Graphic by Anjali Rao-Herel ‘22
By Soleil Doering ’24
Staff Writer
Former President Donald Trump faced the Senate trial as a part of his second impeachment charges on Tuesday, Feb. 9. Trump, the first U.S. president to be impeached twice, was accused of inciting the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6 and was subsequently impeached by the House of Representatives on Jan. 13. In January, Trump's defense team and Senate Republicans attempted to dismiss the trial, claiming that it would be unconstitutional to impeach a president that has left office. But the Senate voted 56-44 in favor of proceeding with the impeachment trials.
Professor of History Daniel Czitrom commented on the question of the constitutionality of these trials. “I guarantee you that the vast majority of attorneys, including conservative lawyers and legal experts … say there is nothing unconstitutional about impeaching somebody who is no longer in office. It’s been done in the past,” he said.
Kate Murray ’22, student organizer and co-founder of MHC Votes!, spoke about the value of this impeachment trial. “I think it’s extremely important to set this precedent by impeaching Trump for the second time,” Murray said. “There was an insurrection on our Capitol, an incitement of political violence, which I believe Donald Trump is personally responsible for. He should be held accountable for that.”
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, lead impeachment manager and former constitutional law professor, began his opening presentation with video footage from the Jan. 6 events in the Capitol with clips of the riot gathering outside, along with moments from Trump's speech from that day. Raskin set the tone for the afternoon, recounting what he and his colleagues in Congress faced as the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. “All around me, people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones, to say goodbye,” Raskin said. “They thought they were going to die.”
“The video that the managers screened at the start was pretty damning in establishing causality between Trump’s claims of election fraud leading up to and after the vote and his incitement of violence and the attack on the Capitol,” Assistant Professor of Politics Ali Aslam said.
In his speech, Trump’s defense attorney, Bruce Castor defended the former president’s right to free speech and urged the Senate to stop the impeachment proceedings, claiming that if Trump had committed a crime, the Department of Justice would handle it.
The New York Times reported on officials’ reactions to the defense’s opening arguments. “The president’s lawyer just rambled on,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. Alan M. Dershowitz, who served on Trump’s defense team at his first impeachment, was critical of Castor’s performance, saying, “I have no idea what he’s doing.”
The nine House impeachment managers presented their case on Wednesday and Thursday. They began with never-before-seen footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that showed how close top officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had come to facing the mob. In one clip, Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman directed Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to run down a hallway to safety mere seconds before insurrectionists broke through the windows.
On Friday, day five of the impeachment proceedings, Trump’s defense lawyers argued that House managers were being hypocritical by claiming the semantics of Trump’s speech led to the insurrection. They honed in on Trump’s use of the phrase “Fight like hell,” showing a montage of Democratic politicians using the word “fight” in their own speeches. One of the defense lawyers, Michael T. van der Veen, said, “Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation. It’s a term that’s used over and over and over again by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And, of course, the Democrat House managers know that the word ‘fight’ has been used figuratively in political speech forever.”
In the defense’s closing argument, Castor took issue with House Democrats’ use of the word “insurrection” in their impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection” because the term implies a hostile takeover of a country.
“These are lawyers’ word games as far as I’m concerned. They are using the most technical obscure claims to ignore what actually happened,” Czitrom said. “Even if you want to argue that it was not an insurrection in some legal sense or that Trump did not incite a riot — what did he do once the riot started? He did nothing.”
Democratic House managers made a surprise request for witnesses on Saturday morning, the final day of the impeachment trials. Raskin announced that they wanted to subpoena Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler about her knowledge of the McCarthy-Trump phone call. The Senate initially voted 55-45 to call witnesses, but House managers ultimately decided against it because of the unpredictability of the endeavor and the fact that it could stall other Senate proceedings.
That afternoon, the Senate voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. The vote came out 57 guilty to 43 not guilty, with seven Republican Senators joining the Democrats.
“I think it’s worth noting that this was the most bipartisan impeachment in history, both in terms of the indictment in the House and the verdict in the Senate,” Czitrom said. “Nonetheless, it underlines the deep political division in the country and the deep divisions within the Republican Party.”
Trump’s second acquittal raises important questions about the future of the Republican Party as an entity now even more closely tied to Trump. “Establishment Republicans made a nihilistic pact with Trump by sacrificing their principles for court appointments and regulatory rollbacks,” Aslam said. “They went along with his anti-immigrationist and white nationalist agenda. That is who they are now, and it will be hard for other candidates to move the party away from that because the record does not support it.”
After the vote to acquit Trump was finalized, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech in which he condemned the former president’s actions surrounding the Capitol riot as “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.” He added, “Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
Despite his claims, McConnell voted to acquit Trump.
Czitrom attempted to explain the contradictory behavior of McConnell and other Republican senators. “Republicans in large part could not vote for impeachment in the House or to convict in the Senate because that would have meant impeaching and convicting themselves,” Czitrom explained. “Ultimately, I think they all understood that they enabled and benefited from Donald Trump.”