After four long years, there’s an understandable desire among millions of Democrats and other opponents of Trumpism to believe that we are through our time of crisis, but we all need to free ourselves of any traces of this mindset. Donald Trump spent nearly the entirety of the post-election interregnum attempting to overthrow the election results, with either the active or tacit support of most Republicans in Congress. With their assistance, he propagated a lie that Democrats had stolen the election from him — a lie that constituted the fuel of the Capitol assault, and the consequences of which will remain with us for years, as the majority of Republican voters now believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president. Though Trump may have given the speech that lit the fuse on January 6, plenty of Republican elected officials had amplified his attacks on American democracy before then.
As Zeynep Tufecki writes, though, as horrendous as it was, the physical attack on the Capitol was not the worst event of the day, but rather “what happened just a few hours later on the floor. After all that mayhem, the legislators were escorted back to the chamber under heavily armed escort, and a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded.” What the insurrectionists had failed to do by force, the GOP attempted to do by abuse of their office. And as Tufecki reminds us, these politicians who attempted to overthrow the U.S. government by more cunning means still remain in office. In other words, even if Trump is gone, his spirit remains very much alive in the Republican Party (multiple state GOP parties have now endorsed the lie that the election was stolen, including here in Oregon). Yet, as she writes, “There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.”
It is true that some Democrats want to hold their Republican peers responsible for their actions that day. A few, like Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, have called for the expulsion of all Republicans who voted to overturn the election. Others have focused on a smaller band of prominent ringleaders, like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and the representatives who spoke at the January 6 Trump rally.
But if most Democrats wanted to avoid facing the culpability of two-thirds of the GOP House caucus and 8 GOP senators who acted on the lie that also led to the insurrectionist attack, this will not be possible once the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is underway. I see no logically or morally consistent argument for Trump’s conviction that doesn’t also serve as a damning accusation against the Republicans who voted to reject the electoral college tally. The Democrats’ case that Donald Trump incited the Capitol attacks cannot be made without asserting that he laid the groundwork with his lies about a stolen election. And if Donald Trump is not fit for office because of such lies, then neither are those members of Congress who acted on them by voting to reject the election results. The assault on the Capitol and their votes later that day were two sides of a single insurrectionist coin.
Republicans are fully aware that any effort to hold Trump accountable for his anti-democratic actions lies perilously close to an effort to hold them accountable for their own anti-democratic actions. This is especially the case as we learn more details about the complicity of individual Republican congressmen in Trump’s schemes to overturn the election results. To convict Trump would be tantamount to convicting themselves of their active or tacit support of his months-long disinformation campaign against American democracy. This, combined with their unwillingness to anger the still-loyal Trump base, means that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that more than one or two Republican senators will vote to convict him, no matter how damning the evidence.
This CNN article points to one of the main GOP strategies to disarming the conviction effort: asserting that conviction after a president has left office is unconstitutional. This way, they can vote to acquit Trump on false technical grounds while pretending not to be excusing his attempts to overthrow the election. Simultaneously, the GOP is also adopting a broader strategy of pretending that President Biden and the Democrats are viciously seeking to divide the country, whether by passing laws that Republicans don’t agree with or by pursuing impeachment as an act of vengeance. From this perspective, the crime is not that Trump incited a coup attempt, but that Democrats are trying to hold him accountable for doing so.
In other words, the Republican Party has signaled it will fight tooth and nail to prevent holding Trump accountable. But as I noted, why wouldn’t they, since so many are fundamentally guilty of the same incitement and disinformation of which the president is accused? Given this bad faith, lawless attitude so early into the Biden presidency, I really don’t see a way forward for Democrats but to seek to hold the GOP to account for its role in fomenting insurrection against our government. We are at the point that continuing to act as if the GOP is a good faith, normal democratic party lends it a credibility it no longer deserves.
In terms of the impeachment, Democrats should go all in on something they should have done with the first, unsuccessful impeachment effort — structure the proceeding not just as a case against the president, but also against GOP senators who participated in his fraud against the American people and refuse to hold the president accountable. Only 8 Republican senators voted to overturn the electoral college results, but nearly all of them were silent or actively complicit in his attempts to denounce the election results. As much as possible, Democrats should make it clear that a vote to acquit Donald Trump is a vote in favor of violent insurrection. This has the virtue of being true, and would also send the unmistakable message that those who refuse to condemn political violence need to be considered its abettors. If it’s impossible to sway all but a handful of Republican senators anyway, why not make it clear to the American people that a vote to acquit Trump is a vote in favor of lawlessness, authoritarianism, and violence?
If the GOP is going to continue down its radical path, and to spread lies and propaganda about Democratic voters and the legitimacy of our elections, Democrats may as well put GOP authoritarianism front and center in the national dialogue. Bipartisanship is a meaningless ideal when one of the two major parties won’t even accept election results any more, or the legitimacy of any Democratic victory.
This is all the more urgent since, as political observers like Ron Brownstein argue, the forces and incentives that have pushed the GOP to this dark place are likely only to increase, not decrease, in the coming years. At The Atlantic, Brownstein writes that:
[T]he breadth of anxiety inside the GOP coalition about the fundamental demographic, economic, and cultural changes remaking America strongly suggest that these party tendencies won’t disappear when Trump leaves the White House. If anything, they could intensify as those changes accelerate and as the incoming Biden administration—which has given prominent roles to people of color, LGBTQ people, and women—embodies all of them.
[. . .] Trump’s redefinition of the GOP as a vehicle for the white Americans most uneasy about racial and cultural change has alienated many previously Republican-leaning white suburban voters, even in previously Republican-leaning states—as this week’s Georgia losses painfully demonstrated to the party again. That means, to win elections, virtually all Republicans now need superheated turnout from the Trump base: white, non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical Christian voters. And that means Republicans of all stripes will feel pressure to continue portraying Democrats not merely as misguided or wrong, but as an existential threat to GOP voters’ lives—even as Wednesday’s riot captures how those alarms are exacerbating the greatest strains on the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.
There is a superficial but false equivalence between GOP efforts to demonize the Democratic Party, and a Democratic effort to unambiguously treat the GOP as an authoritarian threat to America democracy. It’s understandable that some Democrats would want to do what they can to de-escalate tensions, but there can’t be any accommodation with politicians who incite insurrection. The attack on the Capitol, and its incitement through the Big Lie of a stolen election, represented a red line that, once crossed, cannot be forgiven, not without fundamentally compromising the Democrats’ own commitment to democracy. Democrats should feel confident that their cause is based in truth, justice, and the rule of law; they should also know that unless they maintain our system of laws and a discourse based in facts, there will be no democracy, or Democratic Party.
Donald Trump’s incitement of violence, his alliance with far-right extremists, and the Republican Party’s broad willingness to participate in the lies that give aid and comfort to such extremism should be treated as politically disqualifying. With the passage of time, the president’s decision to ally himself with the violent white nationalists who took part in the Capitol attack will only grow more radioactive for his legacy, and for the party that enabled him. As Americans come to realize the president has unleashed a white supremacist insurrection against American government and society, Democrats must be sure to aim public anger and revulsion at those who offered aid and comfort this terroristic movement. The GOP has tied itself to a losing, amoral cause, and the Democrats should use impeachment to hammer this home, and to put the GOP’s cowardice and disgrace on display for all the nation to see.