Trial and terror

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All pundit eyes have been fastened on the likely outcome of this week’s Senate impeachment trial, seeking to hold former President Trump accountable for his role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But the likely foregone conclusion of a verdict aside—we know from a January procedural vote that the Senate GOP caucus won’t deliver the two-thirds majority required for a conviction—the real political actors on trial here are Trump’s accessories before, during, and after the fact: the leadership cohort of the Republican Party. As TNR staff writer Walter Shapiro observes, “We are watching an entire political party on trial, just one month after the failed putsch at the Capitol.”

And thanks to the straightforward character of the House managers’ case, which briskly dispensed with the GOP’s Trump-exonerating alibi of first resort—the bogus notion that a former president can’t be impeached and tried for crimes committed during his term—the choice facing the Senate Republicans’ quisling majority is a stark one. “Will you side with Mike Pence, the Capitol Police, and Congress itself,” Shapiro writes, “or with Donald J. Trump?”

There is no middle ground or split-the-difference option, even though most Republicans are desperate to find one. Try as they might, GOP senators can’t take refuge in such familiar Trump-era defenses as, “What tweet? I don’t know anything about it.”... As a result, GOP senators should no longer be able to use the excuse that the Constitution bars them from convicting Trump because he has been exiled to Mar-a-Lago.

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The consequences of the GOP’s undeviating alignment with Trump are dire, Shapiro notes. What this second trial of Trump underlines in no uncertain terms is the utter disregard most Republican senators show for their oath to uphold the Constitution. They’re fully prepared to meet a massively orchestrated assault on a free and fair election, and a violent bid to bring about an authoritarian coup, with a collective shrug. Even for a long-supine GOP, this is a stunning development unlikely to fare well in the annals of history. “In truth, citizens of Paris displayed more courage in risking the guillotine than Republican senators do in risking a Trump-backed primary challenge or being occasionally shunned at the country club,” Shapiro writes.

Indeed, the party is explicitly aligning itself with the forces that erected a gallows on the grounds of the Capitol, presumably to lynch Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other Trump-designated villains of his Twitter-taunting reign of terror. And this sets up a long-term quandary for any party chieftain—such as GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—trying to navigate in the general direction of a post-Trump future:

It would be fascinating to know the thoughts that were going through … McConnell’s cynical brain as he watched the Democratic presentation in his standard tight-lipped fashion. What may resonate with McConnell is not principle (good luck ever finding that in his mental makeup) but pure political self-interest. The Senate minority leader can probably picture super-PAC dollars flying out the window as corporate America shuns a Republican Party that has become an authoritarian cult. McConnell is also smart enough to know that the GOP will never win back the suburban, college-educated voters who opted for Joe Biden if it chooses to be the party that is proud of the Proud Boys.

Shapiro, a veteran observer of modern politics, sees this final embrace of Trumpism as a de facto death sentence for the party that has spent the past two months glorying Big Lie fantasies of permanent authoritarian rule. “In the end,” he writes, “what we will likely witness with the impeachment vote is the death spasm of the Republican Party and the end of America’s run as a two-party democracy.”

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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