Citizen Writes
Research hot topics
Trump: so bad they impeached him twice
2021-05-09
By Dr Alex Wadden
A president of the United States has been impeached four times. Donald J Trump accounts for half of that total. The first impeachment involved a complex story that unfolded through late 2019 over a phone call between Trump and the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019. Trump was alleged to have pressured Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian-related business dealings of the son of Joe Biden with the aim of disrupting the 2020 presidential campaign. In December 2019, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment that accused Trump of an abuse of power and of obstructing Congress.
The second impeachment was conducted quite differently, with minimal congressional debate but a direct and shocking charge, the evidence very much in the public domain. On 6 January 2020, Congress was scheduled to certify that Biden had won the election. This certification process, normally a little–noticed formality, had already hit the headlines as a majority of House Republicans and a dozen of the party’s Senators had declared that they would dispute the vote count in support of President Trump’s egregious lie that the election had been “stolen”. Some of these Republicans likely believed this, but for many who knew the election to have been conducted fairly, disputing the result was a way of currying favour with the party’s pro-Trump base. This political cowardice was rationalized on the basis that there would not be any long-term consequences as Congress was certain to validate Biden’s victory.
It turned out that irresponsible behaviour from political leaders can have consequences. As Congress began its proceedings, in quite extraordinary scenes, supporters of President Trump ransacked the Capitol Building. Shortly before this riotous behaviour President Trump had addressed the crowd. After thanking the “patriots” for attending he declared, “We will never give up, we will never concede.” He then listed numerous examples of what he alleged to be fraud in the counting of votes in the 2020 presidential election, providing zero evidence. He urged the crowd to march to the Capitol, concluding “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” According to the impeachment charge, President Trump’s actions and rhetoric amounted to “incitement of insurrection”.
A president can be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If the House passes articles of impeachment the process moves to the Senate for a trial, with a two-thirds majority vote needed to convict a president and thus remove them from office. Only once has a Senator voted to convict a president of their own party. That vote came from Senator Mitt Romney of Utah in 2020 and he was quick to condemn Trump again a year later.
This time Romney was not the only Republican to break party ranks and denounce the president. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in Senate, was amongst those to strongly denounce the president, with reports suggesting that he might be persuaded to vote ‘guilty’ in a Senate trial. In the 2019 impeachment vote there were zero Republican votes in favour of the charges against the president. Thirteen months later, ten House Republicans supported the indictment, making this the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history.
Importantly, however, 197 House Republicans voted against impeachment and while polls in the aftermath of the riot showed increased disapproval of Trump, polling focused on registered Republicans suggested continuing high levels of support. The party’s base stood by their man with great loyalty: through to the summer of 2020 Trump enjoyed an average nearly 90% approval amongst Republicans. At this point it is uncertain how this discord in the Republican Party ranks will play out, but a bitter battle over the future of the party looks sure to come.
That battle will be part of the back drop if and when a Senate trial takes place over the House’s impeachment charge. It would take 17 Republican votes along with all 50 Democrats to convict Trump. If McConnell is seriously considering a ‘guilty’ vote that would give permission to other Republicans to follow suit, but the prospect of a backlash from pro-Trump forces in the party base will likely deter many from taking that course. There has been some debate over continuing with the process once Trump has left office, but the events of January 6th and Trump’s role in precipitating that riot in the halls of American democracy demand legal accountability for the perpetrators and political accountability for those who so agitated them.
It remains unclear what impact a Senate conviction would have on the wider political environment. American politics seems certain to remain profoundly fractured for some time to come. An NBC News poll conducted after the January riots found that 74% of registered Republicans did not believe that Biden’s election victory was legitimate. One feature of Trump’s legacy is the mainstreaming of dangerous disinformation. Whether there is a coherent political philosophy of Trumpism that will last beyond Trump himself is doubtful, but his time on the political scene has seen the unleashing of treacherous demons that will infect American public life beyond his own personal fate.