Count Him Out

That didn’t take long. History isn’t supposed to be made in just one day, and a shortened day at that. But what had happened was clear, and what should happen was clear enough. The president had tried to overturn or nullify a certified election he had officially lost. And he had gone too far. He had sent what was, in effect, his informal army of angry thugs, down the street to shut down that rather boring counting of votes, to shut down the government. But that got out of hand. They went looking for the vice president, there to preside over the count. They wanted to hang him. And some wanted to beat House Speaker Pelosi to death right then and there. And he watched from afar, wondering why his people didn’t love what they were all seeing on Fox News. He did. The mob was trashing the Capitol Building. They beat a Capitol Hill cop to death with a fire extinguisher. And they were doing all this for him. Look! They love me!

He was wrong. His sample-size was too small. Everyone else was appalled. There was no point in discussing this any further. It was time to impeach this guy. That took just one day:

The House made history Wednesday by impeaching a president for a second time, indicting President Trump a week before he leaves office for inciting a riot with false claims of a stolen election that led to the storming of the Capitol and five deaths.

Unlike Trump’s first impeachment, which proceeded with almost no GOP support, Wednesday’s effort attracted 10 Republicans, including Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 party leader in the House. The Senate now appears likely to hold a trial after Trump’s departure, an unprecedented scenario that could end with lawmakers barring him from holding the presidency again.

The final vote was 232 to 197.

And that was that. No president can use his own private armed militias to run the country, but somehow that notion was now controversial:

One of the final dramas of a tumultuous presidency, the impeachment unfolded against the backdrop of near-chaos in the House and uncertainty about where Trump’s exit leaves the GOP. Democrats and Republicans exchanged accusations and name-calling throughout the day, while Trump loyalists were livid at fellow Republicans who broke ranks – especially Cheney – leaving the party’s leadership shaken.

But despite the emotions stirred by the Capitol assault, the great majority of Republicans stood by the president, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He argued on the House floor that while Trump bears responsibility for the attack on the Capitol, the snap impeachment would only “further fan the flames of partisan division.”

McCarthy for the first time publicly endorsed a censure for Trump, but the call came too late to serve as an effective alternative to impeachment.

There were no other options, only next steps:

With just seven days remaining in Trump’s term, it became increasingly certain Wednesday that Trump would not be removed from office prematurely. The impeachment resolution for “incitement of insurrection,” however, also seeks Trump’s future “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”

The focus will now turn to how the trial will unfold in the Senate, which has never before held an impeachme trial for a former president.

The House and Senate are working on that. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt report that Donald Trump is working on this:

Under heavy pressure from his advisers, President Trump on Wednesday released a five-minute video recorded in the Oval Office condemning last week’s mob violence at the Capitol and urging his supporters to stand down from further rioting next week.

The video was made public hours after Mr. Trump was impeached a second time and was the result, advisers said, of his realization of the catastrophic fallout from the deadly siege, which also left lawmakers fearing for their lives in the seat of American democracy.

The fallout was catastrophic. More and more Republicans were saying that they voted on the side of Trump because they knew a vote for impeachment would be deadly. Trump would send his angry people. You’d be dead. So would your family. Trump had to stop that talk:

The president offered no note of humility, regret or self-reflection about his two months of false claims that the election was stolen from him. But it was also a broader condemnation of the violence than he has offered so far.

A week ago, hours after the rampage began, Mr. Trump told his supporters who had stormed the Capitol: “We love you. You’re very special.”

The president’s aides have warned him that he faces potential legal exposure for the riot, which was committed by his supporters immediately after a speech in which he urged them to “fight” the results of the election. The House impeached him on a single article, accusing him of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”

So, tell everyone that’s just not true:

Several officials urged Mr. Trump to shoot the video, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, enlisting aides and even Vice President Mike Pence to tell him it was the right move. Even after it was recorded and posted, Mr. Trump still had to be reassured, according to administration officials.

But this had to be done:

The release of the video, which was filmed after the House impeachment vote, came after the president’s company, the Trump Organization, faced canceled contracts in New York, and after Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, told allies he was pleased by the Democrats’ impeachment efforts and let it be known publicly that he was considering voting to convict the president in a Senate trial.

Trump had to turn that around. He could do that. He never said what everyone had heard him say:

“As I have said, the incursion of the U.S. Capitol struck at the very heart of our republic,” Mr. Trump said. “It angered and appalled millions of Americans across the political spectrum.”

“I want to be very clear: I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week,” he added. “Violence and vandalism have absolutely no place in our country. And no place in our movement. Making America great again has always been about defending the rule of law” and supporting law enforcement officials.

“Mob violence goes against everything I believe in and everything our movement stands for. No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence,” he said.

“If you do any of these things you are not supporting our movement. You are attacking it and you are attacking our country,” Mr. Trump said. “We cannot tolerate it.”

And the nation shrugged:

Mr. Trump did not mention the name of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., he did not concede the election and he did not talk about Mr. Biden’s inauguration, which is to take place next week under extraordinary security because of the threats inspired by the Capitol breach. He also made no mention of the impeachment vote.

He did, however, denounce what he called restrictions of free speech, referring not just to social media platforms that have banned him…

And then all of that was over and it was back to hurting the disloyal:

During the day, Mr. Trump periodically watched the impeachment debate in the House and told advisers he was furious with Mr. McConnell and felt blindsided by him. Yet his deeper anger was at the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, for publicly condemning him, people close to him said.

His relationship with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who encouraged him to believe conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, has frayed, one adviser said. The president was offended by Mr. Giuliani’s request for $20,000 a day to represent him in the election fight, which Mr. Giuliani denied making but which was in writing, and told aides not to pay him at all, an adviser to Mr. Trump said, confirming a report by The Washington Post.

White House officials have started blocking Mr. Giuliani’s calls to the president, another adviser said.

Trump lashes out. He is who he is:

Some advisers discussed the possibility of Mr. Trump resigning a few days early, in part because it would allow him to have the option of running again in 2024 and perhaps avoid the risk of being convicted and barred from future office by the Senate.

But Mr. Trump has been dismissive of any suggestion that he leave the presidency early and told White House aides that President Richard M. Nixon, whose influence in the party ended when he resigned, did not have much to show for it.

Advisers said that Mr. Trump had to be dissuaded from going to the House floor to try to defend himself during Wednesday’s impeachment proceedings, something he wanted to do during his first impeachment in December 2019, advisers said.

He wanted to storm in and, on the House floor, sneer and scream at all of them, to get them to stop this crap. His advisers talked him down. Things don’t work that way. And as for the Washington Post, Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker offer this:

When Donald Trump on Wednesday became the first president ever impeached twice, he did so as a leader increasingly isolated, sullen and vengeful.

With less than seven days remaining in his presidency, Trump’s inner circle is shrinking, offices in his White House are emptying, and the president is lashing out at some of those who remain. He is angry that his allies have not mounted a more forceful defense of his incitement of the mob that stormed the Capitol last week, advisers and associates said.

Though Trump has been exceptionally furious with Vice President Pence, his relationship with lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most steadfast defenders, is also fracturing, according to people with knowledge of the dynamics between the men.

Trump has instructed aides not to pay Giuliani’s legal fees, two officials said, and has demanded that he personally approve any reimbursements for the expenses Giuliani incurred while traveling on the president’s behalf to challenge election results in key states. They said Trump has privately expressed concern with some of Giuliani’s moves and did not appreciate a demand from Giuliani for $20,000 a day in fees for his work attempting to overturn the election.

This was a mess:

As he watched impeachment quickly gain steam, Trump was upset generally that virtually nobody is defending him —including press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, economic adviser Larry Kudlow, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to a senior administration official.

“The president is pretty wound up,” said the senior administration official, who, like some others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “No one is out there.”

Well, almost no one:

One of Trump’s few confidants these days is Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who broke with the president last week over attempts to overturn the election only to be welcomed back in the president’s good graces a couple of days later. Graham traveled to Texas on Tuesday in what was Trump’s last scheduled presidential trip, spending hours with Trump aboard Air Force One talking about impeachment and planning how Trump should spend his final days in office.

“The president has come to grips with it’s over,” Graham said, referring to the election. “That’s tough. He thinks he was cheated, but nothing’s going to change that.”

But some things may change that:

In a stark illustration of Trump’s isolation, the White House did not mount a vigorous defense Wednesday as House members debated his fitness for office and, ultimately, voted to impeach him. The president’s aides did not blast out talking points to allies. His press secretary did not hold a briefing with reporters. His advisers did not do television interviews from the White House’s North Lawn. His lawyers and legislative affairs staffers did not whip votes or seek to persuade lawmakers to vote against impeachment.

This is both because there was no organized campaign to block impeachment and because many of his aides believe Trump’s incitement of the riot was too odious to defend. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who was central to the president’s defense in his first impeachment a year ago, told other staffers to make sure word got out that he was not involved in defending Trump this time, according to one aide.

“I just think this is the logical conclusion of someone who will only accept people in his inner orbit if they are willing to completely set themselves on fire on his behalf, and you’ve just reached a point to where everyone is burned out,” a senior administration official said.

Well, not everyone:

One of Trump’s only White House defenses came from Jason Miller, a senior political adviser. He did not defend the president’s conduct but rather argued that those who voted to impeach him would pay a political price. Miller sent reporters a two-page polling memo from Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin saying that a majority of voters in presidential battleground states were opposed to impeachment and to “Big Tech censorship,” a reference to Twitter and other social media companies suspending Trump’s accounts.

“It’s a massive miscalculation by the Democrats and the Liz Cheneys of the world who are massively disconnected from the grass roots that votes in primaries,” Miller said.

“The grass roots and the base support is strong for him,” Miller added. “That’s really what matters. Washington is a very fickle town, and President Trump has never staked his strength as being in the nation’s capital. It’s always been out with the real people.”

Who are these real people? There’s only this:

Trump’s public schedule has been empty, and he is said to be doing little these days besides watching television and fulminating with this coterie of loyalists about Republicans not defending him enough.

Several aides laid blame for the situation not only on Trump but also on Meadows, because the chief of staff indulged Trump’s delusion that the election was rigged and fed him misinformation about alleged voter fraud.

“He is the one who kept bringing kook after kook after kook in there to talk to him,” one adviser said.

That is a problem, and Peter Baker offers this:

Not since the dark days of the Civil War and its aftermath has Washington seen a day quite like Wednesday.

In a Capitol bristling with heavily armed soldiers and newly installed metal detectors, with the physical wreckage of last week’s siege cleaned up but the emotional and political wreckage still on display, the president of the United States was impeached for trying to topple American democracy.

Somehow, it felt like the preordained coda of a presidency that repeatedly pressed all limits and frayed the bonds of the body politic. With less than a week to go, President Trump’s term is climaxing in violence and recrimination at a time when the country has fractured deeply and lost a sense of itself. Notions of truth and reality have been atomized. Faith in the system has eroded. Anger is the one common ground.

As if it were not enough that Mr. Trump became the only president impeached twice or that lawmakers were trying to remove him with days left in his term, Washington devolved into a miasma of suspicion and conflict. A Democratic member of Congress accused Republican colleagues of helping the mob last week scout the building in advance. Some Republican members sidestepped magnetometers intended to keep guns off the House floor or kept going even after setting them off.

All of this was taking place against the backdrop of a pandemic that, while attention has drifted away, has grown catastrophically worse in the closing weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Yes, that does sound like the end of the world, and maybe it is:

More than 4,400 people in the United States died of the coronavirus the day before the House vote, more in one day than were killed at Pearl Harbor or on Sept. 11, 2001, or during the Battle of Antietam. Only after several members of Congress were infected during the attack on the Capitol and new rules were put in place did they finally consistently wear masks during Wednesday’s debate.

And that makes all of this new:

Historians have struggled to define this moment. They compare it with other periods of enormous challenge like the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil War, the McCarthy era and Watergate. They recall the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate and the operation to sneak Abraham Lincoln into Washington for his inauguration for fear of an attack.

They cite the horrific year of 1968 when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated while campuses and inner cities erupted over the Vietnam War and civil rights. And they think of the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when further violent death on a mass scale seemed inevitable. And yet none of them is quite the same.

“I wish I could give you a wise analogy, but I honestly don’t think anything quite like this has happened before,” said Geoffrey C. Ward, one of the nation’s most venerable historians. “If you’d told me that a president of the United States would have encouraged a delusional mob to march on our Capitol howling for blood, I would have said you were deluded.”

But that did happen:

All of which leaves the United States’ reputation on the world stage at a low ebb, rendering what President Ronald Reagan liked to call the “shining city upon a hill” a scuffed-up case study in the challenges that even a mature democratic power can face.

“The historical moment when we were a model is basically over,” said Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian of authoritarianism. “We now have to earn our credibility again, which might not be such a bad thing.”

But that might be a confusing thing:

As Democrats demanded accountability, many Republicans pushed back and assailed them for a rush to judgment without hearings or evidence or even much debate. Mr. Trump’s accusers cited his inflammatory words at a rally just before the attack. His defenders cited provocative words by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative Maxine Waters and even Robert De Niro and Madonna to maintain there was a double standard.

That the comparisons were apples and oranges did not matter so much as the prisms through which they were reflected. Mr. Trump sought to overturn a democratic election that he lost with false claims of widespread fraud, pressuring other Republicans and even his vice president to go along with him and dispatching an unruly crowd of supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” But his allies complained that he had long been the target of what they considered unfair partisan attacks and investigations.

“Donald Trump is the most dangerous man to ever occupy the Oval Office,” declared Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas.

“The left in America has incited far more political violence than the right,” declared Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida.

The starkly disparate views encapsulated America in the Trump era. And at one point Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic majority leader, expressed exasperation at the other side’s depiction of events. “You’re not living in the same country I am,” he exclaimed.

Who is? That’s the only question now. This did end badly. But as for Trump, count him out.