It was often said, as Trump’s first impeachment trial loomed, that there were two juries: the jury of the Senate, and the jury of the American people.
That’s true again this time, and it is not clear to me which is the more important jury. It’s worth asking
- what can actually be achieved with each jury,
- how valuable each potential achievement would be for the political health of the nation, and
- what strategy would be dictated by the answers to those two questions for how the House managers prosecute their case in the trial.
Helping the Republicans Purge their Party of Trump
Regarding the jury of the Senate, the issue is whether Trump will be convicted— and since he’ll already be out of office, the main practical issue at stake is that conviction would then enable the Senate to vote to bar Trump from ever seeking public office again.
This is presumably what Mitch McConnell had in mind in being open to impeachment. Trump’s continuing hold on the Republican base threatens to keep the whole of the Party in thrall to him, and hobble the Party’s effort to get new leadership heading toward the 2024 presidential election.
I would wager that there’s no way that Trump would ever get re-elected President, and likely no way he would ever get re-nominated. But, nonetheless, it is probably very true that if Trump is legally permitted to run again, Trump would utilize that opening to continue to intimidate and enslave the Republican Party in the coming years. (At least if he’s able to stay out of jail.)
Would it be good for America to help the Republicans free themselves from Trump?
Maybe, if that meant they’d become a normal political party. But that’s far from certain, or perhaps even likely. Helping Mitch McConnell and serving the best interests of the United States have rarely been in alignment. And there’s at least reason to question whether it would help, for example, the Biden Presidency to help Mitch McConnell’s Republican Party escape from the taint of Donald Trump, to escape from its profound culpability for their having become the Trump Party during this disastrous Presidency.
Meanwhile, it’s true that a conviction in the Senate does make an important historical statement about the unacceptability of Trump’s conduct. And I will be rooting for that 2/3 majority to come through to repudiate Trump. But I’m really not sure how much good that matters that will ultimately achieve.
As I see it, there may be nothing more important for our national well-being than for the Republican Party — in its present form — to self-destruct, to be consigned to oblivion, and either to be reborn in a new form or to be replaced by a decent conservative Party.
Ending the Reign of the Lie
Regarding the jury of the American people, the issue I see is how well the trial can be used to educate people. And the most urgent aspect of such “education,” it seems to me, involves the belief, among a large majority of the Republican base, that the election was stolen.
This belief is a major threat in two ways:
- Belief in the Trump-and-Republican lie feeds the insurrection. (How many of those who stormed the Capitol would have done so if they’d understood that Joe Biden had won the presidency fair and square?)
- Belief in the Lie that Biden stole the Presidency away from Trump delegitimizes Biden’s Presidency in the eyes of tens of millions of Americans, and that will inevitably weaken Biden’s ability to lead the nation and accomplish his goals.
So the question arises: Can the Senate trial be conducted so as to reduce, to any meaningful degree, the number of people who believe that Trump/Republican lie about the election?
Exposing and debunking that Lie clearly falls within the purview of the Article of Impeachment:
Trump’s incitement of an insurrection did not begin with his speech on January 6. Clearly, he began the process of gathering his mob, ginning up their fury, and mobilizing them (telling the Proud Boys to “stand by”) beginning months before the Election.
And then he continued — after his defeat became an indisputable fact, and after court after court showed Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the results were utterly baseless— to lie to his followers, escalating his rhetoric, and thereby sweeping them up into their insurrectionary insanity.
So proving Trump guilty of the charge in the Article of Impeachment naturally involves presenting the campaign of lying about the Election— attacking the heart of our Constitutional order like no other defeated candidate in our history — as laying the foundation for the violence that predictably ensued.
So exposing the Lie is a legitimate part of the trial. Whether it can be exposed in such a way as to meaningfully reduce the number of people who live in the UnReality Trump (and so many other Republican leaders) have created for them is harder to judge. This is a political subculture which has shown itself pretty impenetrable by truth.
But I would suggest that it’s an effort that must be made. The extent of craziness in the American body politic — craziness meaning a significant detachment from reality — is at the heart of the sickness in American politics.
It’s not only the craziness of people wearing sweatshirts expressing regret that the Nazis didn’t kill more Jews, or the craziness of White supremacists for whom subjugating people of other races is vital to their sense of self-worth. It is also the craziness of people habitually believing the lies that the Republicans tell them, even when the truth is right in front of their eyes.
So if I were to script the trial of Donald Trump in the Senate, I would keep a continual eye on that unofficial jury watching on the television. I would prosecute the case against Trump in a way to expose above all how pervasively he used the Lie to incite violence, and to use that violence to overthrow our constitutional order.
The battle against the Lie, in this trial, seems as important to me as the battle against this one lawless President.
And along the way, I would gesture also — at least by implication — at all of the Republican accomplices who chose to reinforce the lie, even at the violation of their oath of office, and who are also at least morally culpable of helping to foment the insurrectionary violence of January 6.
(How strongly to bring in the culpability of Trump’s Republican accomplices I find hard to judge: what will antagonize, and what will apply effective pressure, to those Republican “jurors” in the Senate?)
I am heartened that the House Managers prosecuting the case against Trump will be led by Rep. Jamie Raskin whose articulateness, constitutional expertise, and — especially — moral passion made his a powerfully clarion voice during the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings for the first Trump impeachment.