Damn near every Republican senator has to know two things. First, that this trial of Donald Trump that’s starting Tuesday is constitutional. And second, that he is obviously, relentlessly, unconditionally, morally, theologically, epistemologically, psychologically, and plain old logically guilty.
They know these things, and yet, as the rest of us know all too well, they’re going to acquit him. And we know why. Or we think we know why.
The commonly stated reason for their behavior is that they’re cowards. They’re afraid of Trump. They’re afraid of their own extreme base. All that’s true. But I say it’s worse than that. I say most of them don’t even want to buck Trump and the base. They want an extremist, authoritarian party because extremism and authoritarianism are the only ways they can get, and hold, power.
We’ll come back to all that, but first let’s return to the two things they know.
The trial is constitutional. True, the Constitution itself doesn’t directly address the question of whether the Senate can try someone who’s no longer in office. People can read these vague passages of the Constitution however they want to read them.
But the case for the trial’s constitutionality isn’t found in the document itself. It’s found in history. There was one occasion in our history when the Senate addressed this exact question directly: Did the Senate have the constitutional authority to hold an impeachment trial of a federal official who had already vacated his office? It was 1876, and allegations of petty corruption arose against Secretary of War William Belknap, who’d long aroused suspicion by appearing to live above his means. Proof emerged from a House committee. The House moved to impeach. Panic-stricken, Belknap raced to the White House to hand President Grant his resignation, admitting to years of graft.
But it didn’t stave anything off. The House impeached him anyway, even though he was now a former office holder. The trial went to the Senate, but before voting on whether to convict or acquit, the Senate voted on whether it even had the right to hold such a trial. It decided that it did, by 37-29.
So the only time in its history the Senate directly considered the question of whether it had jurisdiction over a former office holder, it decided in the affirmative. One can agree with that or not, but one can’t deny that it’s precedent, and the only precedent on the books.
Now, as for Trump’s guilt, no serious and honest person can deny it for a second. Yes, he used the word “peaceful,” once, in his speech that morning. But everybody heard all the other things he said. He encouraged the insurrection. It tried to halt the most important ceremonial proceeding in our democracy and reverse the outcome of an election. It resulted in five deaths, including a police officer. If doing all that isn’t a high crime or misdemeanor, the phrase has no meaning. A future president can do the same thing again, or something worse.
And this is where we circle back to my main point. Republicans don’t want to punish Trump for what he did because somewhere in the darkest and most inaccessible corners of their minds, they know that a Republican president may do something like it again.
They are an anti-democracy party. They have been trying for a decade or more to rig elections so that they never lose. (Read my 2019 column on “competitive authoritarianism.”) They tried like the devil to rig last November’s. Having failed at that, they’re off to a galloping start to make sure they can rig the next one. If you’ve not yet heard about this chilling new report from the Brennan Center, please familiarize yourself with it. More than 100 voter suppression bills have been introduced in 28 states already this year.
This is not a party that wants to win things fair and square.
It is also not a party that represents the majority view on practically any major issue:
Biden’s $1.9 trillion package, 68 percent support.
A $15 minimum wage, 61 percent support.
Pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, 69 percent support.
Major infrastructure investments, 68 percent.
Higher taxes on the wealthy, 67 percent.
Republicans oppose all of these, and so on, and so on, and so on.
When you consistently represent positions that have 32 percent support among the public, you understand on some intuitive level that you cannot behave like a normal small-d democrat, because, representing such a minority on issue after issue, you will lose. You will lose elections, you will lose legislative battles, you will lose credibility, you will lose power.
So behaving like a normal, small-d democratic party is out. You have to choose another path. You have to shift to anti-democracy: to trying to make sure certain citizens can’t vote, to drawing districts that make failure all but impossible, denying the other party’s president a rightful Supreme Court nomination, all those things.
But you’re functioning in a democracy, so you can’t admit to being anti-democracy. So you make up fictions like voter fraud. You wrap yourself in the flag and God and try to fool people who aren’t paying much attention, which alas is a lot of people. And you keep your core supporters in a constant state of agitation about some menacing other—immigrants, Black people, socialists, Jewish space-laser manufacturers, whoever’s handy.
As long as the base stays riled up, as long as they maintain their anti-democratic and authoritarian passions, the party can win enough elections to overcome the fact that only 32 percent of the public supports its positions. But the day the GOP base settles back into something we might call democratic normalcy, well, that’s the day the Republicans become a permanent minority party.
So no; they won’t convict Trump. To convict Trump is to convict what the party itself has become. I’m not saying Mitch McConnell put all this out in a memo. Most of them probably couldn’t even articulate all this to themselves, if they were honest enough to try to.
But deep down, they know it. They feel the vibes—from constituents, from donors, from one another, from watching 10 minutes of Tucker Carlson. They can’t punish a Republican president for trying to thwart democracy when they know they need to thwart democracy to stay in business. Remember that as you watch the roll call and hear “not guilty” after “not guilty.” They’ll be acquitting Trump, and themselves.
