Fight, fight, fight: Trump lawyers subject
senators to repetitive strain
The impeachment trial saw its most bizarre turn yet as
the ex-president’s lawyers deployed whataboutism in its purest form
On Friday, Trump’s lawyers, including Michael van der
Veen, left, provided talking points for rightwing media, straws for Republican
consciences to clutch at and a boost for Trump’s spirits.
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Fri 12 Feb
2021 22.40 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/12/trump-impeachment-lawyers-fight-video-whataboutism
Fight,
fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. The first rule
of Fight Club is just keep bashing your audience with the same word ad nauseam.
A video in
which Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians uttered the
word “fight” 238 times, according to a count by the MSNBC TV network, was the
most bizarre turn yet at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.
The montage
was played by Trump lawyer David Schoen on Friday in an attempt to demonstrate
that such language is common in today’s political discourse, and protected by
the first amendment to the constitution, so Trump’s call for his supporters to
“fight like hell” should not be blamed for the insurrection at the US Capitol.
“You didn’t
do anything wrong,” Schoen told senators, many of whom had seen themselves on
TV screens inside the chamber. “It’s a word people use, but please stop the
hypocrisy.”
He was not
wrong that it’s a word people use. Hillary Clinton, who was seen in the video,
made Fight Song the theme of her ill-starred 2016 campaign against Trump. The
world champion “fighter” is surely Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sprinkles the
word in interviews liberally and wrote a book called This Fight is Our Fight.
But what
Schoen was also doing was displaying whataboutism in its purest form – a wonder
to behold, like a flawless diamond or pristine snow.
Whataboutism
is a dodge often seen in rightwing media. If allegations are made against
Trump’s connections in Russia, respond: what about Clinton’s emails? If Trump’s
family are accused of exploiting their position, respond: what about Joe
Biden’s son Hunter? If white supremacists are running riot, respond: what about
antifa? It doesn’t matter if the equivalence is false because it’s all about
attacking the opponent in order to muddy the waters.
The Trump
legal team’s relentless “fight” video was a case in point. Some of the
Democrats were quoted out of context due to selective editing. We heard Biden,
for example, say “never, never, never give up this fight” but did not hear the
full quotation: “I looked into the eyes of people who survived school
shootings, and I made each of them a promise: I will never, never, never give
up this fight.”
(Speaking
of hypocrisy, Schoen accused the impeachment managers of “manipulating video”
during his presentation.)
Still, the
Trump defence cleared the very low bar set by their Laurel-and-Hardy opening on
Tuesday
In
addition, these Democrats were urging supporters to fight for a political
cause. Trump was urging supporters to fight against democracy: his cause was
based on the mendacious claim of a stolen election. And as the impeachment
managers laid out on Thursday, he had spent years deploying incendiary rhetoric
and demonising opponents.
Still, the
Trump defence cleared the very low bar set by their opening Laurel-and-Hardy
gambit on Tuesday. On Friday they provided talking points for rightwing media,
straws for Republican consciences to clutch at and a boost for Trump’s spirits
after some very grim days.
It was not
hard to imagine the ex-president at Mar-a-Lago, his luxury estate in Florida,
nodding in approval as lawyer Michael van der Veen kicked off in Trumpian
style: “The article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and
blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance. This appalling abuse of
the constitution only further divides our nation when we should be trying to
come together.”
Van der
Veen even described it as a “politically motivated witch-hunt”, a phrase the
former president has used even more often than Warren has uttered “fight”.
In a first
salvo of whataboutism, Van der Veen played video clips of Jamie Raskin, the
lead impeachment manager, and other Democrats objecting to Trump’s victory in
the electoral college in 2016. “To litigate questions of election integrity
within the system is not incitement to insurrection,” he argued. “It is the
democratic system working as founders and lawmakers have designed.”
The lawyer
then falsely asserted that one of the first people arrested after the
insurrection was a leader of antifa, when that individual denies any such
affiliation and indeed antifa is a broad spectrum of far-left, anti-fascist
groups, and not an organisation with a leader.
He claimed
that Democrats had encouraged “mob violence” during the Trump presidency and
played clips accompanied by ominous music.
The
impeachment is “about Democrats trying to disqualify their political
opposition”, he said, accuse them of indulging “constitutional cancel culture”
– another phrase sure to play well on Fox News, Newsmax and the One America
News Network.
Later,
lawyer Bruce Castor argued that the attack on the Capitol was pre-planned –
pipe bombs were planted a day earlier, for example – and so Trump’s fiery
speech on 6 January could not have been the cause. However, the president had
tweeted in December that the rally “will be wild”, and the prosecutors have
shown Trump spent months laying the groundwork.
Castor also
misnamed the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, referring instead
to the NFL star Ben Roethlisberger, and quibbled over the definition of
“insurrection” . After two and a half hours, the defence case rested. They had
put up a fight, of sorts, but it was unlikely to be remembered alongside
Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches”.
Michael
Beschloss, a presidential historian, tweeted drily: “Of all impeachment defense
speeches in American history, Castor’s was the most recent.”
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