Until Wednesday, the Republican president imagined a post-presidency phase leading a fight. The attack on Congress leaves him more isolated and silenced than ever before.
Silenced on social media, repudiated by the Republican establishment, abandoned by a series of his high-ranking Cabinet officials, and defeated in the polls, Donald Trump has never been so alone. His last great battle against the American system, in which he tried to revert the presidential election results by spreading baseless accusations of fraud, served as a final test for those loyal to him, and also as a test to democratic forces, and in the end, the president did poorly.
Attorney General William Barr, nominated by Trump himself, did not find any basis for the alleged scheme of widespread fraud. Republican officials in states where the president contested results resisted pressure from him. The Supreme Court, with a conservative majority and three of nine justices who were Trump appointees, unanimously decided to not get involved. And at the last moment, on Wednesday, when Congress convened in Washington to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s election, only a handful of members of Congress loyal to the President tried to derail the process.
On Jan. 6, a date inscribed forever in history books, the New York real estate mogul decided to make a new show of force. In the morning, before members of Congress met to certify Biden’s election, Trump convened a rally in front of the White House, taking advantage of the enormous number of followers who had come from all over the country. He later incited the group to protest at the Capitol, to be strong, to retake the country without fail.
Until Wednesday, Trump had planned a post-presidential phase leading a fight, thinking about how to keep himself relevant to for conservative voters. He even revealed his intention to run for office in the 2024 presidential election, and, according to what those around him leaked to the press, he considered announcing his candidacy on Jan. 20, the day Biden is sworn in. Nobody likes a good show more than the 74-year-old real estate entrepreneur, who conquered the most powerful presidency in the world, jumping from reality shows to politics. Irritated by rhetoric from conservative TV’s Fox News, another network he believes abandoned him, Trump considered launching his own platform to continue contact with his base. The true battle is for control of Republican voters. Some members of his family, like his daughter, Ivanka, and his older son, Donald, have also considered the possibility of beginning political careers. In essence, to the Trump family, politics are only beginning.
All these plans became complicated for Trump after the violent assault by his radical followers on Congress, an insurrection that was instigated by his campaign over the last few months, killed five people, and humiliated America as the symbol of the most powerful democracy in the world.
According to federal prosecutor Ken Kohl of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, there are no plans right now to bring charges for inciting violence against the president or others who spoke during Wednesday morning’s rally in front of the White House (including Trump’s son, Donald Jr.), speakers who lit the fuse for the attack that followed. However, the Democratic Party plans to bring impeachment charges against Trump and take him to trial in the Senate to determine his removal from office, unless he resigns or his own Cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment and finds Trump unfit from office. (These last two options are unlikely to happen.)*
Trump has little more than a week left in the White House; however, if he is tried, the Senate could also vote to bar him from running for office in the future. Impeachment has a clear path in the Democratic House of Representatives, which initiates the process. However, it will be more complicated in the Senate where the trial will take place, because it will take a two-thirds majority vote to convict the president, something Biden’s party does not have at the moment.
“It’s very unlikely that they will have the time for it all; what the Democrats want to do is hurt him politically, by preventing him from running in the 2024 elections, and they seek support from Republicans, but that isn’t their prerogative, it’s the voters’ prerogative,” said Republican jurist Robert Ray, who was an independent prosecutor in the Whitewater case, a real estate scandal that hit Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s. **
In addition to investigating the violent episode in Congress, the Justice Department will be waiting for Trump when he leaves office. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is investigating his tax records, and thanks to a victory before the Supreme Court, the D.A. will have access to eight years of tax statements in connection with an inquiry into hush payments to women seeking to conceal alleged infidelity during the 2016 campaign and possible tax fraud. Further, New York Attorney General Letitia James is weighing possible charges against Trump’s construction company for altering the real value of its assets to obtain loans.
The Justice Department will also have an open path to resume its obstruction of a justice case begun during the Russia investigation — Trump won’t have presidential immunity — and elsewhere, Trump still faces lawsuits over his personal conduct: a case brought by his niece, Mary Trump, for inheritance fraud and defamation, and a case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, charging Trump with sexual assault in the 90s.
However, this litigation was already on the table before the November election and did not interfere with support for the president, who lost the election, but won 74 million votes, almost 12 million more than he won in 2016. The question is whether the business magnate will still be able to mobilize his base; or whether, as he himself as said, he will be able to lead conservative voters once he is expelled from political power, with less attention from the media and other Republicans who already want to wipe him off the map so they can enter the race for the White House.
For political strategist Rick Wilson, a founder of The Lincoln Project, a platform of Republicans opposed to Trump, the president has lost his “superpower,” that is, his social media loud speakers, Twitter and Facebook, and won’t be able to communicate with his followers as easily as before.
In measuring the weight of the 74 million votes that Trump won in the election, Wilson warns that half the votes came from “behavioral Republicans,” voters who “vote Republican no matter what happens, because to them, the elections are an alternative between socialism and freedom, light and dark, good and evil.”** All that’s left, the strategist says, is the other half who participate in the cult that worships the New York businessman’s style. “The great schism facing this country is whether people who call themselves Republicans, who believe in conservative principles, are well served by Trump,” he says.** What happened on Wednesday was “devastating” to the Republican Party.
There is a lot of talk about Trump’s next move. Trump is no longer a New Yorker, and he is expected to move to Florida, mainly for financial reasons. A character as singular as he is, allergic to defeat and overly prideful, cannot be swept from the map. If presented with a choice, he will keep fighting for control over Republican voters, however, nobody still believes he will have the courage to stage another rally on Inauguration Day.
*Editor’s note: The House voted to impeach Donald Trump for a second time on Jan. 13, and the article of impeachment will be sent to the Senate for trial. Prior to impeachment proceedings, the House approved a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, but Pence declined to do so.
**Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, the quoted remarks could not be independently verified.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.