Name: “Donald Trump Incited Violence to Maintain Power, and People Died”: The Democrats Arguing the Case Against Trump Will Bring Their Own Experience to Bear
Brand: vanityfair.com
SKU: vanityfair-com-467
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

“Donald Trump Incited Violence to Maintain Power, and People Died”: The Democrats Arguing the Case Against Trump Will Bring Their Own Experience to Bear

preview

It was shortly after 2 p.m. on January 6, when he had just finished rebuking Republicans’ rejection of Joe Biden’s election victory in key states, that Congressman Joe Neguse knew something was wrong. Engaged in presenting his argument on the House floor, the Colorado congressman had missed the frantic text messages from friends and family and the videos of rioters descending on the Capitol populating social media. Then he saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, followed shortly after by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, escorted out of the chamber by Capitol Police. At first, like many of his colleagues, Neguse thought it might be a precaution; Pelosi was high in the order of succession. As Jim McGovern, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, picked up the gavel and continued the proceedings, “I assumed that we would continue with our work,” Neguse recalled. The notion that rioters would make it inside the Capitol was unfathomable.Then, the announcements began—at first from the Sergeant at Arms and later a Capitol Police officer. Lawmakers realized that the Capitol had been breached, as hundreds of Donald Trump supporters forced their way into the building. McGovern gaveled out the proceedings. “Sit down,” rang through the chamber. They were told to put on gas masks that had been stashed under their seats and prepare to shelter in place. As sounds of banging and breaking glass bounced through the chamber, the House chaplain offered a prayer. And Neguse, along with the other eight lawmakers whom Pelosi would later name as House managers to guide the Senate through Trump’s second impeachment trial, became a witness to the case against the president.&nbsp;“It was a very intense day, but I don’t think I fully appreciated just how dangerous it had gotten that day until several days later,” Joaquin Castro, another impeachment manager, said. “It’s been a process of really learning everything that went on that day and just how close we came to not just mayhem…but even more carnage.”&nbsp;On Tuesday, a little over one year after his acquittal in the Ukraine impeachment, Trump will once again face trial in the Senate. Led by Congressman Jamie Raskin, the impeachment managers—who are, in addition to Neguse and Castro: Diana DeGette, Eric Swalwell, David Cicilline, Madeleine Dean,&nbsp;Ted Lieu, and Stacey Plaskett—will argue that former president Trump was “singularly responsible” for the siege on the Capitol, which resulted in five deaths, and who responded to the riots have since taken their lives. “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a joint session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be,” the managers wrote in an filed earlier this week.&nbsp;Whereas Trump’s first impeachment and subsequent Senate trial were a bit convoluted, rooted in complicated international politics with an endless network of characters, Democrats see a clear-cut case in round two. That it played out on live television and social media for all of America to see only bolsters their confidence. “They did a magnificent job historically laying out the high crimes and misdemeanors of the president in that case,” said Dean, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee and was trapped in the gallery during the riot. “This case is so tragically different. This was an attack incited by the president, by Americans, against Americans; domestic terrorists, incited by a president,” she told me. “It’s absolutely stunning.”For much of Trump’s first and only term, Speaker Pelosi acted as a bulwark against impeachment, set instead on protecting vulnerable members, who either flipped seats from red to blue or won in districts Trump carried in 2016. She only backed the move after a phone call with Trump, in which, , he admitted “to what he had done.” There was no such hesitancy—from Pelosi or from other moderate Democrats—this time around. Plaskett, representative for the U.S. Virgin Islands and a member of the moderate New Democrats Coalition, was among those reluctant to impeach the first time around; some feared it could work to boost Trump’s popularity, if Americans took it as a partisan exercise. “I don’t think the facts themselves were so on display for [every American] household,” she said. With this impeachment, and its ample video evidence viewed by millions in real time, Democrats want to make sure Trump can never run for office again.&nbsp;Plaskett had been putting on her jacket to head down to the House floor to offer her condolences to Raskin, who had tragically buried his son Tommy just the day before and had been her professor in law school, when the proceedings on the House floor were abruptly halted and members were told to lock their doors. She spent much of the night of January 6 locked in her office. Speaking just days after the attack on the Capitol she recalled how her daughter got a text message from a friend asking, “Is your mom at work?” “There was a coup against our government that was so on display and so evident,” she said. “I think it’s so much easier to come to the conclusion that this president had to be impeached—that if we did not, we would be blind to a prima facie case that was on display for all of us.”&nbsp;It was so evident to Democrats that Trump’s rhetoric in the lead up to the siege—for weeks before and at his “Stop the Steal” rally earlier that day—amounted to an impeachable offense that a group began drafting articles against the president as the riot ensued and before the Capitol was secure. After Lieu was forced to evacuate the Cannon House office building—“It was not a good sign that I was told to take off my number pin that designates me as Congress,” Lieu said—he sought refuge in Cicilline’s office in the Rayburn building. With a skeleton crew of staff, the two lawmakers began to brainstorm in hushed voices, locked in a room with the shades drawn and the door barricaded as they had been instructed. “Even though the president only had a short time remaining in his term, I thought it was incredibly important that we proceed. It was too dangerous a precedent,” Cicilline told me. “He was a clear and present danger to our country and to our democracy and to the well-being of this country. And so for me, it was so clear that we had to move and we had to move quickly.” At first, their focus was on the 25th Amendment, which would require Trump’s Cabinet to remove him, but ultimately shifted to impeachment. With remote input from Raskin, Pelosi, and House Judiciary staffers, a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and one article of impeachment were underway.&nbsp;“It’s very clear that you had a violent mob that attacked the Capitol, hunting for the vice president and speaker Pelosi and legislators, and that attack resulted in multiple deaths and Donald Trump incited that attack,” Lieu told me. “It’s not a complicated story with a lot of characters that the American people have never heard of, or can’t even pronounce their names. It’s a very straightforward narrative that Donald Trump incited violence to maintain power by any means necessary, and people died.”&nbsp;But while Democrats do see a difference between the impeachments, DeGette stressed the connective tissue between them. “Donald Trump has flaunted the duties of the president from day one, and while his effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden seems a little more subtle, it’s really part and parcel of his whole approach, which is sort of a mob-type approach: ‘I need to get reelected, so how can I get reelected? Oh, well, I’ll discredit my opponent by having a foreign government investigate. Oh, well, I’ll just have, I’ll just call the secretary of state in Georgia and lean on him to find me some votes,’” DeGette, who was in the House gallery at the time of the attack, said. “Then of course the ultimate was inciting the riot that came up to the Hill to try to prevent the certification…. He operates like a criminal, and this latest was just the final straw.”&nbsp;Most PopularSwalwell, another impeachment manager, got texts from the wife of Congressman Ruben Gallego as news of the Capitol breach broke. She knew her husband, a military veteran, would look to stay on the House floor and she wanted Swalwell’s help making sure he would leave. (Gallego ended up being instrumental in helping people put on their gas masks. “This isn’t like reading the morning paper. Like, I don’t do this every day,” Swalwell said of the experience.) He wrangled Gallego off the floor and made it to a secure location. “That’s where it just all kind of started to set in and I processed that our president incited our citizens to attack our Capitol—and not just any day—a day where we were supposed to be counting the Electoral College vote,” Swalwell told me. He felt his priority was to get back to the floor.&nbsp;“We didn’t want to be bullied out of there. We wanted to show, you know, ourselves and the country that we can reclaim it and get back to work.” Neguse, who talked for hours with Swalwell about this as they waited for law enforcement to secure the Capitol, felt the same—they had to get back to the floor “that night.” “We needed to send a signal to not just Americans, but also to our allies, to the rest of the world, that American democracy, that our constitutional Republic, would endure.” At roughly 9 p.m., the House reconvened. Hours later, after 3 a.m. on January 7, lawmakers certified Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.&nbsp;As the dust on Capitol Hill settled, the effort to impeach Donald Trump began in haste. The article of impeachment that germinated in Cicilline’s Rayburn office during the siege was on January 11. Two days later, in a vote of 232 to 197, Trump was on a single article of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” Ten House Republicans voted to impeach.&nbsp;The team of impeachment managers has been fairly quiet—on something of a self-imposed media slowdown as the Biden administration focuses on passing a COVID-19 relief package. But they have been working day in and day out. “This is the president, in his own words and actions, inciting people to an attempted coup, to keep him as president of the United States and falsely claiming that the election was unfair and that it was stolen from him and his supporters,” Castro told me. “That’s the kind of thing that we’ve seen for generations in other parts of the world. And it’s been the United States that will often work with countries to try to help them stabilize their democracies and get back to the rule of law. That’s what I see; this is part of that process for us, making sure that we respect the rule of law and show that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States.”&nbsp;Leading the team is Raskin, whose trauma has been particularly acute. His son passed away on New Year’s Eve and he buried him on January 5. Raskin’s daughter Tabitha asked him not to go to work the next day, but he that it was his duty and offered that she&nbsp;accompany him, along with her brother-in-law, to the vote to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory. They ended up trapped for hours just off the House floor in Majority Leader Hoyer’s office, behind a barricaded door rioters sought to break down. “I was most anxious for their safety,” Raskin told me, describing his frantic efforts to get them out. “Pelosi and he are often known to quote Thomas Paine, ‘the times have found us,’” Dean said of Raskin. “My God, the times have found Jamie Raskin.”&nbsp;When Pelosi approached Raskin to serve as lead impeachment manager, he described her as solemn and supportive; she wanted to make sure his family would be okay with it. “The thought that went through my mind was, I’m not going to lose my son in 2020 and my country in 2021. And I told her that I would do it.”&nbsp;The Trump defense team and many Republican senators have coalesced around the argument that it is unconstitutional to impeach an official who has already left office—(despite a of such)—and have largely sought to dodge his unfounded claims of election fraud and his heated rhetoric in the weeks leading up to the Capitol siege. An effort to dismiss the Senate trial as unconstitutional was in a narrow vote of 55 to 45—suggesting that even as Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell have signaled a desire to free the party of Trump, they are not yet ready to fully purge Trumpism from its bloodstream.&nbsp;Most PopularWith 17 Republicans needed to convict, the odds are in Trump’s favor. But Democrats are with their effort, regardless. “This president has set himself against the constitution, he has been impeached twice and now is the time for 100 senators to live up to their oath as senators, but also their oaths that they will swear as jurors,” Raskin said. “We are asking for them to closely scrutinize the facts of these events and we are going to tell them a story which we think leads inexorably and irresistibly to one conclusion, which is that the president incited this violent insurrection against the Congress and the people.”&nbsp;More Great Stories From Vanity Fair&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;— Embedding With Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s — Donald From Women—And Then From America Itself— How Trump’s COVID Chaos Drowned the FDA in — Inside of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump— After Wrecking the Country, Vacation Plans— Can Trump’s Be Deprogrammed?&nbsp;— Trump Makes an Exit With His — From the Archive: How Donald Trump Against Him— Not a subscriber? to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.is the national political reporter at Vanity Fair. She covers the people and the powers that shape the country’s politics. She previously worked at Inc. magazine and Forbes and is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she majored in journalism and economics. You can follow her on Twitter... The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

It was shortly after 2 p.m. on January 6, when he had just finished rebuking Republicans’ rejection of Joe Biden’s election victory in key states, that Congressman Joe Neguse knew something was wrong. Engaged in presenting his argument on the House floor, the Colorado congressman had missed the frantic text messages from friends and family and the videos of rioters descending on the Capitol populating social media. Then he saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, followed shortly after by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, escorted out of the chamber by Capitol Police. At first, like many of his...

public

Abigail Tracy

Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“Donald Trump Incited Violence to Maintain Power, and People Died”: The Democrats Arguing the Case Against Trump Will Bring Their Own Experience to Bear

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS