On January 6, after months of telling his supporters the election had been stolen and weeks of telling them to gather in Washington, D.C., on that day to protest (“Be there, will be wild!”), Donald Trump stood in front of the White House and told a crowd “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and then moments later called on them to march on the Capitol. Trump is now on trial in the Senate following impeachment in the House. But he wasn’t the only person to speak that day, whipping up the crowd in the hours before it attacked the Capitol.
One speaker after another—12 of them—told the crowd to be angry, to believe that the election had been stolen, to believe that America itself was being stolen from them. (The not-very-buried subtext was “stolen from white people.”)
Two of the speakers were current members of the House of Representatives: Mo Brooks and Madison Cawthorn, the former telling the crowd to “start taking down names and kicking ass” and the latter urging them to hold members of Congress “accountable” if they didn’t try to overturn the election. A motion to censure Brooks didn’t get through the House Ethics Committee.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was another public official on the state, accusing states that counted their votes and named President Biden the winner of having “capitulated.” After the attack on the Capitol, he did not join every other state attorney general in signing on to a statement condemning the violence. Paxton faces legal trouble, but it’s not because of this—it’s because he’s extremely corrupt.
Other speakers included Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, as well as Trump campaign fundraiser/Don’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric’s wife Lara. Daddy Trump “has more fight in him than every other one combined, and they need to stand up and we need to march on the Capitol today,” Eric told the crowd. Don Jr. said, “You have an opportunity today: You can be a hero, or you can be a zero. And the choice is yours but we are all watching.”
Then there was the usual assortment of Trump hangers-on, people eager to elevate themselves by associating with him, to suck up to him by lying to his supporters, to bask in the cheering of an angry crowd themselves: former campaign adviser Katrina Pierson; personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani; “Women for America First” head Amy Kremer, who had done much of the rally organizing; law professor and conspiracy theorist John Eastman; former Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, who announced from the stage that he was becoming a Republican.
All of these people are terrible in one way or another. They all participated in inciting the crowd to violence—to believing that violence was righteous rather than an effort to overturn a democratic election. The public officials who participated—Brooks, Cawthorn, Paxton—bear some special blame for encouraging an attack on democracy itself and, in the former two cases, on their own coworkers. So, yeah, they should all be shunned and disdained and booed when they show their faces in public.
But Donald Trump is the root of it all. Trump is the one who refused to concede the election and instead tried to overturn it and to undermine the legitimacy of U.S. democracy. Trump is the one who pressured Mike Pence to try to block the congressional counting of the electoral votes, something Pence was very clear he could not do. Trump is the one who called the crowd there on that day to disrupt that constitutional process. The crowd was not there to hear Katrina Pierson or John Eastman or even Eric and Don Jr. They were there because Donald Trump summoned them, and once they were there, he told them what to do: “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol.
Tuesday wasn’t officially the start of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial—that would be today—but as a warmup round, it certainly served as a preview of what to expect. On Tuesday, both the House impeachment managers and Trump’s legal team got their chance to make a presentation to the Senate that was supposedly meant to address the question of whether the Senate could, constitutionally, proceed with Trump’s trial even though his time in office has expired. But both sides used the time to present something that was more of an abbreviated view of the case they’ll present over the next four days of trial.
For House managers, that meant a powerful presentation filled with images of the assault on the Capitol and even their own personal stories of being driven from the chambers by the hate-filled mob. In particular, Rep. Jamie Ruskin’s story of being separated from his family as the House was evacuated was extremely moving. On Trump’s team the response was … incoherent, with lead attorney Bruce Castor performing an uncanny imitation of someone in far over his head and bereft of any plan.
The House team opened with a video presentation that recounted just a few of the moments from the Jan. 6 event. Even for those who had been there on the day, or watched the events unfold on television, the video was shocking. Compiled mostly from on the ground camera and cell phone footage, the video spoke to the anger and ferocity of Trump supporters as they beat their way past the police and smashed their way into the Capitol. By interspersing the images with shots from inside the House and Senate chambers, the video also made the timeline of events clear.
Overall, the presentation was enthralling. The Senate chamber was absolutely silent as the video unfolded, with most senators transfixed by the images. However, some Republicans—notably Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul—made a point of not looking at the screen, spending their time scribbling or pretending to read the papers on their desk.
Following the video presentation, the House team went on to lay out both their case for why the Senate trial of Trump was absolutely constitutional. That included both citations going back into British Common Law and moving forward to the most well-known cases of impeachment in the 19th century.
When the House managers sat down, it was time for Trump attorney Bruce Castor to rise and … what happened next is difficult to summarize. Castor provided the Senate with an hour of talking for which even the word “rambling” doesn’t seem to apply. At times Castor praised the House managers. On at least two occasions he insisted that the whole event was pointless because the voters had already made a new choice and selected Joe Biden. At other times, he seemed to be threatening the Senate with some vague action. This was particularly true during a puzzling sequence in which Castor addressed Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse and appeared to announce that some court in his home state was preparing to move against him. It was a sequence that left everyone, especially Sasse, completely puzzled.
Finally, after reaching nothing that appeared to be a conclusion, and not even coming close to the question of the constitutionality of the trial, Castor sat down and handed things over to Trump’s second attorney David Schoen. In what was apparently a distracted cop/angry cop paring, Schoen spent the next hour haranguing the Senate with a presentation that featured lengthy diversions into topics such as bills of attainder, that verged on Giuliani-esque while never dropping below a boiling point of mixed disdain and disgust for his audience.
The best view of how the Trump team did may be in the response of Rep. Raskin. Given thirty minutes to reply to the statements from Trump’s attorneys, Raskin simply said that he didn’t see the need. Instead, he handed back his time, allowing the Senate to move on to a vote. In that vote, six Republicans joined with all Democrats to vote in favor of continuing the trial. That meant a gain of one from the last time the Senate voted on the constitutional question. In addition to Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, and Patrick Toomey, the vote on Tuesday added Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
It’s a long way from six to the 17 Republicans necessary to actually convict Trump. But then, the trial is just starting. If it continues to be this lopsided in the performance of the two legal times … there could be surprises ahead.
Sen. Mazie Hirono said Wednesday that defense lawyers for former President Donald Trump were “incompetent and basically pretty pathetic" in their impeachment arguments on day one of the ongoing Senate trial.
Hirono (D-Hawaii) specifically criticized former President Donald Trump’s defense team, Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen, for admitting they changed strategies because the House managers’ presentation was so strong.
"Lawyers don't do that unless you're fantastically talented and good lawyer, and these two were not,” she said.
Hirono said the House managers’ presentation, on the other hand, was very moving for Democratic senators to whom she spoke after the opening of the trial.
“Watching these images, I think all of us were brought to tears,” she said, highlighting the impact of Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) emotional speech about the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I know I was.”
Hirono said the House managers plan to focus on Trump’s actions during their presentation on Wednesday, presenting Trump's repeated, baseless claims of voter fraud in the aftermath of November's election and in the runup to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.