In the wake of President Trump’s failed coup attempt — which includes not just the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol but his various non-violent maneuvers to claim the November election was stolen from him and to throw out the results — the most pressing needs in American politics are to protect our democracy from further attacks while Trump remains president, punish the perpetrators, and ensure as much as possible that nothing like this is ever tried again.
The need to protect ourselves during the final days of Trump’s presidency is the most urgent. So far, the Democrats have made it clear that Trump should not remain president, and have called on him to resign or be relieved of his office via the 25th Amendment; as it’s pretty clear neither will happen, they are now turning to the threat of impeachment. But as we all know, even if impeachment is successful, it requires a substantial number of Republicans (17) to then actually remove him from office. This does not seem likely to happen. It also does not appear likely the impeachment process would be accomplished by the end of Trump’s term, which means it would spill over into the start of Biden’s presidency. At that point, impeachment would obviously not be about the immediate threat posed by Trump, but a punishment for his crimes (including, if the Senate did vote to convict, the important fact that he would be banned from holding future public office).
So we are stuck for the next 11 days with a president who has declared war on the American people by inciting violence against the U.S. government. This should at least focus us on the fact that Trump remains in office because the GOP largely refuses to join Democratic efforts to expel him from office. His cabinet has abnegated its responsibilities to relieve him of office, and in the Senate, Mitch McConnell has made clear his intentions to slow-walk any impeachment trial.
I think this brings us to the central conundrum for Democrats, both in effectively defending the country in the next week and a half, and in fashioning an appropriate punishment for the coup participants and a strategy to prevent another in the future. The great majority of congressional Republicans stand implicated in this coup attempt by their steadfast support of Trump throughout his presidency — a presidency that has included similar attacks on democracy, including incitement of violence against Democratic politicians and propagation of lies about election fraud (remember, Trump has consistently claimed to have won the 2016 popular vote by millions of votes). During this time, the party as a whole has consistently behaved as if the Democrats are not a legitimate opposition party. As Kurt Bardella writes, the GOP claims that Democrats are radicals aiming to take over American with socialism and communism; what logical conclusion could Republican voters reach except that any means necessary are allowed to repel such a threat? And since the November election, the majority of congressional Republicans have assented in or outright supported the president’s big lie that he won the election — a lie that became the basis for the violence of January 6 .
In a better world, the assault on the Capitol would have immediately led GOP representative and senators to oppose Trump’s effort to not certify the electoral college results. Instead, mere hours after the attack, 6 Republican senators and a whopping 139 representatives (65% of the Republican house caucus) still effectively voted to overturn the election results. As Greg Sargent explains, “In so doing, [. . .] Republicans validated precisely the same pack of lies that Trump has told about the election for months to sustain the bigger lie that its outcome was illegitimate — the very notion that drove the mob assault in the first place.” In other words, hours after a violent attack on democracy, many Republicans voted to accomplish by (illicit) legislative means the very same goals as the horde of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and QAnon fanatics had attempted by force. This is a distinction without a difference, and deeply damning for those Republican officials. A direct line can be drawn between their made-up lies about a stolen election, broadcast to millions of Republican voters, and the masses of Trump supporters enraged and emboldened to act violently to reverse the election results.
This is all to help explain the glaring fact that, after a president directed a physical assault on Congress, one that could well have cost the lives of elected officials and, in a worst case scenario, could have killed the vice president and other officials in the direct line of succession to the presidency, the Republicans by and large refuse to expel Trump from office. Even as many Republicans in Congress seem genuinely disturbed by the president’s actions, and willing to criticize the president’s behavior, they simply can’t bring themselves to take the logical, necessary next steps to protect the nation against a president who constitutes an immediate and pressing danger to us all. It is simply not believable that congressional Republicans could not convince Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment, or figure out a combination of carrots and sticks to prompt his resignation. A strong case can be made that such inaction means that every Republican refusing to do their duty is now complicit in Trump’s coup attempt — an attempt that, though failed at the moment, should be considered a sort of chronic condition so long as the president remains in office. We simply cannot trust such a man to not try again in the coming days.
The problem for the Democrats is that, were they to speak truthfully about the support of Trump’s coup attempt by congressional Republicans, they would risk those Republicans closing ranks around Trump, and the Republicans accusing the Democrats of turning this into a “partisan” fight - indeed, they are already attacking the Democrats of promoting “division” by their mere attempts to reign in a lawless president. Yet I would argue that any attempt to impeach Trump without acknowledging GOP complicity risks allowing the GOP off the hook, identifying Trump as the main problem. And so what should be a non-partisan project of driving Trump from office is inevitably a partisan struggle — because the GOP is implicated in his actions (and also, very, very importantly, doesn’t want to piss off his base in forcing him from office).
With so many in the GOP still loyal to Trump, or unwilling to fully admit the seriousness of his actions that implicate themselves, the nation is left in a deeply dangerous place until January 20, with a lawless and psychopathic president still plotting to overthrow American democracy, and Republicans effectively turning Democratic-led efforts to reign him in as a partisan ploy. The Democrats must put fetishization of bipartisanship aside, and make clear to the public both that the GOP is blocking removal of Donald Trump, and bears responsibility for his future, inevitable attempts to remain in office (some, like Representative Adam Schiff, are beginning to make this case).
But the inability to punish Trump and his enablers at this moment of maximum danger means it’s all the more important to make sure they pay a price once Joe Biden assumes the presidency. As commentators like Zeynep Tufecki have been saying, this failed coup is now effectively a test run for a better-organized, successful attempt, and we need to learn from this one to make sure future ones are deterred. Democrats will not be able to avoid a full-scale effort to hold GOP elected officials accountable for their enabling of Donald Trump’s war on America, or they risk bringing a worse attempt on us all.