Donald Trump keeps making history — this time around it’s as the only person to be tried twice for impeachment by the US Senate.
His defenders, of course, have condemned the proceedings. They argue the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office. They claim his first amendment right to free speech protects him. They deny he violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States by inciting a mob to storm the Capitol.
All this is utter nonsense. Trump hasn’t just left a trail of evidence confirming his culpability; with his own words and actions he has all but delivered a signed confession.
None of this matters to the outcome. That is preordained. It is clear to everyone that the fix is in. Trump will be acquitted, albeit by a minority of senators.
Therein lies the real sham. His supporters have decried the prosecution as a show trial, harking back to the concocted hearings during Stalin’s great purge, or the theatrical rantings of the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who presided over the People’s Court.
But they overlook a glaring distinction: those infamous tribunals were condemned as show trials because conviction was a given. Their purpose was to use the power of the state to crush opposition. Evidence was immaterial. Innocence was not an option.
Trump’s impeachment case is the mirror image. His guilt will be whitewashed, regardless of the facts.
Upon receiving the article of impeachment from the House of Representatives, every senator was required to take the following oath: “I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, then now former president of the United States, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the constitution and laws, so help me god.”
Despite this pledge, Republican senators have openly advocated on Trump’s behalf even before any testimony. In a genuinely fair and impartial case, this would be cause for immediate disqualification to sit in judgment. At the very least, such naked conflicts of interest would require jurists to recuse themselves. This won’t happen.
On the trial’s opening day, Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida busied themselves with paperwork, paying scant attention to the evidence and barely glancing at the video highlights of the January 6 insurrection. They have only one Florida constituent on their minds. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the maskless libertarian physician, doodled on a notepad. Together with eight of their GOP colleagues, they rejected even the proposed trial rules, which had been agreed earlier on a bipartisan basis between the respective party leaders.
Just one month ago a horned, bare-chested self-professed shaman carrying a spear sat in the presiding officer’s chair in their Senate chamber while these same senators cowered in a bunker. Now they won’t even pretend to care.
How far the world’s greatest deliberative body has sunk.
Trump could admit to the charges against him on the Senate floor and he would still be acquitted.
But the senators won’t hear from him. Unlike an actual show trial, the defendant is not even required to attend this pantomime. A more apt description would be a no-show trial.
There was a brief window in the aftermath of the insurrection when some Republican senators wavered. On January 19 Mitch McConnell, then Senate majority leader, denounced Trump for instigating the riot.
“The mob was fed lies,” he said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”
This was a powerful signal of intent and a direct acknowledgment of Trump’s culpability. It was clear McConnell saw this moment as an opportunity to break Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. But it didn’t last. Base voters lashed out at their leaders, and their leaders folded. As Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Marjorie Taylor Greene have all declared, the GOP is Trump’s party now.
In the real world we don’t allow juries to be rigged, defendants not to appear at trial, and laws to be blatantly ignored. But in Trumpworld anything goes.
While America is moving on under President Joe Biden, Trump still has enough Stockholm senators in his pocket to escape justice. Again.
When Trump declared that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters, we laughed at the absurdity of that notion. No one is laughing now.
The Trump years have shown the world that all pretense the USA has of being a democracy is nonsense. The GOP is basically now a white supremecist party.
In the recent 4 Corners episode, the truest word was spoken by the young black girl at the end: if it had been black people rioting, they never would have got up the steps to the Capitol building – they’d have all been dead on the grass.
January 6th wasn’t the conclusion of disrupted US politics, it was the Pearl Harbour when the enemy showed its hand and then retreated back to regroup. There is now a deep seated, ugly, core which supports violence to achieve its ends in US politics, it is spear headed by militia groups and has at its head a deluded, divisive and dangerous demagogue, devoid of decency and empathy but replete with ignorance and a lifelong sufferer of mythomania. Now we watch as the inevitable plays out.
I agree, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa, should be condemned for their violence, looting, shooting, murders, and intimidation.
Witless trying to be witty.
It’s been surreal following the US media throughout the Trump presidency making speculations about how Trump is undermining the GOP, something which the GOP-lifers are looking at any opportunity to rectify. It seems they have made the calculation that they are better off as the party of Trump’s populist movement than they are as one of any principles. So all that speculation about the good ol’ conservatives seems moot. The Republican Party exists now as a power grab without principle.
And that is their Inconvenient Truth.
Every time I hear “God bless America”, I think of the perfidy of these GOP Senators.
I don’t believe there is a Hell, but if there is every Senator that abuses his oath will go there.
Yes, even though I’m an atheist, that’s something that also really irks me. That is, for decades now, the Republicans have been claiming that they’re the party of the moral majority and that the basis of that is their Christian values. There would be very few, if any, Republican politicians, who didn’t claim to be strongly religious. But it seems that most of them have no problem with putting their hands on the bible and making an oath to their god, while not having the slightest intention of keeping that oath. It makes you wonder just how genuine their values are?
There’s is a deity of convenience?
They can validate their actions through their deity to excuse whatever they want to do – because theirs is a “righteous quest against the darkness of progressivism”.
Red brothers (and sisters) they may be, but they’re “on a mission from God”?
They have no vslues, all they care about is themselves and being in power positions. If that mob had managed to break in where they were cowering they would have been beaten up, perhaps one or two of them killed. They know Trump wouldn’t have cared one whit if they had diedor if they had found Pence or Pelosi and did hang them, would these cowards have done anything to save them? No, because like Drumpf it’s all about them and what they want. Have any of them commented on the i juries and death of the police trying to protect them, while Trump did nothing but watch TV and giggle. They deserve to lose their seats as politicians if the vote for Trump who cares nothing for them and never did.
.”..I believe passionately in the same things that American Presidents have always believed in ” Government of my people, by my family, for myself, shall not perish from the earth””
Trump D (2021) “The Getmeadoublewhopperburg Address– Great Speeches of the American Civil War (Private Eye 1539)