Well, the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is over, and it ended with acquittal, same as the first. On paper, that statement could seem to justify allegations of a “witch hunt” against the former President, but the details of this second impeachment in particular paint a very different story. Let’s look at the numbers for the three impeachments before this latest one. In the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, in 1868, not a single Democrat voted in favor. In fact, two Republicans defected to join Democrats in voting against impeachment. In the subsequent Senate trial, every Democrat voted against conviction, joined by 10 Republicans. Clearly, bipartisanship was on the side of acquittal. Fast forward a century to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998, and we find an impeachment that was fairly bipartisan both ways. Five Democrats joined Republicans in favor of three out of four of the proposed articles, while each article received 5, 28, 12, and 81 Republicans, respectively, voting in opposition. This resulted in two of the articles failing. In the Senate, when the high price of removal was actually on the line, not a single Democrat voted to convict, joined by 10 and 5 Republicans on each respective article. In the end, bipartisanship was more on the side of acquittal.
Now we come to the first impeachment of President Trump, back in 2019 and early 2020. The House vote was almost entirely along party lines, though two Democrats joined Republicans in opposing impeachment (one of them, Jeff Van Drew, later joined the GOP) and one Republican-turned-Independent, Justin Amash, voted in favor. In the Senate, only one Senator broke party ranks: Mitt Romney, becoming the first Senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a President of his own party. In the end, bipartisanship did not seem to overtly favor one side or the other, as both parties seemed to be clearly acting in a partisan fashion.
Over the course of American history, impeachments have found more bipartisan opposition than support. Before the year 2021, a definitively bipartisan push for impeachment and removal had never been seen before (though, had Nixon not resigned preemptively, I imagine he would have broken that unfortunate ground first). The second impeachment of Donald Trump produced all Democrats voting to impeach, joined by no less than 10 Republicans, making it the most bipartisan impeachment in history. In the Senate, 7 Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict, making it the most bipartisan support for conviction in history. Bipartisanship was clearly on the side of conviction. Indeed, something that struck me from watching the argument of the impeachment managers was how they seemed to genuinely be trying to convince Senators to convict. In the first impeachment trial over the Ukraine scandal, I got the feeling that House managers were merely arguing for political points, believing that conviction was impossible and therefore not worth putting in the effort to convince wary Republicans. But this time, the arguments for conviction by the House team led by Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland were very concise and framed in such a way as to leave no doubt about Donald Trump’s culpability. Numerous Senators, even those that voted “Not Guilty” in the end, stated that the House managers gave a very strong argument.
What makes this even more stunning is that numerous other Republican Senators based their no vote on what they believed to be a lack of constitutional jurisdiction (that is, they didn’t believe a President could be constitutionally convicted once they had already left office). A number of these no votes, most notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, indicated that had Trump still been in office at the time of the vote, they would have voted to convict and remove. The enormity of that cannot be overstated. Trump’s actions in the run-up to and on January 6, 2021, a date which “will live in infamy” to quote FDR, were so damning as to possibly make him the first U.S. President to have sufficient votes in the House and Senate to remove him from office, if only he still held that office.
Sadly, despite what is in my judgment overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump deserved to be convicted and barred from holding public office, as apparently a bipartisan majority of both houses of Congress also believed, there is a strong contingent of Trump supporters that will never leave the former President regardless of what he does. This is the kind of politics of personality over conduct or substance that Trump has cultivated over the past four years, and the fruits of his labor are disturbing.
I want to preface this next bit by saying that I find comparison of Trump to Hitler or Mussolini to be historically illiterate and insensitive to the millions who suffered and died because of the latter two. Yet a question comes up frequently, especially regarding Nazism in Germany, that is “How could the Germans have allowed that to happen?” The fact that Hitler and his National Socialist party initially entered powered by an election victory stuns so many, as does his subsequent consolidation of power into a dictatorship. As Americans, we have come to take for granted the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, and democratic norms that such a scenario seems unthinkable. Indeed, how could Germans vote in and support a dictatorship like that? Well, we are seeing now firsthand how such support could be cultivated.
I intend to write about this more fully in a future blog post, but in short, Donald Trump’s biggest appeal to his core supporters has always been his ability to fight against Democrats as opposed to any particular ideological vision that he espoused (think Ronald Reagan or FDR). This, coupled with his demands for loyalty to him personally, has led to a cult of personality in which, as he famously bragged in 2016, he could “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” and not lose his supporters. After the 2020 election, Donald Trump did, in fact, threaten the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, and democratic norms. Yet surveys show that a bit over half of Republican voters don’t seem to care, and instead buy into these ridiculous notions that Democrats rigged the election to ensure a Biden victory (apparently someone forgot to tell them to stop the Republicans from making House gains, too). A conspiracy theory predicated on a level of fraud numbering in the millions, involving operatives across numerous states at the highest levels of state government and including Republican governors who tied their political fortunes to Trump, is now tragically a mainstream view in the national political discourse. All of this is because of Trump’s personality and tribal politics that he has cultivated for his own ambitions.
Trump is no Hitler, but his destructive actions could lay the groundwork for a future dictator to take power in America. He has already established a precedent for baselessly alleging fraud in order to contest an election, as well as launch a pressure campaign against state legislators, governors, and election officials that would make Nixon blush. He followed all of this up by recklessly riling up a crowd even as he had access to intelligence reports that there were very real threats of violence on January 6 in DC. These are all terribly dangerous precedents damaging our institutions and democratic norms that future dictator wannabes will love to exploit. As Ronald Reagan put it in his first inaugural address as Governor of California, “Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Thankfully, though, the bipartisan backlash against Trump over the Capitol riot (some 30,000 voters across various swing states have reportedly ended their Republican registration since Jan. 6) suggests that the majority view of Donald Trump and his actions is negative. His legacy has been so tarnished by the past few months, that I suspect the historical record will put Trump in a similar category as Nixon or Andrew Johnson, near (or even at) the bottom of presidential rankings. The Capitol riot was a frightening culmination of a dangerous and destructive presidency, but Americans on both sides of the aisle appear ready to move past it and enter a new (post-Trump) era of American politics. The real test of this will be within the GOP itself moving forward; will Trump maintain his iron grip of the party, or will the growing anti-Trump faction take back control? I hope that this bipartisan impeachment will give clout to the latter.
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