NEWS
ANALYSIS
If Convicting Trump Is Out of Reach, Managers
Seek a Verdict From the Public and History
The House Democrats prosecuting former President
Donald J. Trump may not win the Senate trial, but they are using it to make the
searing images of havoc the inexpungible legacy of his presidency.
By Peter
Baker
Feb. 11,
2021
Updated
10:59 p.m. ET
As a day of
violence and mayhem at the Capitol slid into evening last month, with blood
shed, glass shattered and democracy besieged, President Donald J. Trump posted
a message on Twitter that seemed to celebrate the moment. “Remember this day
forever!” he urged.
The House
Democrats prosecuting him at his Senate impeachment trial barely a month later
hope to make sure everyone does.
With
conviction in a polarized Senate seemingly out of reach, the House managers, as
the prosecutors are known, are aiming their arguments at two other audiences
beyond the chamber: the American people whose decision to deny Mr. Trump a
second term was put at risk and the historians who will one day render their
own judgments about the former president and his time in power.
Through the
expansive use of unsettling video footage showing both Mr. Trump’s words and
the brutal rampage that followed, the managers are using their moment in the
national spotlight to make the searing images of havoc the inexpungible legacy
of the Trump presidency. Rather than let the outrage subside, the managers are
seeking to ensure that Mr. Trump is held accountable even if he is acquitted in
the Senate.
“The
Democrats and House managers are playing to a different jury in this case than
in any previous impeachment trial of an American president,” said Ken Gormley,
the president of Duquesne University and the author of books on impeachment,
presidents and the Constitution. “Regardless of the outcome of the trial, the
first paragraph of historical accounts of the Trump presidency is likely” to
say that he incited a mob attack on Congress after refusing to accept the
results of an election.
If Mr.
Trump is not convicted, the managers want to ensure that he remains so
politically radioactive that he cannot be the same force he once was — if not
the pariah they think he ought to be, then at least a figure that many
mainstream Republicans and their corporate donors keep at arm’s length. In
effect, if the Senate will not vote to formally disqualify him from future
office, they want the public to do so.
If the
Senate does not convict Mr. Trump, the former president could be eligible to
run for public office once again. Public opinion surveys show that he remains
by far the most popular national figure in the Republican Party.
Senator
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of Mr. Trump’s more outspoken Republican critics,
touched on that on Wednesday after the House managers played a searing sequence
of never-before-seen images of the mob he inspired ransacking the Capitol.
Given what the country has now seen, she said the prospects for a Trump
comeback campaign in 2024 appear vanishingly thin.
“Frankly, I
don’t see how after the American public sees the whole story laid out here —
not just in one snippet on this day and another on that, but this whole
scenario that has been laid out before us — I don’t see how Donald Trump could
be re-elected to the presidency again,” Ms. Murkowski told reporters. “I just
don’t see that.”
Karl Rove,
the Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, said
the managers had made a “very persuasive” presentation. “Not clear they met the
legal definition of ‘incitement' and ‘insurrection,’ but he is effectively
tarnished for all time and incapable of running in 2024,” Mr. Rove said. “The
question is how much power to dominate the G.O.P. will have been drained away
by the time this is over.”
Mr. Trump’s
camp acknowledges that the prosecution has been effective, but portrays it as
an illegitimate smear borne of partisan animus. Jason Miller, a longtime
adviser and campaign spokesman for Mr. Trump, called the impeachment drive a
“vindictive way to try to beat him for future elections,” but one that he said
would not work given Mr. Trump’s enduring support with the Republican base.
“I think
the president is going to be involved in making sure we win back the House and
Senate in 2022,” Mr. Miller told Fox Business. “President Trump will stay
active. I think it’s going to take a little bit of rest and relaxation at
Mar-a-Lago, but we will see him right back at it shortly.”
The former
president’s legal team, which will begin its own arguments after the House
managers conclude theirs, dismissed the use of the video in the Senate trial as
an inflammatory tactic to blame Mr. Trump for the actions of others.
“It is
something that President Trump has condemned in no uncertain terms, the
terrible violence that went on there, so there’s not an issue about that,”
David I. Schoen, one of his lawyers, said on Fox News. “They’re just hoping to
drum up emotion and get their last shots in at President Trump.”
Jonathan
Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who testified against
impeachment the first time the House lodged charges of high crimes and
misdemeanors against Mr. Trump in 2019, said the managers this time were just
playing to the crowd rather than making a legal argument.
“The House
is presenting an emotionally charged but legally deficient case in terms of
conviction,” he said. “Indeed, much of the argument seems designed to enrage
rather than convict.”
The
videotapes, he added, are provocative but not probative. “It is like showing a
jury the remnants of a fire. It does not prove that the accused started the
fire.”
The
decision to impeach Mr. Trump a second time and put him on trial even after he
left office was always a dicey one for Democrats, some of whom were wary of
once again mounting a largely partisan effort that last year resulted in an
acquittal that only emboldened the president who declared himself vindicated.
Some Democrats like Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia argued that a bipartisan
censure resolution with Republican support would be a better outcome this time
around.
But after
drafting a measure declaring that the former president aided an insurrection in
a way that might disqualify him from running for office again under the 14th
Amendment, the senator found few takers on either side of the aisle —
Republicans balked at breaking with Mr. Trump and his fellow Democrats demanded
“impeachment or nothing,” as Mr. Kaine put it. So now the Democrats who
insisted on impeachment or nothing face the prospect of again failing to
convict Mr. Trump, making it more imperative for them to use the trial to
establish a different kind of verdict that will go beyond the vote itself.
The video
images played for senators this week seemed to be having an effect outside the
chamber. Twitter reinforced on Wednesday that it would never allow its most
famous former user back onto its platform after cutting him off from his 89
million followers for inciting violence. And The Wall Street Journal’s influential
conservative editorial page said that Mr. Trump was permanently scarred.
“Now his
legacy will be forever stained by this violence, and by his betrayal of his
supporters in refusing to tell them the truth,” the editorial said. “Whatever
the result of the impeachment trial, Republicans should remember the betrayal
if Mr. Trump decides to run again in 2024.”
The
managers were also looking past 2024 to the pages of history. When it comes
time to record this era, they want scholars to focus first on the events of
recent weeks, branding Mr. Trump in the minds of future generations as a
dangerous demagogue responsible for a deadly assault on the citadel of
democracy.
“Quite
honestly, as a presidential historian, it was clear to me watching these events
unfold on Jan. 6 that the insurrection would be the defining moment of his
presidency,” said Kathryn Cramer Brownell, a history professor at Purdue
University. “It clearly seemed a culmination of the ways in which Trump
actively worked to advance misinformation, undermine the democratic process and
institutions and endorse violence during his presidency.”
That, of
course, was not the story line Mr. Trump was promoting as he spent weeks
falsely claiming that the election was stolen from him and encouraged supporters
to travel to Washington on Jan. 6 to help him find a way to cling to power.
He
portrayed himself as an aggrieved victim of a vast conspiracy that involved not
just Democrats but Republicans as well, not to mention judges, election
officials, the news media, the Cubans and Venezuelans and voting machine
companies.
“History
will remember,” Mr. Trump declared in a tweet about 10 days before the riot.
That it will, and the trial this week will go a long way toward deciding what
those memories will be.
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