This was no cellphone name transcript, no dry phrases on a web page open to interpretation. This was a horde of extremists pushing over barricades
This was no cellphone name transcript, no dry phrases on a web page open to interpretation. This was a horde of extremists pushing over barricades and beating cops. This was a mob smashing home windows and pounding on doorways. This was a mass of marauders establishing a gallows and shouting, “Take the constructing!” and “Battle for Trump!”
As the US Senate opened an unprecedented second impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday amid the echoes of historical past, the Home managers prosecuting him performed highly effective video photographs of final month’s lethal assault on the Capitol that made abundantly clear how completely different this continuing will likely be from the primary.
The place the case towards Mr. Trump a yr in the past turned on what may need appeared like an summary or slim argument about his behind-the-scenes interactions with a far-off nation, Ukraine, the case this yr activates an eruption of violence that People noticed on tv with their very own eyes — and that the senators serving as jurors skilled personally after they fled for his or her lives.
Reasonably than a judgment of the place international coverage turns into political extra, this sequel trial quantities to a reckoning over Mr. Trump’s very presidency. At concern within the Senate chamber over the approaching days will likely be lots of the basic elements that outlined Mr. Trump’s 4 years in energy: his relentless assaults on fact, his deliberate efforts to foment divisions in society, his shattering of norms and his undermining of a democratic election.
Nonetheless, this trial could find yourself with the identical verdict because the final one. On a check vote on the constitutionality of prosecuting a president after he leaves workplace, 44 Republicans on Tuesday stood by Mr. Trump, a measure of his enduring sway inside his social gathering and a sign that he most probably will safe the 34 votes he wants for acquittal given the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction.
But when the six Republicans who voted to proceed on Tuesday additionally vote to convict him for inciting an rebel, it is going to be essentially the most senators to interrupt from a president of their very own social gathering in any impeachment trial in American historical past.
“I’d not have thought it after I was sitting on the Senate flooring attempting the primary impeachment — it seems that was simply the opening act,” stated Norman L. Eisen, a lawyer for Home Democrats throughout final yr’s trial over Mr. Trump’s strain marketing campaign on Ukraine for political assist. “The second crystallizes all of the anti-democratic components that characterised Trump’s tenure and his Ukraine excessive crimes however brings them to an excellent increased pitch.”