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The president who emerged from last year’s political trial feeling emboldened emerges from the remote closed doors in Florida and faces a dubious political and legal future.
By Peter Baker
Once back, former President Donald J. Trump hit the rap and once he returned wasted no time in claiming victory. He issued a minute before the Senate president even officially declared that he had been acquitted on Saturday, denouncing his political judgment as “a new phase of the biggest witch hunt in our country’s history. “
But this one’s still different. This one will come with an asterisk in the history books, if not a dark spot. This time, Trump did not have the White House East Room to summon allies to a birthday party to escape the conviction. history, and even the Republican leader criticized her. It’s an escape, not an exemption.
The president who came out of last year’s political trial was emboldened and used his workplace to avenge the defendants of the fees against him, emerges from him defeated after a term and behind closed doors in Florida without government force and dubious and legal policies. Future. He forced top Republican senators to stay with him at trial, but few defended his actions, raising constitutional reasons for his votes.
No one condemned him in stronger terms on Saturday than one of those who voted for his acquittal, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who for four years bit his tongue and worked in conjunction with Trump, but has since washed things away. M. McConnell accused Trump of a “shameful and shameful breach of duty” in trying to cancel an election and bring down a crowd in Congress to block the formalization of his defeat and methodically demolished the point through the former president. punctual defense.
“There is no doubt, none, that President Trump is almost and morally guilty of causing the day’s events,” Mr. McConnell said. “There is no doubt about it. The other people who stormed this construction believed they were acting on their president’s wishes and orders. And having this confidence is a predictable result of the growing development of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole that the defeated president continued to shout at the largest megaphone on planet Earth.
But the sting of his rebuke was dimped through his vote, as McConnell explained as an inevitable result of his confidence that a Senate cannot bring a president to justice after his departure. a poisonous leader of his own party only when he came out of the force without holding him accountable, but he also validated the Democratic case against Trump.
He’s not the only Republican to do it either. Seven Senate Republicans voted in favor of convicting Trump, the largest number of senators from the president’s own party who failed in a lawsuit in U. S. history, following the 10 House Republicans who did so in the vote a month ago.
And some of the other Republicans who voted for the acquittal Saturday echoed McConnell: “President Trump’s moves and destitutations have been embarrassing, and history will judge him harshly,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Ohio added: “President Trump has said and done reckless things and encouraged the crowd. “
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the house’s most sensible political trial officer, noted that 57-43 in general for a president’s conviction since Andrew Johnson acquitted him by a singles vote in 1868, even though he was unsuccessful in the two-thirds. required for the conviction.
And Raskin argued that while only 10 of the Republican senators who voted for absolution justified their decisions strictly on the same constitutional grounds as McConnell, that would functionally mean that two-thirds of the Senate would conclude that McConnell Trump. blame for the facts.
“The defendant, Donald John Trump, was disappointed by a technicality,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat and some other manager.
But Democrats were not entirely sure to point to the outcome as an ethical victory or condemn it as an embarrassing betrayal of Republicans.
Even when Raskin quoted McConnell to justify the manager’s case, President Nancy Pelosi gave the impression at the press convention after the managers’ trial of reproaching Mr. McConnell ‘a very misleading speech’ in which she tried to ‘have it in every sense’, possibly to appease Republican donors.
Fearful of wasting McConnell, who may have actually brought several votes with him and perhaps even enough to get a conviction, Trump unusually avoided provoking Republican senators during the trial. lawyers willing to protect him and ended up handing over his case to a non-public injury attorney in Philadelphia, Trump knew he probably had the votes for acquittal as long as he kept it.
His lawyers have misrepresented the facts and annoyed Republicans and Trump himself with their presentations; however, they aimed to bring party senators together to stay with him by calling the trial a hypocritical scam through Democrats to get a political opponent, an argument that some Republicans were willing to settle for even if they didn’t need to protect Trump’s express actions.
“Democrats’ vengeful and confrontational political trial is over,” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson later wrote on Twitter. “While there are still many unanswered questions, I don’t know if neither the violation of the Capitol nor this trial has taken place. Let’s hope the real healer can start now. “
Trump, of course, rarely, or never, has been in the healing box. Now that you’re in the Senate, chances are you’ll give up your reluctance to speak. Saturday was another sign of a setback. ” We have so many paintings ahead of us, and soon we will come out with a vision of a bright, bright and endless American future,” he wrote.
Having failed to condemn him, Democrats hope that the trial, however, has made it implausible, if not highly unlikely, that Trump will run again for president, as he indicated he could, and that photographs of the insurrection he encouraged are etched in the “He deserves to be consistently discredited – and I have been discredited – in the eyes of the other Americans and to the trial of history” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the leader of the Democratic majority, said.
But the final sentences on the occasions of January 6 and his presidency have not yet been handed down. Trump remains strong within the Republican base, as demonstrated when the party’s state bodies condemned and even censored their own representatives and senators who have harmed him in recent weeks. For many members of the Republican central district, non-public loyalty to Trump obviously issues more than loyalty to the party.
On the other hand, while immune to the risk of a political trial, Trump still faces a imaginable legal danger arising from his efforts to overthrow the election with false accusations of fraud. Among other things, there are criminal investigations in Washington into the insurrection. and Georgia in Trump to pressure state election officials to cancel the effects of state voting. Legal experts have said the former president could also face civil lawsuits from those who suffered the Capitol’s uproar. And investigations are underway into his finances in New York.
McConnell gave the impression that he was encouraging the government to prosecute Trump on crime charges, which he said was the constitutionally appropriate way to hold a former president accountable for his actions. Responsibility, he said, was possible.
“He hasn’t, yet, ” said Mr. Mcconnell. I said, “Again. “
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