When word leaked out that the House managers had “new evidence” in their case against Trump, the reflex was to think: Well, okay, but if you’re going to leak this in advance, it better live up to the hype.
I’m here to tell you: It lived up.
Wednesday’s video presentation—led by Eric Swalwell, whose intelligence we knew about already, and Stacey Plaskett, who was the day’s rock star and makes me want the U.S. Virgin Islands to be a state so she can be a senator tomorrow—was gutting. There’s no other way to describe it. The feelings of sadness, rage, anger, grief, and relief that shot across my synapses while watching those images just left me… gutted. If they didn’t leave you that way, maybe you’re not a person who needs or even deserves to live in a democracy.
The bottom line: The footage made it clearer than it’s ever been made, “clearer than truth” in Dean Acheson’s imperishable phrase, how lucky we are that this wasn’t worse. How it was only the quick and courageous thinking on the part of many police officers, and a few strokes of dumb luck, that prevented members of our government from being savagely murdered by fans of our then president.
The vice president of the United States was about a minute away from maybe being killed. He was being hunted. Think about that. The speaker of the House, ditto. That “Nancy, where are you, Nancy, we’re lookin’ for you? Naaancy! Oh Naaancy!” in that one video was chilling. If some staffers hadn’t had just enough seconds to shove some office furniture in front of some doors, who knows how many people could have been killed?
Republican senators have to know this, even the ones who were doing the crossword puzzle. Someone observed over the course of the day that this might well be the first time Republican senators have even seen these images. They’ve spent five years going out of their way not to read Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, not to watch his rallies, to be volitionally deaf and blind to their president’s acts of treason. So they may not even have known what Officer Eugene Goodman did until Wednesday evening.
But Swalwell made sure they knew. He was devastating. He was assigned the task of explaining to the senators how close they themselves were to danger, were it not for Goodman’s fast thinking. “You know how close you came to the mob,” he said to the senators. “Some of you could hear them.”
He then said he counted it off. Fifty-eight steps. Which, depending on the length of his stride, is what, 150 feet or so? Which in a building the size of the Capitol isn’t far. I know those corridors and anterooms reasonably well. A running mob, even one that consists of old out-of-shape guys, can cover that ground—half a football field—in less than 10 seconds.
So the chamber of the United States Senate, in other words, was 10 seconds or so from being overrun by the mob. And the rioters were, shall we say, admirably bipartisan. They were interested in Republican scalps as well as Democratic ones.
As I watched at that very moment, I kept wondering: How many of these 50 Republican senators sitting there are feeling grateful or guilty? Grateful, maybe; I could imagine that. But guilty? Don’t be silly.
To feel guilty, you have to have a conscience, and I’m afraid that when it comes to Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and even Rob Portman, a conscience is a pretty big ask. They have shut that weak part of their brains down. The only parts of their brains that still function are the part locked into Trump’s approval rating in their deep-red states and the related part fixated on that super-Trumpy congressman or lumber magnate or football coach back home who wants to primary them.
These senators can sit there and deny reality, but the reality is devastating to Trump’s case. Devastating. Now, I could maybe see a senator thinking, as indeed some already started saying: “Well, this video is hideous, and none of us condone that, of course. But what they haven’t done is establish Trump’s direct culpability.”
But they did. Earlier on Wednesday, before Swalwell and Plaskett, Madeleine Dean and Ted Lieu did a slam-dunk job of establishing that Trump incited the mob. You’ve heard this by now: the “but for” test. That is, but for Trump’s actions, would this riot have happened? No.
After dinner break, David Cicilline and Joaquin Castro reinforced the argument of Trump’s direct culpability. As Cicilline noted, “Donald Trump did not once condemn the attack.” At 1:49 p.m., nearly an hour after the Capitol was stormed, he retweeted his incendiary speech from earlier that day. Then, at 2 p.m., he tried to call Tommy Tuberville; not to ask if he was safe, not to see how things were at the Capitol, but to pressure him to obstruct the certification. Cicilline and Castro both noted how many people around Trump implored him to say something to stop the madness. Nothing.
I’ve watched Democrats do a lot of things over the years. Conventions, big hearings, big votes, big addresses, etc. They’ve done some well, some not so well. But every time, there was always something I thought they could have done better.
On this impeachment hearing, though, there is nothing I think they could have done better. Every step of this prosecution has been expertly plotted. Jamie Raskin’s closing remarks Tuesday were astonishingly moving and profound. His words will survive for as long as this republic survives and will be studied decades from now.
They have also successfully pre-butted what will be Trump’s likely defense, that his words were protected free speech. This is still America, despite Trump and the Republicans’ best efforts, so the accused is entitled to his defense, and we are obliged to hear it.
But again, we saw it. It’s on tape, and it’s on Twitter. If you mean “fight!” metaphorically, then when violence starts, you immediately say, “Hey, I didn’t mean violence!” He did not.
And we know why. He sat in the White House watching the riot thinking: This is about me. They’re doing this for me.
America knows. Even these 50 Republican senators know. The case is overwhelming.
And yet, how will these Republicans vote? This is a somber day for America. Justice may not be served in this trial, but the Democratic prosecutors have laid the candid facts before the nation, the world, and history in so powerful a way that it will, Republican cowardice notwithstanding, make our democracy stronger.
“Remember this day forever!” Trump tweeted on Jan. 6. Rest assured—we will.
