Guardian columnist Lloyd Green has written about the future of the Republican party after Donald Trump’s acquittal on Saturday:
What was once the proud party of Lincoln and Reagan is now a Trump family rag – something to be used and abused by the 45th president like his bankrupt companies, namesake university and hapless vice-president, Mike Pence.
Yet even the former vice-president has remained mum and his brother, Greg Pence, a congressman from Indiana, voted against impeachment. Talk about taking one for the team.
In the end, devotion to a former reality show host literally trumped life itself. The mob belongs to Trump – as the Capitol police can attest. So much for the GOP’s embrace of “law and order”. When it mattered most, it counted least.
You can read the full column below:
Delaware’s Democrat senator Chris Coons suggested fear of backlash from voters stopped more of his Republican colleagues from voting to convict Donald Trump at his latest impeachment trial.
“I’m fairly certain there would have been a vote to convict with a secret ballot,” he said on Sunday during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. “Ultimately it’s in the hands of the American people. But I do think the Republican Party is deeply divided right now. And I’m grateful for the seven Republican senators and 10 Republican House members who stood up for the Constitution and stood up to President Trump.”
This Week(@ThisWeekABC)
Sen. Chris Coons echoes calls for a 9/11-style commission in wake of the impeachment trial: “There’s still more evidence that the American people need and deserve to hear.” https://t.co/L6vzgDaa8kpic.twitter.com/6zHCURRPfa
He also said that senate minority leader Mitch McConnell influence was crucial in influencing his Republican colleagues. “Once Mitch McConnell made it clear he intended to acquit, even despite the compelling evidence, what the House managers needed wasn’t more witnesses or more evidence, what we all needed was more Republican courage,” said Coons.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson has characterised Donald Trump’s impeachment and acquittal on a charge of inciting insurrection against his own government as “toings and froings and all the kerfuffle”.
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Johnson was asked what signal the acquittal of a president who stoked violence while casting doubt on a free election would send to the rest of the world.
“The clear message that we get from the proceedings in America,” the prime minister said, “is that after all the toings and froings and all the kerfuffle, American democracy is strong and the American constitution is strong and robust.”
Five people died as a direct result of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, who the president told to “fight like hell” in his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden, on 6 January.
Boris Johnson during a call to Joe Biden last month. Photograph: Downing St/Reuters
In the former president’s second impeachment trial, House prosecutors showed chilling footage of lawmakers being hustled to safety by Capitol police.
Members of the pro-Trump mob chanted “hang Mike Pence” as they searched for Trump’s vice-president. Some erected a gallows outside the Capitol.
Constitutional experts have not been as sure as Johnson that the episode painted America’s 233-year-old system of government in such a positive light.
Andrew Rudalevige of Bowdoin College told Axios: “Congress not even pushing back against a physical assault suggests that there’s a lot they will put up with.”
While Trump was in office, Johnson cleaved so close to the president and his populist policies and style that Biden was reported to have called the prime minister “the physical and emotional clone of Donald Trump”.
Asked on Sunday if he was concerned he and the new president might “start off on the wrong foot”, Johnson avoided the question.
“I’ve had,” he said, “I think, already two long and very good conversations with the president and we had a really good exchange, particularly about climate change and what he wants to do.”
Johnson also said the UK was “delighted now, I’m very delighted, to have a good relationship with the White House, which is an important part of any UK prime minister’s mission.”
Read the full story below:
Barack Obama has marked Valentine’s Day by paying tribute to his wife and daughters: “Happy Valentine’s Day to the three who never fail to make me smile. Your dazzling light makes everything brighter.” Meanwhile, his successor, Donald Trump, issued his own Valentine’s Day message on Twit… Ah.
Barack Obama(@BarackObama)
Happy Valentine’s Day to the three who never fail to make me smile. Your dazzling light makes everything brighter. pic.twitter.com/fMcdwf2j20
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once predicted Donald Trump would “destroy” the Republican party before becoming one of his closest allies, says Trump is “excited” about the GOP’s future.
During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham said that Trump “was grateful to his lawyers, he appreciated the help that all of us have provided”. He added that Trump is “ready to move on and rebuild the Republican party, he’s excited about 2022 and I’m going to go down to talk with him next week.”
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell did not vote to convict Trump at the impeachment trial, but gave a withering speech afterwards, condemning the former president. Graham insisted on Sunday that McConnell’s speech was “an outlier regarding how Republicans feel about all this”.
He added that it may come back to haunt Republicans: “I think Senator McConnell’s speech, he got a load off his chest, but unfortunately put a load on the back of Republicans,” Graham said. “That speech you will see in 2022 campaigns, I would imagine if you’re a Republican running in Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire where we have a chance to take back the Senate, they may be playing Senator McConnell’s speech and asking you about it if you’re a candidate.”
As for Trump’s baseless claims that the presidential election was fixed, Graham said they “are not sound and not true” but were also part of “politically protected speech”.
Bill Cassidy was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump at his impeachment travel. On Sunday, the Louisiana senator appeared on ABC’s This Week and was asked why he voted to convict Trump.
“If you describe insurrection, as I did, it’s an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, we can see the president for two months after the election promoting that the election was stolen, people still tell me they think Dominion rigged those machines, with Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, that is not true, and all the news organizations that promoted that have retracted.
“He then scheduled the rally for January 6th, just when the transfer of power was to take place. And he brought together a crowd, but a portion of that was transformed into a mob. And when they went into the Capitol, it was clear that he wished that lawmakers be intimidated. And even after he knew there was violence taking place, he continued to basically sanction the mob being there. And not until later did he actually ask them to leave.
“All of that points to a motive and a method and that is wrong, he should be held accountable.”
Cassidy, like all seven of the Republican senators who voted to convict Trump, received backlash in his home state. He said that many people in Louisiana agreed with his decision, adding “I was elected to uphold an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The majority of the people in Louisiana want that to be the case. And I have respected that trust. I have voted to support and defend the Constitution.”
Maryland’s governor Larry Hogan has been on Meet The Press this morning, and has been pretty vocal about how he feels he would have voted if he had been in the Senate, and what the future holds for the Republican party post-Trump trial. He told NBC:
I think the argument was pretty convincing. I’m not in the Senate but I think I probably would have voted with some of my colleagues that were on the losing side. I was very proud of some of the folks who stood up and did the right thing. It’s not always easy. In fact, it’s sometimes really hard to go against your base and your colleagues to do what you think is right for the country.
On the “hostile takeover” of the Republican party, and whether it can be a force without distancing themselves from Trump and his supporters, Hogan said:
I don’t think they can. I think that if they really want to win competitive seats and in purple states and if they want to win suburban districts, if we want to somehow get back the House and the Senate, if we want to win a presidential election. They’re going to have to start building coalitions like we’ve done here in one of the bluest states in the country, where you can have a message that appeals to more people.
Hogan said, however, that he was not ready to abandon the party he said he had spent his whole life working for. Hogan’s father Lawrence was the only Republican in the House to vote for all three articles of impeachment against then-president Richard Nixon in 1974.
It should have helped, perhaps, that the result was anticipated before the trial even got under way. There was no suspense, no surprise; the votes needed to convict were never there. Nor, seemingly, was the appetite for investigation: both sides agreed at the 11th hour not to call witnesses and draw this thing out.
There is a point, of course, which is to enter into public record a detailed, forensic account of what happened at the Capitol on 6 January, even if it didn’t result in conviction. This hurried process and hasty conclusion instead felt like a shrug, an afterthought, leaving us with little more than a flat sense of disgust and latent fury with nowhere to go.
What to be angry about most? Perhaps it was the absurdity of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who led a blistering attack on Trump minutes after voting to acquit him. This vote, said McConnell, was a result of what he labelled a period of “intense reflection”, which is certainly one way to describe political cowardice.
Or perhaps the most galling figure was Mitt Romney. He was one of the seven Republicans voting against Trump, a stance less evident four years ago when he sucked up to him for a place in the cabinet, or more recently, when he voted to rush through confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court.
If anything, the Republicans who voted with the Democrats on Saturday seemed worse than their Trump-supporting counterparts: these were the people who, one understood, had always had the measure of the man, but while it suited them had gone happily along with him.
Donald Trump may have escaped consequences in Congress for his actions leading up to the Capitol riot on 6 January, but CNN have this piece today reminding us that Trump’s legal woes are far from over. They cite three specific threats that the former president now faces:
Georgia election results
Georgia officials announced that the former President faces two new investigations over calls he made to election officials in an attempt to overturn the state’s election results. A source familiar with the Georgia secretary of state’s investigation confirmed they are investigating two calls, including one Trump made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Business dealings in New York
Trump also faces a criminal investigation in New York where the Manhattan District Attorney’s office is looking into whether the Trump Organization violated state laws, such as insurance fraud, tax fraud or other schemes to defraud. The scope of the investigation is broad, with prosecutors looking into, among other things, whether the Trump Organization misled financial institutions when applying for loans or violated tax laws when donating a conservation easement on its estate called Seven Springs and taking deductions on fees paid to consultants.
The insurrection in Washington, DC
In Washington, federal prosecutors have signaled that no one is above the law, including Trump, and have stressed that nothing is off the table when asked if they were looking at the former President’s role in inciting violence.
In the flurry of court proceedings after more than 200 people were charged with federal crimes, Trump’s influence on rioters has been mentioned both by prosecution and defendants looking to defray responsibility. In a case filed Thursday against a member of the Oath Keepers, prosecutors alleged the woman was awaiting direction from Trump, which is the first time they have made that direct of an allegation.
The president doesn’t have anything official in his public diary today, nevertheless we are expecting an executive order to be signed to bring back an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to the White House, as per White House senior director of coalitions media Jennifer Molina
Jennifer Molina(@JenMolina46)
NEW: Today @POTUS will sign an executive order to reestablish the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The office will work with community and faith leaders to tackle the problems in front of us.
Battles over religion are nothing new in US history, but the Trump years were a ruinous nadir. Trump goaded millions of religious conservatives to embrace the heresy of white Christian nationalism.
Biden has a plan to nudge the nation back toward a more benign and (dare one say it?) constructive engagement with faith. He hopes to encourage greater tolerance and openness across our creedal differences and to embrace the role that churches, synagogues, mosques and the houses of worship of other faith traditions play as solvers of problems and builders of civil society.
He is poised to take a big step on Sunday by signing an executive order returning an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to the White House. This is another instance of what is becoming a through-line in the Biden presidency: restoration combined with transformation.
On the restorationist side, Biden is bringing back an approach to partnerships with faith-based organizations that was pursued by both Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush. But the transformational aspect includes a call for civil society groups, including religious ones, to engage deeply in our ongoing battles against the pandemic, systemic racism and the entrenched problems facing historically disadvantaged communities.
Over these three years, the Parkland families have taught all of us something profound. Time and again, they have showed us how we can turn our grief into purpose – to march, organize, and build a strong, inclusive, and durable movement for change.
The Parkland students and so many other young people across the country who have experienced gun violence are carrying forward the history of the American journey. It is a history written by young people in each generation who challenged prevailing dogma to demand a simple truth: we can do better. And we will.
This Administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call. We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer. Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.
While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.
Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.
The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.
Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.
This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Importantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.
One slightly curious aspect of the trial coverage over the last few days – it was one of the few times in the US you could get to hear someone say “motherfucker” live on the television during the day.
David Bauder, the media writer at the Associated Press, has had a look at the likelihood that news networks could end up with a fine for broadcasting the obscenities as they were used in video clips shown in the Senate chamber.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prohibits broadcasters from airing indecent or profane content between the hours of 6am and 10pm, when children could reasonably be expected to be in the audience.
There’s no exemption for news channels in the rules – though in practice enforcement is unlikely. The first requirement for FCC action is getting a complaint from the public, which would lead the government body to open an investigation. There have been some complaints, an agency spokesman said on Friday.
Repeated obscenities were shouted by members of the pro-Trump mob as they moved toward and inside the US Capitol that day. They included a chant of “fuck the blue,” directed at police officers, and other swear words as the crowd became more confrontational and violent.
Paul Levinson, a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University said “The FCC doesn’t want to get anywhere near what would be considered political censorship.”
News executives who aired the language this week argued that it would be wrong to edit language being used on the floor of the US Senate. In their defense they will point to the fact that many networks bleeped out the offending language when repeating videos later, although they could not intercept the language when it was being broadcast live.
The FCC fined ABC and Fox in 2012 after they aired obscenities blurted out during an awards show, but the supreme court threw the action out, saying the networks could not have anticipated the language. Networks will argue the same thing with the impeachment trial.
The FCC received complaints in 2018 after news programs aired stories about Trump referring to some African and Latin American nations as “shithole countries,” but did not take enforcement action.
Given the explicitness of the language used this week, during daytime hours, Levinson said he believes it’s a watershed moment in broadcast standards. “The fact that this language was put out there,” he says, “is a very important step forward in terms of freedom of expression.”
Bauder reminds us that we can thank the late comic George Carlin for the rules. When his famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” was played on a New York radio station in 1973, it led to a supreme court ruling that affirmed the FCC’s authority to fine radio or television stations for using such words and, potentially, take away their license to broadcast.
The seven Republican senators who broke rank by voting to convict former president Donald Trump at his impeachment trial faced immediate hostility and criticism from fellow conservatives revealing the potentially high cost of opposing Trumpism within the party.
These senators – North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s Mitt Romney, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey – brought the total number of guilty votes to 57. That was not nearly enough to secure a conviction, but easily enough to ensure instant attack from fellow Republicans and others on the right.
The reaction was a powerful illustration of the strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican party even though he is out of office. “Let’s impeach RINOs from the Republican Party!!!” Trump’s son and conservative favorite Donald Trump Jr said on Twitter, using the insulting acronym for Republicans In Name Only.
The instant backlash came from powerful rightwing media figures also. Conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham commented: “Prediction: none of the Republicans who voted in the affirmative today will speak at the 2024 GOP convention.”
For Cassidy, there was almost instant retribution in his own state. Jeff Landry, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, tweeted: “Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote is extremely disappointing.”
The local party agreed and its executive committee unanimously voted to censure Cassidy for his vote. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him,” the Republican Party of Louisiana similarly said in a statement.
Cassidy was not alone, as Burr’s state party in North Carolina also went immediately on the attack. Michael Whatley, North Carolina Republican Party chair, condemned his colleague in a statement, saying: “North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing.”
One thing you may have missed overnight in all the frenzy of the impeachment outcome – the Biden administration has suffered a very early resignation, with deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo resigning after making threatening and abusive remarks to a reporter.
“We accepted the resignation of TJ Ducklo after a discussion with him this evening,” press secretary Jen Psaki said last night in a statement.
“We are committed to striving every day to meet the standard set by the president in treating others with dignity and respect, with civility and with a value for others through our words and our actions,” she said.
In his resignation statement, posted to social media, Ducklo said: “I used language that no woman should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she was just trying to do her job. It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful, and unacceptable. I am devastated to have embarrassed and disappointed my White House colleagues. I know this was terrible. I know I can’t take it back.”
The conversation in question appears to have occurred when Ducklo was on a call with Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, who was questioning him about his relationship with Axios reporter Alexi McCammond.
Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell appeared to finally break from Trump yesterday, after four years of supporting him and voting to acquit him in both impeachment trials. Alan Fram at Associated Press has analysed the Trump-McConnell relationship this morning.
He notes that McConnell had signaled last month that he was open to finding Trump guilty, a jaw-dropping admission of alienation after spending four years largely helping him or ducking comments about his most outrageous assertions.
McConnell called the 6 January assault a “foreseeable consequence” of Trump using the presidency, calling it “the largest megaphone on Planet Earth.” Rather than calling off the rioters, McConnell accused Trump of “praising the criminals” and seeming determined to overturn the election “or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
The 36-year Senate veteran maneuvered through Trump’s four years in office like a captain steering a ship through a rocky strait on stormy seas. Battered at times by vindictive presidential tweets, McConnell made a habit of saying nothing about many of Trump’s outrageous comments.
He ended up guiding the Senate to victories such as the 2017 tax cuts and the confirmations of three Supreme Court justices and more than 200 other federal judges.
Their relationship, built more on expedience than admiration, plummeted after Trump’s denial of his 3 November defeat and relentless efforts to reverse the voters’ verdict with his baseless claims that Democrats fraudulently stole the election.
It withered completely last month, after Republicans lost Senate control with two Georgia runoff defeats they blamed on Trump, and the savage attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. The day of the riot, McConnell railed against “thugs, mobs, or threats” and described the attack as “this failed insurrection.”
Nevertheless, having declined to recall the Senate to hear the impeachment case while Trump was still in office, McConnell voted not to convict him on the grounds that Trump was now out of office.
One aspect of the impeachment trial that Fox News have gone big on today is the confusion yesterday when House impeachment managers won a vote to use witnesses in the trial, and then did not use any witnesses. In fact, the Fox News website is leading on that at the moment, rather than the verdict, in a piece liberally filled with criticism of the Democrats from their own side:
“This is so weak,” Meena Harris, the niece of Vice President Harris, said. “Just do us the favor of not acting appalled when he runs again in 2024.”
“This is retreat. White flag. Malpractice. Completely unstrategic. They just closed the door on others who may have stepped out, as @HerreraBeutler urged last night,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee Co-founder Adam Green said. “Just when we thought Dems were being bold and strategic. This is grabbing lameness out of the jaws of boldness.”
For his part, House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin defended the apparent u-turn, saying:
“We tried this case as aggressively as we could on the law and on the facts… We got from the president’s lawyers exactly what we wanted which was the entering into the evidentiary record of the statement by our colleague Congresswoman Beutler,” he said. “And we got that I was able to read it before the entire country and it became part of the case. And it became an important part of our case.”
He added: “We could have had 500 witnesses and it would have not have overcome the kinds of arguments being made by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans who were hanging their hats on the claim that it was somehow unconstitutional to try a former president.”
The impeachment trial is not yet quite in the rear-view mirror, but there’s already some areas where state Republican parties are looking ahead – and in California it is removing Gov Gavin Newsom that is their aim.
Associated Press report that the California Republican Party announced Saturday that it is giving $125,000 to the campaign aimed at recalling Newsom.
The infusion of cash comes at a critical time for organizers, who are required to collect 1.5 million valid petition signatures by mid-March to qualify the proposal for the ballot. The funds will go toward hiring workers to gather signatures. So far, that work has fallen largely on volunteers, along with mailings sent to households around the state.
The funds to try and dislodge Newsom were donated to Rescue California, one of several political committees working to oust his from office. Newsom’s political advisers call the proposal a misguided effort by supporters of former president Donald Trump and other Republicans. The party wrote the check just days after the Republican National Committee gave the state party $250,000 intended to aid the recall drive.
Organizers say they have collected over 1.5 million signatures so far, although it’s not clear how many of them will be disqualified because of technical or other errors. “We expect to collect another 400,000 signatures,” Rescue California campaign manager Anne Dunsmore said in a statement. The Republican contribution “will guarantee that we bring in enough additional signatures to hold Gavin Newsom accountable,” she added.
Dan Newman, Newsom’s chief strategist, said the check confirms the financial partnership between the recall effort and state and national Republicans.
“The facade is gone. It’s never been more clear they’re admitting that the Republican recall scheme is simple partisan politics,” Newman said in a statement. “Republicans have lost every single state election for 15 years, so they’re trying increasingly desperate, distracting and destructive things.”
Polls show Newsom’s popularity has been sliding as residents recoil from long-running coronavirus rules that have shuttered schools and businesses.
Newsom also has weathered a public drubbing for dining out with friends and lobbyists at a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant last fall, while telling residents to stay home. And more recently, an ever-expanding fraud scandal at the state unemployment agency has his leadership during the pandemic under even closer scrutiny.
Although the recall has yet to qualify for the ballot, the Republican field is continuing to take shape. Among the early candidates: former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and businessman John Cox, who lost to Newsom in a landslide in 2018.
