Consider This from NPR - What Donald Trump's Impeachment Means The 2nd Time Around

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

In the weeks after Jan. 6. insurrection, even top Republicans like Mitch McConnell said Donald Trump provoked the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, leaving five people dead. But it appears unlikely enough Republican Senators will find that he bears enough responsibility to warrant conviction in his second impeachment trial — which could prevent him from ever holding office again. Charlie Sykes, founder and editor at large of the conservative site The Bulwark, argues that Republicans are failing to hold themselves accountable. NPR's Melissa Block reports on the future of Trump's "big lie" about the results of the 2020 election. For more impeachment coverage, listen to the NPR Politics Podcast via Apple or Spotify.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The Senate will be in order. On the floor of the U.S. Senate Tuesday, we witnessed two things that have never happened before. No president has ever been impeached twice, and no president has ever been tried by the Senate after leaving office. We will stop the steal. House Democrats serving as the impeachment managers, essentially the prosecution, began their case with this highly produced 13-minute long video. It featured clips of the president's January 6th rally, along with news and amateur footage of the riot that followed. Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution, that's a high crime and misdemeanor. In his opening remarks, Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, weighed in on the first legal question of the trial. Can a president who is no longer in office still be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors? The president's attorneys have argued no. In other words, conduct that would be a high crime and misdemeanor in your first year as president,

in your second year as president, in your third year as president, and for the vast majority of your fourth year as president, you can suddenly do in your last few weeks in office without facing any constitutional accountability at all. This would create a brand new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America. As we record this, the Senate is still listening to debate about whether the trial should proceed. It will vote Tuesday evening on that question. But this is, of course, a dodge.

This is part of the way that Republicans hope to avoid confronting the reality of what happened. Charlie Sykes is a founder and editor-at-large of the conservative site The Bulwark. He spoke to NPR this week. The vote on whether the trial should proceed is expected to pass. Then the real trial begins on Wednesday at noon. It could last into early next week. But in the end, it would take 17 Republican senators to vote to convict Trump and potentially bar him from ever holding public office again.

And that is seen as pretty unlikely. A vote to convict would be a confession and admission that they have been wrong from ever holding public office again. And that is seen as pretty unlikely. A vote to convict would be a confession, an admission that they have been wrong to back Trump for so long, make so many concessions, and to rationalize his behavior. Consider this. History may hold Trump accountable

for the events of January 6th, even if today's Republican Party doesn't. And in fact, what this party is doing is it is failing to hold itself accountable. Coming up, how the election denial that led to January 6th will echo in American politics for a long time to come. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, February 9th. My name is Peter Sagal, and I'm here to interrupt your very serious NPR podcast to tell you about another NPR podcast, mainly mine, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Chances are that right now you're enjoying an earnest, serious treatment of some serious topic in the news or perhaps history or science. That's great, really. Well, that's not what we do, because people cannot live on serious alone.

Listen now to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Tuesday, the Senate impeachment debate was about the process. The rest of the week, it'll be about the merits of the case. So let's talk about the process first. President Trump no longer is in office. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters. That was Trump defense lawyer Bruce Castor, who argued that the former president's impeachment trial is unconstitutional because he's no longer in office. And they based that argument, in part, on the work of Brian Kalt,

a Michigan State University legal scholar who is cited 15 times in Trump's impeachment defense brief. The worst part is the three places where they said I said something when in fact I said the opposite. Kalt told NPR that his scholarship does not support the argument that an ex-president can't be part of an impeachment trial. In fact, it argues the opposite. The framers worried about people abusing their power to keep themselves in office. And the point is the timing of the conduct, not the timing of the legal proceedings challenging it. We should say a large number of leading constitutional scholars share that view and have said so in a formal letter to the Senate. So that's the process question.

What about the merits of the case? So the article of impeachment charges incitement of insurrection based largely on the January 6th riot. But I think what we're going to see over the next couple of days is a much larger scope. Daniel Goldman was the lead counsel for the House Democrats in the first Trump impeachment trial, and he's a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He says impeachment managers will argue that Trump seeded the insurrection for months, claiming before the election that it would be fraudulent, claiming after the election that it was, and then trying and failing to pressure state and federal officials to overturn the results. Mafia bosses who I prosecuted don't tell their

underlings, go kill this person. They say, go ahead and take care of him. And that's very similar to Donald Trump's language. Trump does not directly say, please go march on the Capitol and interfere with Congress's certification of the electoral votes, but his language is intended to and is understood by his followers to mean the same thing. Of course, Trump's defense attorneys argue the opposite, that Trump never explicitly urged his followers to violence, and he isn't responsible for what they did. But look back to the days after January 6th. Top Republicans in Washington, D.C., at least then, seemed to have a different view.

The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. That was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on January 19th. The top Republican in the House, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, said something similar just a few days earlier. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. But here's Kevin McCarthy a few months before on Fox News. President Trump won this election. So everyone who's listening, do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes. In the weeks after the attack,

McCarthy actually walked back his remarks that Trump was responsible. I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility. What do we write on our social media? What do we say to one another? And finally, at the end of last month, McCarthy met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the pair discussed Republican efforts to retake the House in 2022. It really is extraordinary that the defeated,

disgraced, and now twice impeached president still has this hold. Here's conservative writer Charlie Sykes again. How durable it's going to be, I don't know. But a testament to the way the Republican Party has really ceased to be a party of ideas or policies and has become very much a cult of personality. And we'll find out how durable that cult is over the next couple of years. That brings us to a question about the future. The man still seen as a powerful force in Republican politics

who may be able to run for president again in four years has never admitted that he lost a free and fair election. It's a claim that's being called the big lie. NPR's Melissa Block asked historians to explain the significance of that term and where it leads. It's not just historians who call Trump's fiction that he won the election the big lie. President Joe Biden used the term to slam Republicans in Congress who've amplified Trump's falsehood. They're part of the big lie. President Joe Biden used the term to slam Republicans in Congress who've amplified Trump's falsehood. They're part of the big lie. And Biden noted the term originated in Nazi Germany, embodied in Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels.

We're told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie. One of the Republican senators Biden was referring to, Josh Hawley, called the Nazi comparison disgusting. Hitler used the phrase big lie in his manifesto Mein Kampf. The Nazis' big lie, blaming Jews for everything wrong in the world, fueled anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. There are lies that if you believe in them, rearrange everything. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder specializes in Eastern Europe. He writes about authoritarian states and tyranny. Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, talked about the fabric of reality. And a big lie is a lie which is big enough that it tears the fabric of reality. In his cover story for the New York Times Magazine, Snyder calls Trump the high priest of the big lie.

As for where big lies lead, Snyder writes, post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When I say pre-fascism, I mean when you take away facts, you're opening the way for something else. You're opening the way for someone who says, I am the truth. I am your voice, to quote Mr. Trump. I am your voice. Which is something that fascists said, as a matter of fact.

The three-word chants. Lock them all up. The idea that the press are the enemy of the people. And it's become the enemy of the people. These are all fascist concepts. It doesn't mean that Trump is quite a fascist himself. Imagine what comes after that, right? Imagine if the big lie continues.

Imagine if there's someone who's more skillful in using it than he is. Then we're starting to move into clearly fascist territory. People would say, oh, it couldn't possibly happen here. But so many things that we say couldn't possibly happen, happen. That's Fiona Hill, a historian who spent decades studying Russia and the former Soviet Union, looking at how disinformation and lies are woven into authoritarian regimes. Hill was also on the National Security Council staff under President Trump. You may remember her testimony from Trump's impeachment hearing in 2019, when she refuted what she called the fictional narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Given the big lie's roots in Nazi Germany, I asked Fiona Hill, is it a stretch, a poor analogy,

to call Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election a big lie? Hill says no. We get so bogged down on the terminology that we don't then just kind of catalog what has been happening and inspect it for what it is. What it is, says Hill, is a colossal falsehood meant to subvert the transfer of presidential power and to incite violence. So I don't actually think that we should get caught up in the origins of where this term the big lie comes from because this is clearly a lie on a large scale that was meant to have political consequences and was also intended to pit one group of people within society against

another. Trump has told so many falsehoods that he has effectively normalized lying, Hill says, and he's taken his cues from the autocrats he publicly admires. President Trump was also talking openly about removing term limits. Wouldn't that be great? And the thing is, everyone thought he was joking. But as I learned from observing him, he says things in these throwaway manners, but he's deadly serious. He's not joking at all. Trump's use of the big lie comes from an age-old authoritarian playbook, says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, history professor at NYU and author of the book Strongman,

Mussolini to the Present. It's part of a much larger discourse of throwing any mechanism of democracy, any democratic institution, into doubt. Looking forward, Ben-Ghiat says while Trump will soon be gone from the White House... He's also going to carry his victimhood cult with him, which will be stronger than ever. So we haven't seen the last of those lies and the pernicious effects they're going to have on our democracy. Put another way, as historian Timothy Snyder writes,

the lie outlasts the liar. NPR's Melissa Block. For coverage the rest of the week of Donald Trump's impeachment trial, listen to our colleagues on the NPR Politics Podcast. There's a link in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.