Trump Is Acquitted Again

The United States Senate on Saturday voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of inciting the January 6 rampage at the U.S. Capitol, bringing his dramatic and historic second impeachment trial to a close. 

Under the watch of National Guard troops still patrolling the Capitol, the Senate rejected the charge of “incitement of insurrection,” by falling short of the two-thirds majority (67 votes) needed to convict the former president. The vote was 57-43 in favor of conviction. 

Seven Republicans broke with their party and joined all 48 Democrats and the two Independents who caucus with Democrats in voting to convict Trump. That’s the largest number of senators who have ever voted to convict a president from their own political party. 

At the close of the trial, many Republican senators said the House managers—members of the House of Representatives who served as the prosecution—didn’t prove that Trump was at fault for the violence at the Capitol. Republicans also cited constitutional reasons for their acquittal, arguing that a president can’t be subject to impeachment once he’s already out of office.

“The House managers’ burden in this trial was to prove first, that the Senate should exercise its impeachment jurisdiction in a case against a former president,” said Mike Lee, a Republican Senator from Utah, “and second, that he committed the high crime of inciting an insurrection. The House managers did not clear either hurdle.” 

Other Republicans, however, said that although they couldn’t vote to convict for constitutional reasons, they believed Trump was responsible for the insurrection. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed these views in a speech shortly after voting to acquit. 

“There is no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”

Democratic leaders decried the Senate’s vote to acquit Trump. They accused Republicans who condemned Trump’s actions while voting to acquit him for Constitutional reasons of trying to have it both ways. 

“January 6th will live as a day of infamy in the history of the United States of America,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “The failure to convict Donald Trump will live as a vote of infamy in the history of the United States Senate.”

The impeachment trial was the first in U.S. history of a former president. Trump is also the first U.S. president to face two impeachment trials. The last one was in 2020, when the Senate acquitted him of pressuring a foreign government to help him win the 2020 presidential election.

The trial in the Senate this time came after the House of Representatives impeached Trump in January. The House charged him with inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government by sowing false claims about election fraud and encouraging his supporters to try to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory. Ten Republicans joined all 222 Democrats in the House to vote for impeachment.

The incident at the center of the impeachment trial occurred on January 6. That day, a joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the results of the November presidential election. Trump held a rally for his supporters that morning in front of the White House. After attending Trump’s speech, rioters made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and ransacked the building. One Capitol Police officer was killed and dozens of other officers were injured. Four other people died, including one of the rioters, who was shot by police inside the Capitol. Lawmakers who were in their chambers and in the process of certifying the election results were forced to evacuate and take shelter, before returning hours later to confirm Biden’s victory.

During the Senate trial, which began on February 9, the House managers argued that Trump’s lies about the election being stolen from him and calls for his supporters to “fight like hell” had directly led to the riot and endangered the heart of American democracy. As the 100 members of the Senate—who served as the trial jury—looked on, the House managers laid out their case, using chilling video footage that showed the mob violently pushing past the police barricades, smashing windows and destroying Capitol property, and brutalizing police officers. 

The footage also showed near-miss moments, such as Vice President Mike Pence—whom Trump had vilified for not trying to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory—and members of Congress coming steps away from being confronted by the mob. The House managers also argued that Trump disregarded pleas from lawmakers, including fellow Republicans, to more explicitly call on the rioters to stop the attack.

Lawyers providing Trump’s defense called the impeachment politically motivated. They argued that Trump didn’t encourage violence at the Capitol and that the rioters who stormed the building were acting on their own, not at the direction of the president. They also said Trump’s statements before the riot were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and that they were “ordinary political rhetoric” common among politicians, including Democrats. 

“The reality is, Mr. Trump was not in any way, shape or form instructing these people to fight or to use physical violence,” Michael T. van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers, said during the trial. 

During the vote on Saturday, Trump released a statement denouncing the trial as “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.” He promised supporters that he would return to the political stage.

However, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the seven Republicans who crossed party lines and voted to convict Trump, said in a statement that she believes that Trump’s actions “were an impeachable offense.”

“If months of lies, organizing a rally of supporters in an effort to thwart the work of Congress, encouraging a crowd to march on the Capitol, and then taking no meaningful action to stop the violence once it began is not worthy of impeachment, conviction and disqualification,” she said, “I cannot imagine what is.”

For many other Republicans, though, the trial came down to the question of whether an official could be tried for impeachment in the first place after he’s already out of office. Trump’s lawyers said that doing so was unconstitutional and pointless—arguing that the Constitution requires convicted officeholders to be removed from power and Trump’s term already ended on January 20. 

Democratic leaders argued that the Constitution doesn’t prevent an impeachment trial from taking place after someone is out of office. They said that not going through with the trial would send a message to future presidents that they essentially have free rein to abuse their power in the final days of their term—and they warned that Trump could try to stir up violence in the future. If Trump had been convicted, the Senate could have sought to bar him from holding federal office in the future with a simple majority vote.

Democrats also pointed out that Trump was impeached on January 13, when he was still president, but that McConnell, who was the Senate majority leader at the time, decided not to reconvene the Senate, which wasn’t in session, guaranteeing that the trial wouldn’t be completed before Trump’s term ended. 

Democrats hoped that by showing the shocking footage of the rioters violently breaching the Capitol they could win in the court of public opinion even if they failed to win a conviction in the Senate. However, it remains to be seen how politically damaging the trial will be for Trump and his legacy in the eyes of the public. Going into the trial, the country was deeply divided over his culpability for the riot. In a CBS News/YouGov poll released last Tuesday, 88 percent of Democrats thought Trump encouraged violence at the Capitol compared with 21 percent of Republicans. 

Many political experts say the relatively small number of Republicans who voted to convict confirms that Trump remains the head of the Republican Party and will likely retain a strong grip over the party for years to come. However, he could still face other congressional or legal challenges related to his attempts to get election officials to overturn the results and to the Capitol takeover.

Now that the Senate trial is over, lawmakers in both parties say they’re eager to turn their primary attention to providing relief to the millions of Americans affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic collapse it has caused. Some political experts think that if they can successfully pass pandemic-relief legislation, they might be able to help bring the country together.

“I think it would be in both parties’ self-interest to move forward,” says Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University in Texas. “We just watched days of a deep divide being showcased on national television, so any attempt at unity would be welcome.”

With reporting by The New York Times.