Trump will likely face a barrage of criminal indictments and high-profile civil lawsuits in multiple states.
At some point in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will face his second Senate trial following an impeachment by the House of Representatives. Unlike the proceedings in late 2019 and early 2020, this time around — in the wake of the attempted coup on January 6 carried out by a violent mob inspired by Trump’s words to attack the U.S. Congress — the process has been swift. The House impeached Donald Trump after a debate that lasted a mere few hours. Given Trump’s inflammatory words on January 6, and the unwillingness of senior lawyers to rally to his defense, and given the fact that Mitch McConnell has now publicly laid blame for the violent events squarely on Trump’s shoulders, the disgraced ex-president’s trial in the Senate could be almost as rapid. If there is any honor whatsoever among GOP senators — or for that matter, any ability to think long-term about their own political self-interest — he will become the first president in U.S. history to be convicted by that body. Of course, since he will have already left office, he won’t, alas, become the first president to be removed from power via an impeachment and trial process. That’s a shame, but it doesn’t make the process any less vital. If American democracy is to survive, if political decisions aren’t to be held hostage by gun-wielding fanatics, Trump’s effort to undermine the peaceful transfer of power following an election must face real consequences. Conventional wisdom has it, however, that most GOP senators, no matter how personally distasteful they find Trump and how terrified they were by his unleashing of a mob against them on January 6, won’t want to antagonize their base by voting to convict. Conventional wisdom has it that, when push comes to shove, appeasement will win the day. But in this instance, might conventional wisdom be wrong? As Mitch McConnell seems now to have concluded, and as and many of his caucus likely soon will, having shamefully enabled Trump these past four years, they now have precious little incentive to waste political capital on a wounded and discredited ex-president, a man who has lost his hold on many independents as well as on a significant minority of GOP voters. To the contrary, they have every incentive, as more and more evidence of his malfeasance surfaces, to utterly disempower this demagogue in order to ensure that he can’t rise from the political ashes to wreak vengeance on those in the GOP who didn’t help him in his coup attempts. Convict him, and they can then, in quick order, pass legislation barring him from ever running for public office again — a fate that, surely, no public figure in American history has so richly deserved, and one that must have McConnell and other GOP leadership figures in the Senate privately salivating in delight.
