Trump has been impeached a second time

One day after the acquittal of former President Donald Trump, multiple House impeachment managers worked to explain their decision not to call witnesses in his second impeachment trial.

Witnesses initially were not expected to be called during the trial, but that expectation was upended Saturday morning when lead House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called for Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) to be deposed.

Two very different interviews on the Sunday morning news shows illustrated the Republican Party’s post-Trump impeachment acquittal identity crisis.

With Trump now out of office, banned from social media, and fresh off a trial in which a bipartisan majority of senators voted for his conviction, the Republican Party is polarized.

With a montage of people saying “fight” only slightly more ridiculous than the version actually presented by former President Donald Trump’s defense team, Saturday Night Live returned this weekend with a cold open tackling Trump’s second impeachment trial.

The skit opened with Alex Moffat as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who compares himself to a “human White Claw” and announces he’ll open his show with “a loose collection of scaremongering non sequiturs.”

In the hours after Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (LA) and Richard Burr (NC) joined five other Republican senators in voting to convict former President Donald Trump on an article of impeachment for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection, the state Republican parties in Louisiana and North Carolina wasted no time laying down a marker that the GOP still belongs to Trump.

The LAGOP and NCGOP each quickly censured Cassidy and Burr for their votes. In a statement posted to Twitter, the LAGOP wrote that it “condemn[s], in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump,” while NCGOP chair Michael Whatley released a statement denouncing Burr’s vote as “shocking and disappointing.”

One of the lessons of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment proceedings is that convicting a president is virtually impossible.

The jury in Trump’s impeachment trial, the 100 men and women who make up the Senate, were not only witnesses to the violent insurrection Trump was charged with inciting but were also some of the primary victims of Trump’s alleged crime. The evidence presented at Trump’s trial suggests that he refused to help senators who were being pursued by rioters, including those whose chants suggested they could have quickly become a lynch mob.

On Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made a strong case for convicting former President Donald Trump of inciting insurrection — less than half an hour after voting to acquit Trump of inciting insurrection.

Before taking the floor to speak, McConnell joined 42 other Republicans in voting to find Trump not guilty on the single article of impeachment approved by the House, thus heading off the former president’s conviction and possible disqualification from holding future elected office.

Ahead of the conclusion of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial Saturday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the lead House impeachment manager, made a powerful appeal to the Senate to convict the former president.

Throughout the trial, Raskin interspersed his case with personal testimony about how the insurrection affected him and his family — particularly given that it occurred shortly after the December death of his son, Thomas Raskin. And on Saturday, Raskin again invoked his family in a final, emotional plea to senators.

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial had something to disappoint practically everyone.

Democrats and Trump’s Republican critics were of course disappointed by the outcome — the former president was acquitted on the charge of “incitement of insurrection,” with 57 senators voting to convict and 43 voting to acquit. (Sixty-seven votes, a two-thirds majority, were required for conviction.)

While former President Donald Trump has been acquitted yet again in his second impeachment trial, seven Republican senators voted to convict him, making the trial outcome the most bipartisan in history.

A total of 57 senators ended up voting to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection that took place at the US Capitol on January 6, including seven Republicans: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey.

Former President Donald Trump has now been acquitted in his second impeachment trial, after the Senate failed to meet the 67-vote threshold needed to secure a conviction.

In total, a majority of senators, 57, convicted him while 43 lawmakers acquitted him of the one charge he faced — inciting an insurrection at the Capitol — after a brief five-day trial in which neither side used its full time for arguments and no witnesses were called. Unlike Trump’s first impeachment trial, when Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to find him guilty, seven Republicans did so this time around, making this the most bipartisan Senate conviction vote ever. These Republicans were Sens. Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey.

Former President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense is looking more threadbare: New statements by Republican lawmakers appear to undercut key claims from his defense team about how much Trump knew about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and when he knew it.

New details emerged Friday about a call between Trump and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy in the midst of the attack. First recounted in January by Washington state Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was one of just 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment, the call gives insight into Trump’s state of mind on the day of the insurrection and suggests his sympathies lay with the rioters.

In a surprising turn of events, the Senate briefly considered calling witnesses at the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

But then they decided not to.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has told Republican colleagues that he plans to acquit former President Donald Trump of an impeachment charge for the second time, according to a Politico report.

McConnell’s comments, relayed to other members of the GOP conference in a letter, make his position on impeachment clear: The minority leader cites the issue of jurisdiction as a key reason for his acquittal, and describes impeachment as a tool mainly used to remove a president from office. He writes that because Trump is no longer president, the Senate lacks purview.

Key Republican senators on the fence about the verdict in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial had some specific factual questions for Trump’s lawyers about his actions on January 6, the day the US Capitol was stormed.

Trump’s attorneys did not come close to answering them.

Closing their second day of arguments in former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, House Democrats warned of the real danger of acquittal.

Asking senators to weigh the threat of letting Trump’s incitement of an insurrection go unpunished, House impeachment managers detailed his history of stoking violence and the ongoing threat of domestic terrorism that his actions have encouraged. Their intent: making it clear that January 6 was an extension of a pattern — rather than an aberration — and could be repeated if consequences are not imposed.

A new poll hints at one potential reason so many Republican lawmakers remain wary of distancing themselves from former President Donald Trump and seem reluctant to convict him in the Senate’s impeachment trial: There’s a real possibility they’d endanger their electoral prospects.

In a new survey from Vox and Data for Progress, 69 percent of Republicans said they’d be less likely to vote for a political candidate in their state if that person found Trump guilty in the trial, with 56 percent of Republicans saying they’d be much less likely to do so, and 13 percent saying they’d be somewhat less likely to do so.

The pre-trial brief prepared by former President Donald Trump’s attorneys ahead of his second impeachment trial, slated to begin Tuesday, constructs an alternative reality regarding the chain of events that preceded the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and resulted in his impeachment on a charge of incitement.

To hear Trump’s lawyers tell it, just before the insurrection, Trump delivered a speech to his followers in which he focused on election security issues and urged them to remain calm and peaceful. Because he did not explicitly direct them to commit crimes, and because a few of the rioters may not have been supporters of his, they argue, the Senate must acquit.

The House of Representatives impeachment managers filed a lengthy pretrial brief on Tuesday, making the case that former President Donald Trump should be convicted of incitement of insurrection by the Senate — and banned from holding future federal office.

Trump’s team submitted their own, shorter filing as an initial response to the charge against him. They argue that Trump did nothing wrong in spending months trying to overturn the election results ahead of his speech to a crowd in Washington, DC, on January 6 — and that even if he did, it’s unconstitutional to have an impeachment trial for a former president, so the Senate can’t do anything about it.

The United States has just lived through historic events, with no real precedent in its modern history. The president, having lost his reelection, tried feverishly for two months to overturn the result and retain power — an effort that culminated in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol building. In the end, he failed.

And the main reason Trump failed is that the people with key institutional roles in formalizing the outcome, including many Republicans, chose not to help him — opting instead to uphold the rule of law and abide by the norms of the country’s electoral system, despite facing great pressure to do otherwise.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) released a letter on Sunday calling on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — soon to be the majority leader — to dismiss the House’s article of impeachment against President Donald Trump, calling the effort an “unconstitutional” act of “vengeance” which will hinder the process of “national healing.”

Graham’s letter represents the latest effort by Republicans to question the legality and the ethics of Democrats’ plan to hold a Senate impeachment trial for Trump after he leaves office. But Democrats argue that holding Trump accountable for his role in inciting the storming of the US Capitol — and potentially barring him from holding office again — is a critical component of restoring democratic norms and stability in America.

What the hell happened to the Republican Party?

I’ve been asking myself this question since Donald Trump began his hostile takeover in 2015. After the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, there’s a whole new urgency to the inquiry.

New York magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi has been covering Donald Trump’s White House since 2016. In the inaugural episode of Vox Conversations, Nuzzi talks to guest host Sam Sanders, host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, about her experience reporting on an unprecedented administration.

“The people who became rabid Trump supporters,” Nuzzi says. “It’s not as though they just acquired their capacity to believe the things he had them believe or that he encouraged them to believe or that he promoted on June 16, 2015. They had that capacity before that.

Saying no to Donald Trump is a pretty effective tactic.

In the wake of the Capitol Hill riots on January 6 — riots incited, in part, by the president of the United States and some members of the Republican Party — there has been a broad-based backlash against Trump and some factions of the GOP. The political reaction has been swift, and Trump became the first American president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives, with a growing chorus within his own party turning against him. But the corporate and cultural response has also been influential, as institutions that enabled or, at the very least, put up with Trump for years finally turn against him.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) called for President Donald Trump’s resignation during an appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press. “I think the best way for our country, Chuck, is for the president to resign and go away as soon as possible,” Toomey told the show’s host, Chuck Todd.

Toomey became the latest Republican elected official to call for Trump’s resignation, following in the footsteps of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. All three are moderate Republicans.

On Friday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) became the first Republican senator to call for President Donald Trump’s removal from office over his role in fomenting a violent insurrection, implying that she could leave the party if it continued to align itself with the president.

“I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Murkowski said in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News’s James Brooks. “But I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”