Donald Trump may have never admitted that he lost—bigly—but he sure spent his last months in office acting like a loser. That wasn’t just a matter of Trump completely checking out of his already inadequate governance, or drumming up support for an insurrection. It also included a firestorm of ripping out even marginally competent officials and making last-minute Trumpist substitutions. In particular, Trump got genuinely busy right after the election in replacing top Pentagon and national security officials. Some of those new officials seem to have been involved with the slow, inadequate response to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Even after the failed coup, the deck chairs kept moving on the Trumptanic. Less than 24 hours before Trump made the nation genuinely grateful by leaving Washington for good, Trump loyalist Michael Ellis was sworn in as the top attorney for the National Security Agency (NSA). This is a slot that’s supposed to be a nonpolitical civil service position awarded to the best qualified applicant. The push to seat Ellis in this post raised immediately generated calls for a review by an inspector general. But Trump’s team pushed around those calls to seat Ellis and keep him working until the last minute.
That minute is up. President Biden has placed Ellis on administrative leave. Now everyone wants to know just what he did in his less than two days on the job.
Ellis was not a newcomer to the Trump White House. He was originally a White House attorney before Trump handed him the role of senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council in March 2020. As Kerry Eleveld reported at that time, Ellis was considered a “Trump loyalist” who had no experience in intelligence. He was already known as someone who had slipped classified information to Rep. Devin Nunes and for requesting that transcript of Trump’s Ukrainian call be moved to a more secure server. His move to the NSC came shortly after Republicans handed Trump a free pass on his first impeachment—an impeachment that included key witnesses from the NSC who testified to Trump’s attempted blackmail of the Ukrainian president.
Even though Ellis was already in the NSC and there were only days to go, The New York Times reports that former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller scrambled to move Ellis into place over objections. Among other things, Ellis’ appointment seems to be a clear violation of rules against “burrowing,” in which political appointees are assigned supposedly competitive civil service positions that normally carry on between administrations. Insiders have also said that Ellis was given the job over several more experienced attorneys who scored higher and had applied for the position. Why the rush? Well, for one thing, the top attorney has almost total control over that classified server where the transcripts from the Ukraine conversation and other classified conversations are stored.
For the moment, Ellis has been ordered to the sidelines. The Biden White House put Ellis on administrative leave Wednesday evening.
However, if the investigation fails to show that seating Ellis violated regulations, the protections provided to civil service jobs could well see him returning. Which doesn’t mean he would once again be in charge of such critical areas. He may get to stay, but he can definitely be reassigned.
Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal reports, is mulling the idea of forming a third party in his own political image, and calling it the “Patriot Party.” The report cites White House insiders who said the departing ex-president “discussed the matter with several aides and other people close to him last week.”
“Patriot,” however, is not just any old name. It’s a self-descriptive name that has long been used by the conspiracist Bircherite radical right, for decades a cauldron of extremist behavior ranging from Oklahoma City to the Bundy standoffs to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, spawning such movements as militias and sovereign citizens and inspiring numerous acts of violence. It’s an unmistakable dogwhistle to the American extremist right.
Trump seemed to reference his plans for a new party—not an original idea on his part, the notion of a third party with that name having been a topic of discussion in far-right chatrooms at Telegram, Parler, and elsewhere since the election—in his remarks during his closing days in the Oval Office. In his Tuesday farewell speech, Trump told his followers that “the movement we started is only just beginning. There’s never been anything like it.”
On Wednesday, departing finally from Andrews Air Force Base, he vowed: "We will be back in some form."
As the WSJ’s Andrew Restuccia observes, “It’s unclear how serious Mr. Trump is about starting a new party, which would require a significant investment of time and resources. The president has a large base of supporters, some of whom were not deeply involved in Republican politics prior to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
What has become unmistakable, however, is that Trump now identifies clearly with the Patriot movement—the far-right political movement that has been spreading its toxic influence on the American landscape since the 1990s. In suggesting “Patriots” as the name of a new right-wing political party, he is less hijacking the name than embracing it.
Trump has called his followers “patriots” for a very long time—and because the word still carries a generic meaning, journalists and other observers have failed to note the significance of his repeated and increasing use of it. What’s noteworthy is that, in the past year especially, he often applies it to a specific bandwidth of his supporters—namely, those engaging in acts of intimidation and thuggery against leftists and liberals.
When a “Trump caravan”—with the usual Trump, Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me,” “Blue Lives Matter,” and ordinary American flags streaming from their pickups—drove through downtown Portland, Oregon, last August, amid images of his Proud Boys supporters firing paint and pellet guns at protesters, he tweeted out a video of the caravan on the move, hailing its participants as “GREAT PATRIOTS!” (A Trump supporter involved in the melees was shot later that night by an antifascist.)
It was also the term the Capitol insurrectionists called themselves. One of the attendees at the Trump rally that preceded the riot—a 55-year-old man from Chicago—told a reporter: "We're not moving on. … We are not Republicans. We are the MAGA party. We are patriots.”
Trump’s inner circle is fond of using the word as well. Donald Trump Jr. greeted the January 6 rally crowd with: "Hello, Patriots!"
After the same crowd then stormed the Capitol, his sister Ivanka then tweeted out an appeal for calm: “American Patriots—any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.” (She deleted the tweet later that day.)
And the people who invaded the Capitol used the word to identify themselves. “Patriots!” a number of insurrectionists were recorded shouting as they rushed to enter through broken police barricades. Inside, the “QAnon shaman” Jake Angeli—garbed in furs and a horned hat—could be heard hailing his comrades: “Hold the line, patriots!”
In a New Yorker video taken inside, Angeli can be seen greeting other rioters inside the Senate chambers: “Heyyyy, glad to see you man. Look at you guys, you guys are fuckin’ Patriots!” Leading a prayer from the dais later, he thanked God for “filling this chamber with Patriots who love you and love Christ.”
Trump supporters elsewhere who celebrated the insurrection applied the label as well. A “Stop the Steal” protest organizer in Illinois told a local TV station: "Well, now the patriots are waking up and we're taking our country back. As you've seen in D.C., they've stormed the Capitol and they are making their voices be heard. So, that's what we'll continue to fight for."
This is not by any means a recent phenomenon. Trump supporters have been regularly identifying themselves to journalists and others as “Patriots” for several years now. A classic example is a California-based MAGA fanatic—a man previously arrested on terroristic-threatening charges—who traveled to Arizona for a “Trumpstock” event, and told a New York Times reporter: “They label us white nationalists, or white supremacists. … There’s no such thing as a white supremacist, just like there’s no such thing as a unicorn. We’re patriots.”
The use of the name originated with right-wing extremists in the mid-1980s who called themselves “Christian Patriots,” and were unabashedly racist—many of its participants could be found at annual “Aryan Congresses” assembled by the “Christian Identity” Aryan Nations near Hayden Lake, Idaho. This movement was studied in depth by sociologist James Aho in his 1990 book, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism(University of Washington Press). Derived in many regards from the openly racist and anti-Semitic “Posse Comitatus” belief system, Christian Patriots also claimed that ordinary people could declare themselves “sovereign citizens” to free themselves from rule by the federal government (including paying taxes), and that the county sheriff was the supreme law of the land, able to countermand federal law if he deemed it unconstitutional. Civil-rights laws, public land ownership, a federal education department—these were all considered null and void in their world of radical anti-federalism.
Following the tragic outcomes of the armed federal standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993, an idea that had been circulating in far-right circles for several—a strategy called “leaderless resistance” that called for forming small action-directed “cells,” along with violent acts of “lone wolf” domestic terrorism—became the consensus response among Christian Patriots. They called them “militias”—a reference intended to invoke the wording of the Second Amendment as a way to justify their existence.
Moreover, to broaden the appeal of the militias to include more secular-minded recruits, the movement dropped “Christian” and began calling itself simply the “Patriot movement.” The name stuck permanently.
At the time he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh self-identified as a “Patriot,” as did Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics backpack bomber. The Montana Freemen—purveyors of “sovereign citizen” pseudo-legal scams and major figures in the movement—engaged in an 81-day armed standoff with FBI agents in 1996 near Jordan, Montana.
Despite the connection to public violence, however, the Patriot movement—as I explained in my 1999 book In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest—played the strategic role as part of a campaign for ideas and agendas from the radical right to become more mainstream. The general idea was to strip their overt bigotry (especially the innate anti-Semitism and racism) from their radical localist and nativist politics and to present them wrapped in American-flag bunting and lofty-sounding “constitutionalist” rhetoric that disguised its utterly nonsensical nature with heavy doses of jingoist jargon.
Throughout the 1990s, the Patriots continually organized their vigilante paramilitaries as militia groups, and preached the “constitutionalist” approach to government to anyone who would listen, along with their never-ending web of “New World Order” conspiracy theories, peddling maps of “FEMA concentration camps” and sightings of “UN black helicopters.” The conspiracism reached a kind of fever pitch in 1999 over the supposed looming “Y2K Apocalypse,” but after that proved to be an utter non-event, it then receded into a low-level hiatus during most of the early 2000s, with conspiracists mostly devoted to the massive speculation industry that sprang out of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Among the leaders of that industry was radio host Alex Jones, a onetime John Birch Society member who began his career in Texas regurgitating conspiracy theories originally concocted by the Militia of Montana and packaging them for mass consumption. Shortly after the embarrassment of having hysterically hyped the Y2K Apocalypse, Jones seized on the 9/11 attacks as a fresh, and wildly promotable, avenue for drawing listeners into his web of fantasies. Over the years, Jones increasingly identified on-air with “the Patriots” in their “war against the globalists.”
Around 2008 and the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the Patriot movement suddenly came roaring back to life. While the numbers of militia groups had declined to a mere 131 groups in 2007, they revived sharply over the next two years, with 512. By 2012, they had reached a record high 1,360 militia groups. However, relatively few of the movement’s leaders from the 1990s remain active to this day, many of them having subsequently died.
A collective term used to describe a set of related extremist movements and groups in the United States whose ideologies center on anti-government conspiracy theories. The most important segments of the “Patriot” movement include the militia movement, the sovereign citizen movement and the tax protest movement. Though each submovement has its own beliefs and concerns, they share a conviction that part or all of the government has been infiltrated and subverted by a malignant conspiracy and is no longer legitimate. Though there is some overlap between the “Patriot” movement and the white supremacist movement, that overlap has shrunk over time; there are, in fact, people of color within the “Patriot” movement, particularly within the sovereign citizen movement.
As the Rural Organizing Project (ROP) explains, however, the presence of people of color—as well as its occasional rhetorical embrace of civil-rights ideals—is more of a conscious “we can’t be racist” façade for a movement that, at its core, is built on a foundation of white supremacist beliefs.
The origins of the Patriot movement tactics and approaches are tied up in organized racist currents. As mentioned, many of their beliefs were developed as a coherent political package by the racist Posse Comitatus. In the 1980s, one commentator described the Patriot movement as “half” racist. By the 1990s militia movement, perhaps less than a quarter of members were connected to explicitly White separatist groups; Christian Identity members still held prominent positions.
By the 2008 movement revival, connections to organized racism were hard to find in the leadership. CSPOA’s Richard Mack and Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt both have public histories of working with white separatists, but both are also 1990s holdovers.
Open racist expressions are more commonly found among local activists, however. For example, Malheur occupier Ryan Payne has said that slavery never really existed. In response to a post on a Facebook saying, “I’ve yet to met a white supremacist” (assumedly in Oregon Patriot movement circles), Oregon Oath Keeper Sally Telford replied, “I am a proud white/caucasian and I support and stand with all other white/Caucasians,” and elaborated that, “I stand with free white people.” Many Patriot movement activists are part of the “White Culture and Heritage” Facebook group, the content of which is a continuous stream of white supremacist propaganda.
Moreover, as the ROP notes, it’s common for Patriot movement adherents to deny the existence of structural or interpersonal racism. They typically define it narrowly as hatred of individuals purely for their race, a “conscious, vocalized action.” The Oath Keepers, for instance, instructed readers at their now-defunct website: “Realize there is no such thing as white privilege or male privilege: In reality, there is only institutionalized ‘privilege’ for victim-status groups. There is no privilege for whites, males, white males or straight white males.”
Even more acutely, the Patriot movement has long been antagonistic to a number of nonwhite ethnic groups:
Latino immigrants. One of its major subgroups that kept the Patriot movement alive in the early 2000s was the “Minutemen” vigilante border-watch movement of 2005-10, which organized public rallies that denigrated Hispanics and encouraged violence against them. The Minutemen eventually dissolved under the weight of the manifestations of violent criminal elements within their ranks.
Native Americans. Patriot movement conspiracists—many of them operating in states with Indian reservations and, consequently conflicts between tribes and nontribal residents and fishermen over land and water rights—have been highly active in organizing campaigns to attack tribal treaty rights and even decertify certain tribes, built primarily around “New World Order” conspiracy theories.
Muslim refugees. A number of more recent Patriot groups have been highly active in promoting Islamophobic campaigns against Muslims generally and refugees in particular. In 2015-16, “Three Percenter” militia groups organized multiple protests in Idaho against the presence of a refugee-relocation program based in the city of Twin Falls, claiming it was part of a nefarious global campaign to eventually replace the white population there.
Black Lives Matter. Most Patriot groups are unapologetic in their disdain and hatred for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Oath Keepers in particular have prominently attacked BLM as innately violent Marxists and a threat to the nation, as have “Three Percenter” militia groups and the Northwest-based Patriot Prayer street-brawling group. When Proud Boys marched violently through the streets of Washington, D.C., on December 14, their primary targets became African American churches adorned with Black Lives Matter banners and signs, which they tore down and burned.
Groups in the 1990s regularly adopted “Patriot” as part of their name, just as many right-wing militia and conspiracy-fueled groups include “Patriot” in their organizational titles to this day. Most of these are explicitly pro-Trump operations. Two Trump-loving Arizona groups, the Arizona Patriots and Patriot Movement AZ, have been highly active in protests against the election results the past two months. During the 2018 midterm election campaign, after pro-Trump forces repeatedly ran ads quoting his hysterical references to an “invasion” on the southern border, another group—the United Constitutional Patriots—set up camp at the New Mexico/Mexico border and tried arresting migrants, eventually resulting in prison time for the militiamen.
The revival of the Patriot movement during the Obama years primarily revolved around the tea party. By mid-2010, it had become clear that the tea party—first promoted by mainstream media as a kind of normalized right-wing populist revolt against liberal Democratic rule in the Obama era—had swiftly transformed into a massive conduit for conspiracy theories, ideas, and agendas directly from the Patriot movement. Attending a tea party gathering after that year, particularly in places like rural Montana, was indistinguishable from the scene one could have found 15 years before at a militia gathering: the same speakers, the same books, the same rhetoric, the same plenitude of paramilitary and survivalist gear for sale.
By 2010, Patriot groups like the Oath Keepers had become the primary face of the tea party. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes boasted of his prominent role in the movement to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly: “We like the Tea Party movement a lot, we think it's great. It's a revitalization of our core Americanism and core constitutionalism.”
A Gadsden flag, right, flutters above the site of a “Minutemen” vigilante border watch operation near Blaine, Washington, in 2006.
The ultimate emblem of this ideological takeover by the Patriots was the ascendance of the Gadsden flag as the tea party’s most prominent symbol. The flag had originally been revived in the 1990s by the Patriot movement and was commonly on prominent display at their gatherings, as well as available through the Militia of Montana mail-order catalog.
It remained a standard symbol for Patriots well afterward, and was prominently used by Minutemen groups while organizing vigilante patrols on both the Mexican and Canadian U.S. borders. When a group of far-right conspiracists gathered to discuss the supposed globalist conspiracy to destroy Western civilization at the core of their worldviews, a Gadsden flag was hung above the club where they met.
But soon after the tea party began organizing rallies in the spring and summer of 2009, Gadsden flags began appearing prominently. Soon the banner became the best-known symbol of that movement—reflective of the flood of Patriot movement ideologues who seized control of the tea party agenda.
The yellow Gadsden flag and its coiled rattlesnake also made prominent appearances during the two Bundy standoffs in the West, first in Nevada in 2014, and then in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Two of the participants in the Nevada standoff, Jerad and Amanda Miller, went on a murder spree two months afterward in Las Vegas; after shooting two police officers to death in a pizza parlor, they covered their bodies with a Gadsden flag.
Emblematic of its core of conspiracist fearmongering, the Patriot movement (and the tea party) also was the sector of the public that most avidly embraced the utterly groundless conspiracy theories about Obama’s supposedly “fake” or “incomplete” birth certificate, known as the “Birther” theories. That’s where Donald Trump first entered the picture.
Trump built the foundations of his political career in 2011 by promoting the Birther theories avidly, creating such a broad media sensation that eventually Obama conceded and ordered Hawaii officials to publicly produce the “long form” certificate in an attempt to satisfy the conspiracists. Of course, it signally failed to do so; encouraged by Trump’s public ambivalence over whether he accepted the evidence as legitimate, the conspiracists in no time produced a fresh new round of theories claiming that the new certificate was actually fake.
Around the same time, Trump claimed the mantle of leader for the tea party, telling a Fox interviewer: “I think the people of the Tea Party like me, because I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party. What I represent very much, I think, represents the Tea Party.”
Trump enjoyed substantial support for his 2016 election from an array of radical-right organizations, notably a solid phalanx comprised of the Patriot movement. His ascension to the presidency was widely hailed by various Patriots (not to mention Jones, who had hosted Trump on his Infowars program).
In short order, the movement’s conspiracy theorists were spinning up wild claims about Marxists and “antifa” plotting to overthrow his presidency, even before he was inaugurated—and then, ten months later, they revived the same claims, but this time the conspiracy theories were picked up by Fox News and other right-wing media and broadly disseminated. The narrative that resulted—depicting a “violent left” that needed to be violently confronted by “patriots”—became intensely repeated throughout the 2020 election campaign, ardently adopted by such pro-Trump groups as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
Throughout his tenure, Trump made regular references to “patriots” in his speeches, such as his September 2019 speech to the United Nations at which he declared: “The future belongs to patriots.” In 2020 he issued a proclamation designating September 11 as “Patriot Day.”
Indeed, Trump established a record of describing people who support him and his agenda as “patriots.” He used the word to describe people who backed his attempt at shutting down the government in 2019, and for farmers who had been devastated by his trade war with China. He has also described members of his administration as “great patriots,” as well as Republican candidates he has endorsed.
Trump’s campaign emails have also regularly used the word, encouraging donations by describing recipients as patriots, particularly for supporters who attended his rallies and purchased his MAGA merchandise. Notably, in the past year, these emails regularly capitalize “Patriot” to describe would-be donors.
The first such email appears to have been a fundraising appeal in September 2017 (“I know there’s no stopping our movement with the support of patriots like you,” it read). The references continued through 2018 and 2019 in some 800 emails, and then became intense in the past year. In 2020 alone, the campaign sent out nearly 2,000 emails containing the word “patriot.”
It’s a neat rhetorical trick for Trump, playing on neutral observers’ propensity to interpret the use of the word generically, while acting as a direct dogwhistle to his followers who identify with the Patriot movement. Even more Machiavellian is the effect its use has on non-extremist supporters by encouraging them to identify indirectly with a far-right movement.
These manipulations all came home to roost on Jan. 6, when the primary elements leading the insurrection at the Capitol included a number of Patriots. Among these were Three Percenter militiamen and Oath Keepers, whose authoritarian devotion to Trump became so intense this year that it has declared a “civil war” against “antifa and BLM.” Rhodes spoke at the December 14 pro-Trump rally and urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law.
Now, the FBI has arrested three Oath Keepers for their roles in the insurrection, and more arrests may be coming. Several others charged in the Capitol invasion also have connections to the group.
“The insurrectionists’ use of the term ‘patriot’ is striking,” Woden Teachout, author of Capture the Flag: A Political History of Patriotism, told the Deseret News. “It’s also powerful to see how flags are being used as literal weapons against officers at the Capitol. Neither of these is new in American history. Other groups—like anti-immigrant nativists in the 1940s and pro-Nixon forces in the Vietnam era—have used them similarly. In each case this language and the symbols are invoked to draw an ideological circle that brings some in and forces others out.
“To define certain people as patriots is to say that other people are not,” she added.
Sam Jackson, an expert on the Oath Keepers, saidthat many people who self-identify as patriots today see themselves as modern versions of the Founding Fathers. In their version of reality, their enemies are not British redcoats but rather the federal government, the political left or, “more generally, those who don’t support Trump,” all perceived as a threat to “the Republic” and their version of the Constitution.
Indeed, for most of the three decades that the Patriot movement has been active, it has been primarily described by experts and monitors as a “antigovernment movement.” However, given its ardent support for the government run by Trump—and its long record of antipathy directed almost solely at liberals and Democrats—as well as its revealing refrain that America is “a republic, not a democracy,” it has become apparent (particularly in the past year) that it is probably far more accurate to describe it as a fundamentally antidemocratic movement.
But while the Patriots conceive of themselves as representing a kind of real patriotism rather than the seditionist travesty that their movement has manifested itself as in action, the public may not have been fooled, at least not on January 6. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released two days after the Capitol takeover found only 5% of Americans believed the rioters to be patriots. Nine percent described them as “concerned citizens” while 79% percent said they considered participants in the uprising “criminals” or “fools.”
So while Trump prepares to split the Republican Party by creating a party designed primarily to accommodate his far-right supporters and their increasingly radicalized fellow followers, mainstream political observers are not necessarily being gulled by his dogwhistles. And if he makes clear he intends to act on the scheme, he may well give the U.S. Senate the incentive it needs to convict him of the House impeachment charges approved last week and strip him of the ability to ever again plague the nation by holding public office.
The minority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is getting threats from his conference over what they perceive to be his abandonment of their one true leader, Donald Trump. Though only one is dumb enough to do so publicly, rather than anonymously.
"'No, no, no,' Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and Trump ally, told CNN when asked if he could support McConnell if he voted to convict Trump, calling such a vote a 'dangerous precedent' and adding: 'I don't even think we should be having a trial.'" (You knew it was him, didn't you.) Another, asked the same question, told CNN "If he does, I don't know if he can stay as leader." This is after McConnell's remarks Tuesday on the floor, when he said "The mob was fed lies. […] They were provoked by the President and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like. But we pressed on."
According to Sen. Mitt Romney, McConnell told Republicans to "vote your conscience." The Utah Republican said that McConnell "has not in any way tried to pressure folks to go one way or another." That's not enough for Johnson and the more circumspect Republicans who aren't showing their hands right now. They want him to fight the upcoming trial and protect their leader. So the old days of the Republican civil war between Trump and McConnell are back. Which is fun.
The part that isn't fun is that these Republicans are still downplaying the insurrectionist attack of January 6, when the lives of their colleagues—and former Vice President Mike Pence!—were very much threatened. Republican Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach, has hinted at just how dangerous the situation was without revealing any classified information he's received in intelligence briefings.
"I've had a lot of classified briefings on it, and it's deeply troubling," Katko said in an interview with local press this week. "I was left with a profound sense that it was much worse than people realized." Bad enough that he is behind the effort to create a 9/11 type commission that has subpoena power to investigate. "There are a lot of unanswered questions here, from possible security lapses to who was involved and when they were involved," Katko said. "We need to have a full stem to stern look back on this to see what happened, how it happened, the sequence of events, who contributed to it, and how we make sure it never happens again." McConnell would have also been getting these briefings, and so would Johnson, who is the outgoing chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
McConnell is smart enough to recognize the threat to the Republican Party—including losing lots and lots of funding from big donors who don't want to be associated with the rabble that tried to overthrow Congress—posed by the insurrection and its aftermath. There will be an aftermath because there will be a commission that investigates it. There will also be more arrests and more court proceedings that uncover what happened behind the scenes. Johnson hasn’t caught up with that eventuality yet.
On his way out the door, right before it hit him in his ass, twice-impeached madman Donald Trump said, “Have a good life. We will see you soon.” What might’ve been a throwaway line from a person incapable of surrendering the limelight received added context when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had discussed starting a new “Patriot Party” with his aides—a five-alarm fire that has Republicans panicking and Democrats licking their chops. In fact, it might be a major factor as Senate Republicans struggle with how to handle the impeachment trial.
And yet I wouldn’t bet on it ever happening.
First things first: Let’s stipulate that Trump never does anything for anyone except himself, and maybe Ivanka. While several Republicans would love to bask in its light—the Paul Gosars and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the right-wing MAGA/Q fever swamp—Trump’s entire reason for building this party would be for the benefit of the TRUMP brand, and nothing else. And how could it not? There is no such thing as a Trump ideology (beyond “owning the libs”). There isn’t a cause that motivates him, a higher calling or purpose. He clearly didn’t even like the job of president! He barely showed up to work, didn’t read briefing papers, watched television all day, and said the dumbest shit ever said by a president … and that includes eight years of George W. Bush!
All Trump cared about was the title, being the Big Man with his airplane and taxpayer-funded Big House and his precious bully pulpit, which he used to, well, bully people. For example, at a reelection rally in Ohio, Trump wasn’t making a case based on how he had improved people’s lives, or a policy vision for a second term (a question he was repeatedly asked during the campaign and he could never answer). Nay, he could only focus on the perks of being president. “[Air Force One has] more televisions than any plane in history! They’ve got televisions in closets, in bathroom, on the floor, on the ceiling.”
So what would being a member of the Patriot Party entail beyond the further aggrandizing and enrichment of Trump himself?
Forget any broader strategy of pressuring Republicans, again, on policy grounds. Trump is too stupid to formulate any real strategy, and too aloof to care about any outcome beyond “they better kiss my ring” and “send me more money to save America.” That last part may actually loom large. Trump saw the $200 million that he raised for his big “fight the steal” lie, and he wants more. His real estate empire is on the verge of collapse, with banks refusing to do further business with him. Mainstream television isn’t going to give him another show to bail him out financially. The MAGA rubes are his last chance. And sure, campaign finance law prohibits candidates from enriching themselves from campaign contributions, but since when has Trump cared about the law? He’d do what he wants and dare a toothless Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to do something about it. And if the FEC did act on it, he’d tie it up in the courts for years.
Remember, Trump is a guy who couldn’t manage to get a platform for his own Republican Party convention—are we really going to pretend that his Patriot Party would have one?
So what would the actual impact of this party have on elections? If smartly set up (ha ha), it might function as the Working Families Party, which endorses in primaries and supports candidates who back its agenda. Or maybe like the Democratic Socialists—again, focusing heavily on primaries, mostly on friendly territory, trying to push Republicans closer to Trump. There could be a “Patriots caucus” in the House that would push Q conspiracies, Putin’s agenda, and whatever other inanities whip up its white supremacist base.
At the presidential level, imagine Trump going on his own (or, hilariously, whoever emerged from the Patriot Party primary process—Don Jr. or Ivanka), splitting off critical votes from the mainstream Republican Party. If Republicans lost even 10% off their toppling (or flip it around: Trump got the bulk of base Republican support, 90% of it), this is what the electoral map would look like with a split right:
Furthermore, Alaska and South Carolina would be competitive. And you can believe that the right-on-right rhetorical violence would be fierce in such a contest. The fireworks from a Ben Sasse vs. Donald Trump matchup could even render the Democrats an afterthought, with Joe Biden waltzing easily to reelection. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to us.
Which is why it is in Senate Republican (and minority, ha ha) Leader Mitch McConnell’s interest to nip this shit in the bud. His best way to do it? Conviction. He takes away Trump’s ability to run again, and he removes 98% of the any impetus Trump might have for this party. Will Republicans have to deal with pissed-off MAGA assholes for several years? Of course, but it should be pretty clear at this point that Republicans need some time in the wilderness to rethink who they are if they are going be competitive at the national level.
The demographic trends that flipped Arizona and Georgia this time aren’t ebbing. Republican Texas is next, and South Carolina and Mississippi three to four presidential cycles behind. Kansas doesn’t have the racial and ethnic diversity of other transforming states, but it has higher-than-average education levels and is also moving in the Democrats’ direction. All of those states would more than offset any Republican gains in the rust belt and Minnesota.
Just flipping Texas and North Carolina alone keeps a Republican Party wholly dependent on white non-college evangelical voters so far from a presidential majority that it is doomed to eternal minority status. Republicans need college-educated whites (both urban and suburban), and they need to do better with growth demographics (Asian, Black, Latino, and Muslim). Trump Republicanism isn’t going to get that done.
What’s worse, the GOP advantage in the Senate will erode over time. Arizona and Georgia both went from two Republican senators to two Democratic ones seemingly overnight (though it took a decade of hard organizing to make it happen, of course). Texas came close to flipping a seat, and Democrats will hold those seats before long.
Susan Collins won’t be around forever in Maine. That seat will eventually be Democratic. South Carolina and Mississippi will be more competitive in the next two decades. Statehood for Washington, D.C. and maybe Puerto Rico would further erase their built-in advantages. And again, if Republicans retreated to a white evangelical base, they could still hold an easy 30-40 Senate seats, representing a fraction of the U.S. population, but that’s not going to get them a majority.
On the other hand, if Republicans excise the Trump cancer, wander in the wilderness for one to two presidential cycles, and start winning back college whites while eating away at Democratic dominance with voters of color, then you have a national party once again.
By all indications, that’s where McConnell’s head seems to be. He’s done playing with Trump and his cult: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people." It doesn’t hurt that conservative mega-donors and corporate PACs are refusing to donate to Republicans until they clean house of the insurrectionists.
So for conservatives suddenly in danger of losing control of their party to American fascists, that might not be a bad course of action. They had a good run, got themselves an ill-gained 6-3 Supreme Court majority, some nice tax cuts, a few wars, and lots of environmental degradation and higher global temperatures. None of that would’ve been possible with a truly democratic America, one in which the Senate actually reflected people, not cow country, and one in which presidents got popularly elected by a majority of the American people, not just a handful of battleground states.
And sure, it led to an actual insurrection and occupation of the U.S. Capitol by American Nazis, but all in all, I’m sure they’d do it all over again. It’s just that the bill has come due, and they now have to pay the price.
Then again, they can roll the die some more. They can gamble that a deplatformed Trump won’t have anywhere near the juice to maintain his level of influence. They can gamble that they can still keep control of the Trump-only hidden deplorable crowd, that it was just a few “bad apples” and antifa infiltrators who caused the Capitol insurrection. They can guess (with good reason) that Trump is incapable of managing anything well, and that his party wouldn’t be any different. Remember, this is the guy who bankrupted a casino. This is a guy whose most successful investment is the one he had nothing to do with. He’s the guy who surrounds himself with hucksters and grifters like Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale.
For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time. pic.twitter.com/aJgCNfx1m0
They can try to blow kisses at Trump and hope it keeps him (and his MAGA/Q adherents) satisfied enough to keep him in the fold. This is the Sen. Lindsey Graham approach. "I hope people in our party understand the party itself. If you're wanting to erase Donald Trump from the party, you're gonna get erased," Graham said on Fox News. "Most Republicans like his policies, a lot of Republicans like his style. A lot of people are disappointed with him personally at times but appreciate the outcomes he's achieved for our country." Maybe if they stroke his ego enough, Trump will be stay happy until he loses interest and heads off to the golf course.
And is there really that much danger? Trump can’t tweet his threats, and he doesn’t have a White House press office to distribute his proclamations. He was never able to generate small-dollar donations for other candidates, including his preferred primary choices. (Not that Trump would ever direct his supporters’ dollars anywhere but into his own pocket.) And anyone betting that this party will ever get off the ground and have enough juice to seriously impact Republican politics would be taking one hell of a risk. I wouldn’t take that bet. Trump just doesn’t have a track record of success.
But for Republicans, it’s an existential question: Do they cut the Trump cancer out, wander in the wilderness for a few cycles, then rebuild in the image of today’s America (more diverse, more educated, more secular), or do they keep going down the same path that cost them the House, the Senate, the White House, and the critical support of key growth demographics (not to mention, Arizona, Georgia, and soon, Texas), while at the same time remaining beholden to the whims of an egotistical madman?
If I were them, I’d rip off the Band-Aid and start rebuilding today.
During House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s weekly press briefing on Thursday morning, the California Democrat appeared to stop herself from making a mistake many of us may find ourselves making as we adjust to life in 2021. What is it? The speaker referred to Joe Biden as “vice president” and then updated her language with the now correct identifier: President Biden. As change goes, a pretty fun one to adjust to after four years of the Trump administration.
On a more serious note, however, the speaker stressed a point that will be reassuring to many progressives, Democrats, and, frankly, even some Republicans. In reference to the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Pelosi said, “There is no question that there were members in this body who gave aid and comfort to those … with the idea that they were embracing a lie. ... A lie perpetuated by the president."
She went on to state that there will be an after-action review, and, if House lawmakers “did aid and abet, there will be more than just comments from their colleagues here. … There will be prosecution if they aided and abetted an insurrection in which people died.” Pelosi stressed, of course, that it all comes down to evidence, which, in her words, “remains to be seen.”
Let’s check out other highlights of her briefing, as well as clips, below.
Here’s that clip.
Speaker Pelosi says there will be consequences if House lawmakers are found to have aided and abetted insurrectionists: "More than just comments from their colleagues here, there will be prosecution." pic.twitter.com/OxtZLBAomy
A journalist, identified on Twitter as Manu Raju of CNN, asked Pelosi if she was at all concerned that moving forward with an impeachment trial could contradict or undercut efforts to unify the country. In a word, she said, “No.”
Here’s that clip.
Speaker Pelosi says it would be “harmful to unity” to not hold Trump accountable for inciting the insurrection. The Senate must convict Trump. pic.twitter.com/gC8xBdyjzb
“The fact is, the president of the United States committed an act of incitement of insurrection. I don’t think it’s very unifying to say, Oh, let’s just forget it and move on.” Pelosi stressed it’s their responsibility to protect and defend the integrity and constitution of the United States.
"You don't say to a president, ‘Do whatever you want in the last months of your administration,’ ... 'You're going to get a Get Out of Jail Card free,' because people think we should make nice-nice and forget that people died here on January 6th."
Pelosi stressed she thinks forgetting would, in fact, be harmful to unifying the country. And she’s definitely right, even as some Republicans, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, argue: “What good comes from impeaching a guy in Florida?,” as though Trump has been just “a guy in Florida” for the last four years.
On a heartwarming note, Pelosi talked about the inauguration as a “breath of fresh air” for the nation, and congratulated the three new Democratic senators, as well as celebrating the new majority Democrats hold in the Senate.
Here is that clip.
Speaker Pelosi: "That inauguration was a breath of fresh air for our country." pic.twitter.com/pdlz73WFRe
Republicans want to move along and forget that whole thing where a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatening the lives of lawmakers and killing one police officer and wounding others. Donald Trump isn’t in office anymore, the senators who would have to vote in his impeachment trial say, so there’s nothing to talk about anymore.
We should move on from the 15 police officers hospitalized and more than 100 injured as Trump-supporting domestic terrorists beat them with fire extinguishers and American flags and fists and whatever else was available, shot bear spray at them, massed in the hundreds if not thousands to force their way through doors and beat down windows, and in one case Tasered an officer in the neck until he had a heart attack.
Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment, said after classified briefings on the attack, “I was left with a profound sense that it was much worse than people realized.”
But Senate Republicans are strenuously looking for excuses not to hold Trump accountable. Sen. John Cornyn spent Thursday morning quoting former Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz to suggest that holding Trump to account for his significant role in whipping up the mob that attacked the Capitol would be merely “seek[ing] revenge” and would “distract from President Biden’s agenda, and make it hard to heal the country.”
”What good comes from impeaching a guy in Florida?” Sen. Lindsey Graham asked. But he made clear to CNN that his concern was not about “what good” but about what’s good for the Republican Party, saying: “There's no way to be a successful Republican Party without having President Trump working with all of us and all of us working with him. That's just a fact. And I think we got a decent chance of coming back in 2022. But we can't do it without the President.”
Trump told these people to come to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the president. “Will be wild,” he tweeted. That day, he told the crowd “we’re going to have to fight much harder,” and, “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.” Then, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he told them he would be with them as they marched on the Capitol.
What good would come from impeaching him now that he’s a private citizen in Florida? You put a marker down that inciting violence against Congress specifically as it attempts to carry out the process of democracy is not acceptable. Do Cornyn or Graham treat a dirt-filled wound by slapping a bandage on it and pretending it’s not there? Because that’s a recipe for festering infection, just as refusing to address what happened at the Capitol, and Trump’s role in it, would worsen the already festering infection in U.S. politics.
Republicans like Cornyn and Graham, though, don’t care about what’s good for the nation. They care about what’s good for the Republican Party.
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate is likely to be a real trial, unlike the first time around when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans conducted a sham process, refusing to hear witnesses and refusing to consider the gravity of Trump's crimes. That's changed, now that their place of work—their essential home—has been defiled by an insurrectionist mob incited by Trump. That the impeachment hearings will go forward this time was made clear Tuesday by none other than McConnell, when he stated on the floor "The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people."
Despite McConnell's essential granting of the validity of the charges against Trump and recognition that the process will proceed, there will still be Republicans and Trump apologists who will argue that the Senate shouldn't continue because Trump is already gone—variations on the supposed "unity" theme we have been hearing since January 6 and the violent, armed, deadly insurrection Trump instigated. Some will argue that the Senate cannot try a former president for acts during his or her presidency. Most nonpartisan experts have called that idea bunk, but now we have the pretty darned definitive conclusion of the Congressional Research Service, which looks at all the scholarship and all the precedent, and concludes that it is well within the power of Congress to convict a departed official and that "even if an official is no longer in office, an impeachment conviction may still be viewed as necessary by Congress to clearly delineate the outer bounds of acceptable conduct in office for the future."
The attorneys writing at Congressional Research Service start at the beginning. "As an initial matter, a number of scholars have argued that the delegates at the Constitutional Convention appeared to accept that former officials may be impeached for conduct that occurred while in office," they write. "This understanding also tracks with certain state constitutions predating the Constitution, which allowed for impeachments of officials after they left office." That's following the precedent of British law and practice, which included the impeachment of the former governor-general of Bengal Warren Hastings, impeached two years after his resignation and while the Constitutional Convention was actually happening. The Framers were aware of this while it was happening, and in crafting the impeachment articles did depart from some British precedent—for example requiring a two-thirds rather than simple majority vote for conviction—but they didn't explicitly restrict Congress's power to convict a departed official.
There's the plain text of the Constitution, however, which doesn't really definitively say one way or the other. "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment … and Conviction." Then there's the other part: "judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States [emphasis added]," which follows from removal from office. How could you disqualify an already-departed and deserving official from holding future office if you couldn't impeach them first? As one scholar argued all the way back in the 1920s, "an official's resignation following an initial impeachment by the House but before conviction in the Senate may not 'deprive the people of the full measure of the protection afforded them' through the additional remedy of disqualification."
What was in the Framer's heads isn't too hard to divine, either. They told us. CRS relates this: "President John Quincy Adams, who, during debate on the House's authority to impeach Daniel Webster for conduct that occurred while he had been Secretary of State, said in relation to his own acts as President: 'I hold myself, so long as I have the breath of life in my body, amenable to
impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office.'" There's also the precedence of the 1876 impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap for, essentially, bribery—accepting payments in return for making an appointment. Belknap resigned hours before a House committee determined there was "unquestioned evidence of malfeasance," but the committee recommended impeachment anyway, despite his resignation. The House debated moving forward, and ultimately approved the resolution, without objection. The Senate debated and deliberated on the issue of whether he could be tried in the Senate as a former official for more than two weeks, and ultimately "determined by a vote of 37 to 29 that Secretary Belknap was 'amenable to trial by impeachment for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office before he was impeached.'" That vote established the representation of an impeached former official being subject to a Senate trial. A majority voted to convict, but not a two-thirds majority.
What the CRS report does not go into deeply, and what would be the larger point of a Trump conviction, is the disqualification part. That would come in a simple majority vote following a successful conviction, and would prevent Trump from ever holding "any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States." They can't get to that part—the part that matters to McConnell and plenty of other Republicans—if they don't do the first part, convict.
McConnell's condemnation of Trump on Tuesday means little more than McConnell trying to create distance between himself and the man he—almost single-handedly—allowed to remain in a position in which he could raise an insurrection against McConnell's own branch. This could have been prevented if, one year ago, McConnell and Senate Republicans had offered even one word of rebuke to contain Trump. If at any point in the last four years McConnell had done anything to curtail Trump's worst instincts. Hell, if we wound the clock back to late summer 2016 when the entire intelligence community was warning congressional leadership that Russia was intervening in the election on Trump's behalf, when McConnell refused to let that information be made public. But I digress.
Yes, Trump can still be impeached, convicted, and barred from ever holding office again. That's if Senate Republicans care more about the country, about their own institution, about the future of their own party than about their next election and whether the MAGA crowd will primary them.
In 2016, Donald Trump infamously said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing the support of his fanatical followers. That still appears to be pretty much true as, after refusing to acknowledge the results of a free election, splitting his own party, presiding over the loss of the Senate, and instigating a deadly, violent assault on the Capitol in a bid to interfere with counting electoral votes, the latest CIVIQS results still show Trump holding onto 43% support.
In fact, if anyone has suffered from Trump’s actions it’s every other Republican official. It doesn’t even seem to matter to what degree they supported Trump in his efforts to topple the elected government. Kevin McCarthy? Way down. Mitch McConnell? Down to a hilarious 11% favorable rating. But the biggest loser may be Mike Pence, who has seen his support among Republicans plummet, putting him at a 33% favorable rating.
All of this can be explained simply enough: Republicans no longer think of themselves as Republicans. By a two to one margin, those who voted for Trump say they consider themselves “a Trump supporter,” not “a Republican.”
The way that these voters attach to Trump rather than anyone else can be seen in another value in the poll. When asked if they believed the election was “stolen,” a jaw-dropping 40% of Americans still said yes, over a week after the assault on the Capitol. But when asked if Republicans who voted against certifying the vote were “protecting democracy,” only 37% agreed. Even when Republicans were doing exactly what Trump asked them to do, they still got lower marks than Trump himself.
There was an interesting split on views of the actual insurgency. Asked if the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol represented “a coup attempt,” 53% of Americans agreed—within a point of those in the poll who said they did not vote for Trump. However, when asked if the attack was “an act of terrorism,” the number rose to 60%. That number indicates that even some of those who voted for Trump were upset over the the sight of a mob prowling the halls of Congress. That number was apparently confirmed by the 62% who agreed that everyone who broke into the Capitol building should be arrested. And still, the guy who instigated the attack is polling far higher than other Republicans.
Finally, a plurality of voters want to see both Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley kicked out of the Senate. In Hawley’s case, that includes at least some voters who went for Trump.
Everything in the poll seems to indicate that Trump voters remain Trump voters, not Republican voters. If there remains a core of non-Trump Republicans, they are vanishingly small. As the GOP tries to separate itself from the angry guy leaving the room, it’s completely unclear how many of those Trump voters are ready to come back into their ranks without Big Orange at the lead. With a 11% favorable rating for McConnell, and a 20% rating for McCarthy … just who is the leader of the Republican Party going into 2021?
One possible side effect of this deep schism in the Republican Party is that it may make it easier for McConnell and other Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment. To coin a phrase: What do you have to lose?
The House has just impeached Donald Trump for the second time following a violent insurrection by his supporters that endangered the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. Trump got into the White House to begin with despite losing the popular vote in 2016, but went on to pack the federal courts with lifetime judges, including appointing one in three Supreme Court justices. The recent Republican Senate majority, which refused to rein in Trump’s abuses after his first impeachment, was elected with 20 million fewer votes than the Democratic minority.
You don’t have to look far or hard for evidence of the flaws in U.S. democracy. But in thinking about how to fix it, it’s helpful to have a framework for understanding what’s going on here—the roots of the problems and how deep they go. Political scientist Douglas Amy offers a start on that with Second Rate Democracy, a website laying out 17 ways the U.S. lags behind other major western countries on democracy.
In the introduction, Amy notes that:
Besides Denmark, no other advanced democracy follows the U.S. example and appoints Supreme Court justices for life – all now have mandatory term limits or age limits for justices.
None use an Electoral College that allows a minority of voters to choose its chief executive.
Most use different voting systems that make gerrymandering impossible and create more representative multi-party legislatures.
None have anything like our misrepresentative Senate that gives the 40 million voters in the 22 smallest states forty-four seats, while giving 40 million Californians two seats.
Nearly all have rejected our conflict-prone separation-of-powers model of government and have chosen instead a more cooperative parliamentary system that avoids the legislative gridlock that plagues our government.
And all rely much more on public money, not private money from rich organizations and individuals, to fund their election campaigns.
Amy offers a framework for assessing the health of democracies, from majority rule and fair representation to the rule of law, political equality, and public participation. To fix the problem, we need to understand the problem. This is one resource for doing so.
Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has succeeded again in obstructing vital action for the future of the nation. In this case it’s the conviction of Donald Trump, with McConnell refusing to reconvene the Senate to hold the impeachment hearings and conviction vote until after Trump is gone. One thing that will undoubtedly do is spur conservative commentators, and probably no small number of Republican senators, to insist you can't impeach and convict a former president.
Well, you can. At least the legal minds at Just Security say so: "The Constitution provides that the President 'shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,' but it says nothing about the timing of when the impeachment and trial may take place." The Constitution leaves that possibility open, probably for one key reason—to make sure that an official and in particular a president who was convicted of "high crimes and misdemeanors" be barred from ever holding another office.
As Michael Gerhardt at Just Security writes, "the special penalties upon conviction in impeachment are designed to protect the republic from the very type of people who have abused public office in such a grave manner that they should never have the opportunity to be entrusted with public power again." It's almost as if the impeachment statutes were written for Trump. "It would make no sense for former officials," Gerhardt continues, "or ones who step down just in time, to escape that remedial mechanism."
At The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin agrees. "Nothing in the text of the Constitution bars impeaching and trying officials who have already left office. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution indicates that '[t]he President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.'" Further, "Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 says that 'Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.' Notice that the latter is a penalty that can be applied even to an official who is no longer in office."
Michael Stokes Paulsen at The Bulwark agrees, too. "Impeachment is the exclusive method for removing a president from office but nothing in the constitutional text literally limits impeachment to present officeholders. Moreover, it would seem almost absurd to permit a miscreant officeholder to frustrate completely the possibility of receiving the constitutionally contemplated punishment of disqualification from future office by quickly submitting a pre-emptive resignation, hoping to launch a new bid for office in the future."
No, no president has ever been removed from office by the Senate, either during or after his term. But no other president has been impeached twice either. He's setting all kinds of precedent here, so this should be another. You can sure bet that if the Founding Fathers were around now to see what has happened to their government and what was installed in the White House for the past four years, they'd say about impeachment is: "What took you so long?"
