The NPR Politics Podcast - Donald Trump Impeached On Charge Of Inciting Insurrection

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Ten Republicans crossed the aisle to support the impeachment. Next, a Senate trial — one that won't take place until after President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell.

I cover Congress. And I'm Franco Ord Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House. The time now is 5.34 p.m. on Wednesday, the 13th of January 2021. And President Donald Trump has been impeached for a second time. On this vote, the ayes are 232. The nays are 197. This time on one charge of incitement of insurrection. Donald John Trump engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors by inciting violence against the government of the United States and that. The clerk began the debate

over the article of impeachment by reading the charge. Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. Kelsey, we had a day of debate. In the end. How did the vote break down? It was 232 to 197 with 10 Republicans voting with the Democrats. That is a significant number, something that we've been talking about here. 10 is much larger than the last time. And it shows that the split that we have been talking about between Republicans and the president is actually showing up in the way they vote, not just what they say on background to people. And, you know, when you hear about a Republican source says they're uncomfortable with the president. No,

these people committed their names and votes to impeaching the president. Kelsey, that is a lot different from President Trump's first impeachment when Democrats in the House were only able to pick up one vote from outside of their party and independent. This time, a year later, Democrats have a smaller majority and he was impeached by a larger margin because of Republicans. There are a lot of differences, but one difference that we can't stop repeating because it is so significant is there was an attack on the Capitol by a mob of people who left a rally where President Trump spoke and told them that they had to fight like hell. That is not something that anybody inside of that building could escape from. And in part, that's why we didn't hear a whole lot of people defending the president's words. So there weren't a lot of Republicans that were making arguments that what happened last week

was OK or even particularly defending the president. There was a lot of comparing the riot to the racial justice protests, some of which had violent turns over the summer. But the main theme that Republicans kept coming back to was summed up pretty well by Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. He is a Republican who actually changed parties around the time of the last impeachment. Congress must be the glue that starts unifying everyone. By the time this process would conclude, the man they want out of office will no longer even be the president. If we want unity, this is not the way. And then there were Democrats who sort of clapped back on that, including Zoe Lofgren of California.

She made the case that even with so little time, it was essential for Congress to live up to its constitutional role. The founders devised the impeachment clause to protect against a president who would threaten constitutional order. If we don't act now, the impeachment clause would essentially be meaningless. Faced with these facts, if we don't impeach to protect our country, we will fail our own oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and, yes, domestic. Kelsey, I was I was really surprised to see Congressman Jim Jordan leading the Republicans defense of President Trump instead of Kevin McCarthy. What do you make of that? In a moment that is as significant as this, you would expect that somebody from leadership would be the person kind of keeping time, making sure that members come up and talk,

and leading the process. But that is not what happened. Having Jim Jordan be that person was very symbolic of the split that's happening within this party. And it was interesting to me that Kevin McCarthy, who is the top Republican in the House, did come out and speak, but he kind of tried to split the baby a little bit. His remarks felt like they were emblematic of the churn and discomfort among a lot of Republicans who could not figure out how to square placing some blame with the president and saying he shouldn't be impeached. That doesn't mean the president is free from fault. 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. Yeah, I don't know about you guys, but I certainly listening to McCarthy, I was really stunned. And I can almost feel like I could hear in his voice that he was struggling, kind of splitting hairs here, you know, going against President Trump in such strong language, at least at times.

Well, yeah, I mean, what was remarkable is you have him saying, no, you people who are saying that this was Antifa was involved. No, Antifa wasn't involved. I mean, these were people who were there in support of President Trump. And then he also acknowledged in a way that President Trump hasn't yet President Trump still hasn't said Joe Biden's name acknowledged Joe Biden will be president of the United States next week what we saw last week was not the American way neither is the continued rhetoric that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president let's be. Joe Biden will be sworn in as president of the United States in one week

because he won the election. Yeah, I mean, I'm just really eager to hear from President Trump himself kind of respond to this because in the past, this is the kind of long language that would really set off the president. But, you know, obviously we are in very different times. We are in a very different moment. And also we don't have Twitter, you know, or at least President Trump doesn't have Twitter in the way before. So we're not getting, you know, the the immediate feedback that, you know, some of us are kind of used to, like, you know, of him kind of lashing out in a way that,

you know, I think we would have maybe heard if if he had not been kicked off the social media network. The president does not have social media anymore, but we did hear from him today, right, Franco? You know, so the White House is not saying whether he's watching the proceedings. He did issue a statement, though, while lawmakers were debating the issue. But it seemed to be more about the FBI warnings of potential violence ahead of inauguration. Congressman Jim Jordan, who we've talked about a lot, actually took a moment to read President Trump's words on the floor. Here it is.

Madam Speaker, statement from the president. I urge that there must be no violence, no lawbreaking, no vandalism of any kind that Republicans and Democrats, but including Republicans, had been pushing for Trump to do for a while to condemn the violence, something that he was slow to do last week. He did, though, talk about impeachment yesterday, though, and he took no responsibility for the violence, none at all, and instead really lashed out and said that impeachment was creating more anger and division in the country. That is literally, those are the words that Republicans and Democrats alike were begging for last week. Those were the words that his own staff, that his inner circle were demanding much earlier when his vice president was trying to escape the House chamber.

I mean, it's pretty amazing that it did take this long for him to come out with such a strong statement, you know, condemning the violence. And I just can't help thinking about the statement he made on Wednesday itself, almost kind of excusing the violence and saying that this is a moment that would be remembered forever. It was really stunning. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. Franco, we have to say goodbye to you. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. And when we get back, we will be joined by NPR's own Ron Elving. Support for NPR and the following message come from BetterHelp, offering online counseling. BetterHelp therapist Hesu Jo explains the importance of creating a safe space for therapy. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients that say that expression, like, I've never told that to anybody. That's when I know I've made some kind of momentous move with this person. They feel safe enough to expose that part of themselves. And doing that together with somebody else can be very powerful.

To get matched with a counselor within 48 hours and save 10%, go to betterhelp.com slash politics. With civil unrest, the pandemic, and the economic crisis, you want to know what's happening right when you wake up. And that's why there is Up First, the news you need in about 10 minutes from NPR News. Listen every day. And we're back. And as promised, Ron Elving is here.

Hey, Ron. Hey, good to be with you. Good to have you here in this moment. We've had a president now impeached twice. That is an American first. How do you think that that will shape the president's legacy? A good deal depends on what the Senate does with what the House has handed them. They're going to have a trial and whatever comes out of that is going to have a great deal to do with how we remember Trump's legacy, particularly if they decide to bar him from office in the future.

But even as it is, even if the Senate doesn't really pick up the ball at all, this is going to be part of the biography, whether you're talking about a full-length biography or a medium-length or just a paragraph, they're going to all have to say, the only president who was ever impeached twice. This presidency has had so many just absolutely historic, unheard of moments, moments where, you know, historians say, if you think something is unprecedented, you just aren't looking hard enough. But I've spoken to multiple historians in the last week who say, no, in this case, I think we can say unprecedented. Generally speaking, when you're talking about something highly unusual that happened with Donald Trump, the odds are quite different from talking about any other presidency. The odds are it probably didn't ever happen before. This really does exist outside of time in historical terms, because the nature of everything about his rise to the presidency and his means and his demeanor in office have been so different.

Kelsey, let's talk about what comes next. The Senate is where these things go for a trial. Do you have any sense of the timetable when the article might be sent over, when the Senate might take it up? Yeah, we do know that the House does plan to send over the articles of impeachment fairly quickly. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will not hold an impeachment trial for Trump until Biden assumes the presidency. We had kind of known that that was going to be the case because the Senate would have had to come back into session after sending people home. But McConnell put out this statement saying that they're working around the clock to prepare for a safe and successful inauguration and kind of left it there.

So this will be a trial for a president who left office. Incoming Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democrats, says there will be a trial. We don't know a ton of details beyond that, but he has said he is committed to making sure that there is a trial for this article of impeachment. But this would be something that, again, we've never experienced before, which is a trial that happens to remove someone who is already out of office. There are some Republicans questioning the legality or constitutionality of that. But for Democrats who, who Kelsey, as you say, are going to pursue it and that it will definitely happen. What is that? What is the purpose? What would this do? There are a couple of aims here. One is that if they

are able to convict the president, they can then move on to a vote to bar him from future federal office. Democrats say that's something they absolutely want to try to get to. They want to do everything they can to get to that point. The other thing is that it forces Republicans on the record about this. And the raw politics of that is the Senate is absolutely in play yet again in 2022. There are so many seats in competitive states up in the Senate. And some of this is a message to Republicans that they are going to be held to account for how they respond in this moment. So that is certainly part of the calculus. Another part of it is that Democrats really do feel like it's their responsibility to go through impeachment to express that Congress will not stand down in moments, extraordinary moments, and that they need to push back on executive

overreach where they see it and that they need to make sure that they are exerting their constitutional powers. There's also the possibility that we are going to learn a good deal more about what happened a week ago in the Capitol with the assault on the Capitol, the siege, how it was planned, who was involved, and that all of that could make the stakes in the Senate trial higher than even we know at this time. And Liz Cheney kind of hinted at that in her famous statement that she made the night before the impeachment vote. That is certainly something I've heard from Democrats as well, is they don't think that the totality of the story is out there. And they think that they they think that more Republicans will be swayed when they hear more details about

how things unfolded. And they worry that there will be additional violence between now and then. And they think that, you know, that could add further credence to their argument. You know, Mitch McConnell put out this statement today where he did not say that he was absolutely planning to vote against conviction. It seemed like it left a door open, and I don't know what to make of that. He was responding to some degree to a lot of stories that ran in newspapers and all over the cables this morning saying that Mitch McConnell was not unhappy about this impeachment, that he was not necessarily opposed to it, and that perhaps he would welcome it in some respects is a strong word.

But then he said he planned to listen to the arguments. Well, that's not a total rejection of the idea of a Senate trial that would result in the opposite verdict from what we saw the first time. You know, McConnell's floated some trial balloons here and trying to kind of feel out where other Republicans are. We've talked about this a lot over the past week, but the party is trying to grapple with a huge split. They're having to decide if they are going to be the party of Trump and all of the legacy that he has left them, and if they're going to embrace that and continue that on into the future, or if they're going to take the Trump legacy and say, you know, this was a departure from the party that we have always said we are, and we're returning to our more traditional pro-business, pro-growth, you know, the traditional Republican values.

Pro-norms. Yeah, I don't think this will be solved that quickly. I don't think that just because there is a delay in the start of this Senate trial, that there will suddenly be a decision among Republicans about what the party is. This is a multi-year experiment that is going to take time. But it is something that McConnell means leaving the door open so that he can make decisions between now and then. And real quick before we go, Ron, President Trump did put out a video. You know, we were expecting a response to him being impeached, but that's not what this video was. Instead, President Trump condemned last week's violence.

And he also told people not to do it again. like there may be real concern, and certainly there is in the law enforcement community and the fact that we have National Guard members piling into D.C., that there may be real concern about further threats of violence. No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence. No true supporter of mine could ever disrespect law enforcement or our great American flag. No true supporter of mine could ever threaten or harass their fellow Americans. If you do any of these things, you are not supporting our movement. You are attacking it and you are attacking our country. This is one of those moments when a president's leadership can be absolutely crucial. If he steps forward and denounces any such plans, if he says, please don't do this, the likelihood of people doing it is far less.

And the participation level is likely to be far less. So this is the right thing to do. And one hopes that this will take a lot of the air out of it and that there will be far less likelihood of serious disruptions on Inauguration Day or around Inauguration Day and in the state capitals and in Washington going forward. Yeah, because last week there were a lot of people who said that they were there for President Trump. They were there because President Trump wanted them there. And now he's saying, don't do this again. Exactly. All right, we are going to leave it there for now. And we will be back tomorrow in your feeds,

but we will be back a bit late once again, because we're going to be covering a speech that Joe Biden is giving late tomorrow. Until then, you can subscribe to our newsletter for a roundup of our continuing analysis of this historic moment. Just head to npr.org slash politics newsletter. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.