic Party pressing its already known opinion on Trump and more the Republican Party decision as to whether it wishes to continue being ruled by him, even as the costs start to outweigh the benefits.
The prosecution at least is going to be pretty straightforward based on the article of impeachment: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/13/incitement-of-insurrection-impeachment-resolution-full-text “On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.”
Lest one think this is taken out of context, here is the text of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech, all the rambling and interrupting chants included: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6 Notably he mentions how “They’ll knock out Lincoln too, by the way. They’ve been taking his statue down, but then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years and everything stopped.” But I’m sure the part Trump would want emphasized is “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Never mind that in Trumpworld, “peaceful protest” is code for “all these darkies get to march in the streets without masks on, so why can’t we?”
The legal question then is, is Trump legally liable if he didn’t specifically tell people to hunt the Vice President and Congress?
There was a completely unrelated question on Quora, I can’t find it now, but it was basically “what is a great detail in a movie scene?” And one person answered with one of the courtroom scenes in A Few Good Men, where Cruise’s defense attorney questions a corporal, the prosecutor (Kevin Bacon) comes up with a line of argument to undermine Cruise’s assertion, and Cruise comes back up with another line of questioning that proves his point. And as they take the witness off the stand, Cruise walks back to his desk and the camera shows Bacon nodding in rueful admiration of Cruise’s skill. That was considered to be an example of good character detail.
But I bring up that particular scene because of the specific context and dialogue.
In A Few Good Men, two Marines are up for court-martial due to the death of a recruit at Guantanamo Bay. Lieutenant Kaffee, Cruise’s character, has a Corporal Barnes from the unit on the stand (played by Noah Wyle) and goes into several questions asking him to detail a “Code Red”, which is basically a hazing process designed to break down a Marine who seems to be screwing up. The prosecutor, Captain Ross, gets up and gives the corporal the Marine outline for recruit training and asks him to detail the regulation involving the use of Code Red. He can’t. He then picks up the manual for the garrison at Guantanamo Bay and asks the corporal where the use of Code Red is. The corporal just says that “Code Red” is a term for an informal process, meaning it’s off the books. Ross’ point is that the defense can’t bring up a process that’s not in regulations as though the defendants were giving orders. But as he walks back, Kaffee gets up, snatches the book out of Ross’ hand and asks the corporal to describe where in the Guantanamo manual he would find the mess hall. And Barnes says he can’t. And Kaffee asks if he never had a meal on the base then, and Barnes says of course he did. So Kaffee asks, “I don’t understand, how would you know where the mess hall is, if it’s not in this book?” And Corporal Barnes just says, “Well I guess I just followed the crowd at chowtime, sir.”
You don’t need to know what the specific order is. You just follow the crowd at chowtime.
This goes with the often-mentioned similarity between Trump and the New York mob, specifically the “Teflon Don”, John Gotti, who craved the spotlight more than most Mafia bosses. A reporter who covered the Mob confirmed that the similarity is somewhat intentional: “It’s important to remember that Trump learned his ABCs for success from Roy Cohn, who was mixed up in the Mafia, defended them, and mentored Trump exactly how to succeed in life. “Always be aggressive, take no prisoners …”
“Trump resembles John Gotti. Most mob bosses were quiet, stayed in the shadows, didn’t want any kind of publicity or exposure. All Gotti wanted was the spotlight, all the time. That bolstered his ego, made him feel important. …Gotti would never say, “Hit that guy.” He’d just say, “Do me a favor, get rid of that stone in my shoe.” He would just say, “He’s a problem.” You never caught Gotti saying, “Let’s do a hit job on him,” but the understanding is clear to their acolytes. They know what the code words mean. … Just remember, Roy Cohn. He taught him his ABCs. He was a mentor. Trump was proud of it! Remember that line about, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The government works for him; he doesn’t work for the government.”
Not only that, there is legal precedent with the case in question. An article in Politico goes over the potential problems for Trump: “As a person with good lawyers and experience being investigated, Trump would undoubtedly claim these comments were nothing more than First-Amendment-protected political speech if he were charged with encouraging the mob to commit seditious conspiracy. But that might not help. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brandenberg v Ohio, found that the government can punish inflammatory speech when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
So did Trump know that his statements were “likely” to produce imminent lawless action?
Well, in his NOW BANNED Twitter account, Trump said “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” after also saying “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” For weeks, Trump supporters fed by his own mythologizing on Twitter and rumors spread amongst themselves and the Q Anon network, organized for a protest specifically timed for the Elector count on January 6, even before Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert and Senator Josh Hawley announced their intent to contest the slate. “The story of how the pied-pipers of Trumpism enlisted supporters illustrates the dramatic evolution of Trump’s voters into an effective and well-financed network of activist groups. The crowds that rally organizers recruited were joined in Washington by more radical right-wing groups that have increasingly become a fixture at pro-Trump demonstrations – including white supremacists and devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals. “
Trump also knew that the people doing his bidding in denying coronavirus strategies by state governments were willing to take violent extremes. A month before the election, Trump’s own FBI announced charges against 13 men in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, “and otherwise violently overthrow the state government.” Now most of the time it’s extremely easy for Trump to plead ignorance, but it stretches credibility for him to say he was unaware of what people say about him on social media, especially pro-Trump networks that repeat his opinions and support his position that opposition to his rule is illegal by definition.
It was that much harder for Trump to deny the potential for violence when he came to the outdoor podium on January 6 and saw exactly how many people were outside ready to respond to what he had to say. I’m not sure if he would have seen the hanging scaffold that someone set up for Mike Pence. And while he did indeed say “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” he also used fascist bullyboy code language like “We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong” and “The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
So certainly there’s more legal basis for a criminal claim – both in the context of impeachment and outside it – than “you’re mean, and you’re haters, and you’re meanie haters, and you just want to take down the bestest most Americanest president we’ve had since Jesus.”
But as I keep saying: Not like it matters. Because in this government, the only way you can stop a malicious incompetent from doing this much damage as President is not to elect him in the first place, and that’s very difficult when the duopoly does even more than the Constitution to enforce a first-past-the-post election system, and that binary logic thus causes a huge plurality of America to program themselves into thinking that the only alternative to the Democratic Party is the designated official NotDemocrat party, even if that party endorses the most cuckooland nonsense, because you don’t want to be a DEMOCRAT, do you?? And because that self same election system causes all political functions in the Federal government to be apportioned between the two parties, and again, you’ve got that 2/3 requirement to convict on an impeachment, you’re most likely not going to get even 1/3 of the 50 Republicans required to convict their Leader, even knowing he started a brushfire without caring if they got burned. And that’s only partly because there’s a genuine (M)ob intimidation campaign against them. In other cases the identity fusion with Trump is just that strong, and even the more sensible people refuse to do anything constructive because that would be seen as surrendering to the Democrats.
This is why there are several reforms being proposed – such as creating DC and Puerto Rico as Democrat-friendly Senate bastions (giving statehood to DC would also mean they’re not waiting on Federal approval to restore order in the district), or severely reducing the lame-duck period so that sedition campaigns against a lawful election don’t have nearly as much time to brew.
These reforms are almost as unlikely to work as impeachment and removal of a president by the Senate, because even if they weren’t specifically intended to cripple one of the two parties, the Republicans will certainly perceive that intent. The only solution then would be the long-term process going on now, in which the Republicans continue to alienate the center of the country. But Democrats learned from 2020 that they can’t count on every race, especially in “red” states, going their way, and they have every reason to suspect that if the sitting president’s party (theirs) loses seats in the midterm, as they are expected to do in 2022, Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell will do exactly what he did to Obama after 2010 and hamstring Joe Biden as much as possible and use that as the pitch for why Republicans should retake the White House. And if Trump is not in prison, and still has an audience, there’s every reason to suspect he will get nominated again, and win the White House again, because certainly no one in his party is going to stop him.
Which is why, in terms of having a national audience, the strongest consequence of Trump’s little stunt on January 6 wasn’t yet another impeachment trial where his pet political party can enable him yet again. It was getting kicked off social media, especially Twitter.
Simply not having his media megaphone seems to have demoralized Trump to the point that he isn’t even trying to get his message out to the public, even though he has all the pre-Twitter methods that a president has historically had to communicate, including TV. Except he’s sort of alienated Fox News, too.
But while the Left has embraced Twitter’s decision in the short term, it’s inspired them to a lot of tut-tutting about the control that Twitter and other corporations have over social discourse. Even Jack Dorsey has admitted this is an issue.
I personally think the system is working, at least now that it’s finally reached the extreme. I don’t think that we should be passing more laws on these media platforms, and ironically the people who want to get rid of Section 230 (including Trump) are blanking out the point that removing the platforms’ shield of liability would have only created the result that has already happened, where the companies de-platformed Trump and his goons on their own, because he was becoming a liability to their reputations (such that their own employees were near revolt) and potentially a legal liability.
The solution would have been for Twitter and Facebook to enforce THEIR OWN RULES of conduct that they are perfectly willing to impose on Joe Schmo, but no, because Trump is a big time celebrity (and incidentally the president) every excretion from that upper colon he calls a brain is “newsworthy.” All I know is, if Trump had posted more than two topless photographs, Facebook would’ve banned him for life.
Supposedly others have pointed out that if someone in the private sector had said half the stuff that Trump said on Twitter as a matter of course, they would lose their job. And we can say this because a lot of Trump’s supporters got fired from their jobs after they joined the Beer Belly Putsch January 6 and bragged about it on social media. And yet both the traditionally anti-capitalist Left and the woke conservatives who suddenly realized that capitalists are dictating terms to politicians are unable to regulate a threat to public safety half as expediently as Twitter did by removing Donald Trump’s power within their medium, which he has less claim to than he has to the Republican Party.
This is part of why I’m libertarian, because I think that private business is often doing a better job of regulating itself and reading the consequences of its public actions than government regulators do. And if I were liberal, I would be concerned not just that reactionaries are trying to take over the government, and not just that private companies have so much control over public activity, but that private businesses, as mercenary and dysfunctional as they are, are still regulating themselves better than the public sector is able to regulate and reform itself.