What We Learned Impeachment - Part 2
Make no mistake - he knew exactly what he was doing. For me, that is the overriding lesson of Impeachment Part 2.
For weeks I had been questioning my knee-jerk liberal view that, of course, Trump should be convicted. Of course, he incited the riot. But in the back of my mind, some classroom training or First Amendment talk around the family dinner table kicked in. (Blame my mother) Trump did not explicitly call for a riot. He actually mentioned peaceful protest in his meandering, unhinged talk at the Ellipse behind the White House on Jan. 6.
And that's where I come down. If the Impeachment charge was that Trump incited the riot that day, there is an argument to be made that he was not guilty. It was an argument his terrible lawyers on the Senate floor made with all the incompetence and bitterness they could muster.
What is surely impeachable, and what should have convicted him, is the totality of his behavior during the election. It wasn't what he did on one day. It was his actions over months and months.
He committed high crimes and misdemeanors by trying to overturn the election and subvert democracy through intimidation, misinformation, violence, and misuse of the office.
For me, it is the phone call to the elections official in Georgia urging him to "find" more votes to swing that state to Trump's favor that, in some ways, is worse than the speech. Thank goodness the official taped the call.
Trump really did want to overturn the election. The harder part we must face is that in our comfort and our assumption that democracy would just be there to save us, we elected a criminal who never cared about the democracy - ever.
He wanted to stop the counting of the Electoral College votes so that Vice President Mike Pence would force the election to the House of Representatives.
Or as House Manager Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, told New Yorker Editor David Remnick:
"All of his concentration was on thwarting the count so that the Vice-President would be forced to say there's a need for a contingent election. That is what the President had in mind, and he came dangerously close to succeeding. And at that point, he could also have decried the chaos and declared martial law."
I hadn't understood that until I watched the trial.
Here's what else we learned at Impeachment Part 2:
It was important to do this. History is important. It's vital that most Americans now know that Trump is a crook who tried to steal the election. Even the Republicans who voted to acquit know this. Look at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's floor speech in which he assigns all the blame to Trump for the riot. McConnell voted to acquit in one of the great shape-shifting political acts of all time. But he fingered the criminal on national TV. We now have a growing, factual record of what really happened. And that record is a reminder of our failure as citizens to care about our democracy when we elected a person who cares about nothing.
Race is always there under the surface. Look no further than Trump's legal defenders - older white men pining for the days of "law and order" without protest, of a suburban America where people know their places. They became most animated when they decried the violence of Black Lives Matter protests as if they are somehow equal to a mob hunting for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after erecting a gallows outside the building. The lawyers could have been brothers in their white maleness and their faux outrage. It was hard to tell them apart.
We learned about impeachment. The impeachment and Senate trial forced us to listen more. Some of us re-read the Constitution's provisions for impeachment. We talked about it on TV and in the US House and US Senate. We conducted a civics lesson for ourselves. We exercised the democracy muscle. We created a record for the next time and for the next generation. I hope it sticks.
We learned the terrible toll. For the law and order crowd, it wasn't just a dead Capitol Police officer. One police officer lost an eye. Another lost fingers. One was shocked so many times with a tazer gun that he suffered a heart attack. More than 150 DC and Capitol police were injured. Two others committed suicide. We watched one officer being tortured by the mob begging for his life.
If you haven't already watched the 13-minute video montage that Democrats presented at the Impeachment trial, you should. Here it is.
We learned that Americans can do amazing things. Rep. Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, presented the case weeks after the suicide of his son.
We learned that the system doesn't always create courage. Madison designed it to promote self-interest, thinking that a battle of ideas would lead to better outcomes. That system, better than most, means senators will act in their political self-interest, even when they come inches from being kidnapped or killed. Again - watch the video.
We learned the Republican party is completely broken. To this day, Trump has not called Mike Pence to inquire about his experience, certainly not Capitol Hill staffers who hid for their lives behind locked doors. I rarely see Republicans, at the national and local level, recount the horror of the day or take responsibility for what happened. Again it is left to a Vermont Republican, Gov. Phil Scott, to condemn Trump for what happened.
In the end, this impeachment exercise was necessary because it reminded us of how the country works and how it can break down if we stop paying attention and stop caring. With Mitch McConnell's floor speech, we now have a historical record that Trump was responsible for an attempted coup, a take-over of the federal government - like Jefferson Davis or John Wilkes Booth.
He may not have incited it, but he caused it over four dreadful years. A gradual yet sudden act. I hope we learned something.
