As much as House prosectors hearken back to the intentions and fears of America’s founding fathers as they argue for the conviction of Donald Trump, this impeachment trial is very much about the immediate and urgent conflicts of American politics. With most GOP senators unwilling to turn on the president, the trial has become a judgment on the fitness of the Republican Party to hold power in this country. In refusing to take seriously the need to hold the president to account for actions that culminated in the Capitol attack, recalcitrant GOP senators are telling America, and their supporters, that violence is an acceptable way to contest power in this country.
The Capitol attack is so resonant for understanding American politics, and the devolution of the Republican Party, not only because it represents the GOP’s increasing willingness to court violence to achieve political ends, but also because this violence is merely the most extreme of a continuum of anti-democratic activities that the party has embraced going back decades. From gerrymandering districts and limiting voting sites in Democratic precincts, to overtly racist purging of voter rolls, to propagating the Big Lie that the Democrats actually lost the November election, the GOP has largely decided that the key to its future is disenfranchising Democratic voters and casting doubt on the legitimacy of any Democratic victories.
As I wrote last week, this means that Democrats have a responsibility to make this trial about the Republicans who supported the president as much as the president himself. After all, without the mass backing of GOP federal officials, the president would have had far more difficulty sustaining his inciting lie that Democrats stole the presidency. He would have appeared much more as a madman, and less like the authoritarian leader the GOP seems to crave.
The purpose of doing so is to make sure that accountability for GOP politicians’ complicity will ultimately be obtained at the ballot box. Greg Sargent is exactly right when he notes that “Democrats need to make it as politically uncomfortable for Republicans as possible to acquit — and to extract a political price for it among the suburban moderates whom the GOP continues to alienate with its ongoing QAnon-ification.” But beyond tying the GOP to Trump’s illicit actions, the Democrats must also work to communicate to the public that anti-democratic animus marks the whole of the GOP, even with Trump out of office.
So far, it seems that the Democrats have decided against implicating the GOP via the trial; as Sargent and Paul Waldman write in a piece out today, “The role in this whole saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization, and its increasing comfort with anti-democratic tactics, openly authoritarian conduct and even political violence, is largely going unmentioned,” though he adds that, “Whether they are saying so or not, the case the House managers are making most definitely does implicate much of the Republican Party.” So while this may be a missed opportunity for Democrats, I would argue that it’s not a blown opportunity. Somewhat counter-intuitively, opportunity will present itself to Democrats in the likely refusal of most GOP senators to vote for conviction. At that point, Democrats can easily make the logical case that the GOP condones Trump’s violence, and use this as an entry point to foreground the Republican Party’s increasing lawlessness. The impeachment of Donald Trump will be a crucial political milestone and electoral millstone around the neck of the GOP, even if the Senate fails to convict, because Democrats can forever point to that failure as the ultimate evidence of GOP sympathy with the president’s means and ends.
The audience for House prosecutors truly is the American public, not unpersuadable Republican senators. The Democrats need to educate as many voters as possible that the GOP has turned its back on American democracy; just as importantly, though, it needs to mobilize Democratic voters in particular to stay engaged in politics in the coming years, to rise to the moment of this authoritarian threat. This Democratic base will be crucial both in blunting GOP efforts to further suppress voting rights in the wake of the 2020 election, and to advance democratic reforms that ensure every American’s vote matters and is counted.
Democrats must not underestimate how much material they have to work with to condemn the GOP in the eyes of the public. To build on a point I made above — going forward, Democrats can make the case that all prior and ongoing GOP efforts to subvert elections are on a continuum with the violence we witnessed at the Capitol on January 6. Measures like gerrymandering and voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise minorities bear not just an anti-democratic stain, but a kinship with the violence that is the ultimate recourse of people who refuse to accept the will of the majority and that every American gets an equal voice in this country. Likewise, all future acts of violence by right-wing extremists can be tied back to the Capitol insurrection and viewed as echoes of that awful attack — and more, can be tied back to Republicans’ inability to take the obvious step of convicting the president for the violence he incited against our country, and to the argument that the GOP sees right-wing insurgents as its allies, and not the enemies of America that normal Americans see them as.