The NPR Politics Podcast - What To Know About Trump's Second Impeachment Trial

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

The impeachment trial gets underway tomorrow. A new brief suggests that Trump's lawyers will defend him on both process and substance. And a vote to convict the former president always seemed unlikely, but Republican opposition to the president appears to have softened in the month since the insurrection. This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.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

Hey there, it's Danielle Kurtzleben. Before we start the show, we've got an announcement. This year we started the NPR Politics Book Club, where we pick a book that we think gets to the heart of the political moment, and we read it along with all of you. Each time we pick a book, we'll have a discussion on our Facebook page with the author and do a podcast with them using your questions. Our next book will be Uncivil Agreement by Liliana Mason. If you want to join the discussion and share your thoughts as you read it, join our Facebook group at n.pr slash politics group. All right, here's the show. This podcast was recorded at... The greatest decade of your life is ahead of you. It is... It's 208 Eastern on Monday, February 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this,

but I will be embarking on a new decade of adulthood. Alrighty, enjoy the show! Your 30s will be great! Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Former President Donald Trump has been out of office for several weeks now, but he will be the center of political attention again this week when the Senate tries a former president on impeachment charges for the first time in U.S. history. The trial starts tomorrow. We're going to preview it today. But part of this preview is a little bit of a challenge, Sue, because here we are, Monday afternoon, and we still don't have a firm sense yet of what the day-to-day schedule

is going to be and how long this thing is going to last. Well, the one thing we do know is that they want it to be short. Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are finalizing the terms of a resolution. We will probably see that later today or this evening because they'll have to vote on it before the trial begins. But it looks like they're going to want to wrap this up in about a week. The trial is going to allow for some debate over this constitutional question of whether the Senate can even have a trial once a president has left office. They'll have a vote on that. They're going to give both sides 16 hours each to make their cases. In comparison, in the first impeachment trial, both sides got 24 hours to make their cases. So it's going to

be a little bit more abbreviated. And they've reached an early agreement not to work on Saturday, which is nice to those of us who will be covering this trial. President Trump's defense attorneys asked not to work on Saturday because it's the Sabbath, although it looks like they might be coming in to work on Sunday, which is also a Sabbath, but no one has asked to not work on Sunday just yet. Do we have a sense yet of whether the Senate will multitask and, you know, continue confirming cabinet nominations or other things during the trial? We don't. They would, as we've said before, they'd need unanimous consent. All 100 senators would have to be on board to do something like that. But it may become sort of unnecessary. If they are able to wrap this up in just a week's time, then they can move right on

to nominations, you know, as early as next week. So Mara, we have obviously been hearing for several weeks now what the argument for conviction is. It was the argument for impeachment. Democrats have been loud and clear about it. We got a clearer sense today of what the Trump team's legal defense is going to be. Can you give us a summary? Right. The Trump team has a brief where they explain their defense, and it's very technical and very narrow. First of all, they say it's not constitutional to convict and remove from office a president who's already been removed from office by the voters. He's no longer the president. They also are focusing very heavily on the one speech, the January 6th speech at the Ellipse,

where they say that there was nothing in the speech that can be interpreted as a call to, quote, immediate violence or violent overthrow of the U.S. government. But isn't that kind of a willful misreading of the argument that's being made against the president? Obviously, they're focusing on that speech, but also all of the other things he said from the moment he lost the election on. Yes, they're not focusing on that. The Democrats will. They're focusing on individual words like, so what? He said fight. Well, fight is a very common word in political discourse. Of course, the rioters who breached the Capitol were chanting fight for Trump. They do at one point say that he

was exercising his First Amendment rights to express his belief that the results of the election were suspect. And what you're talking about is the months and months that Trump spent saying that if he lost the election, it would only be because it was stolen. And then after the election, constantly saying that it had been stolen, that he tried everything he could to overthrow the results of an election that the judiciary found to be free and fair. His defense team is making a process argument. It worked the last time when Republicans said, you know what, he was impeached in the House, but to remove a president from office, that's a decision left

better to the voters. And the Democrats are going to try to make this not a process argument, but they're going to try to force Republicans to vote on whether what the president did was right or wrong. There is a point in the Trump defense brief that they put out today that I did think was interesting and it will be curious to see how they make this argument to the senators this week. But part of their case, they say, will rest on this argument that, you know, so much as the focus is the January 6th speech, that that speech was an inciting event, that immediately after that people went and stormed the Capitol. And in their brief, and I want to be clear in the brief throughout it, they condemn the violence. They say it was unequivocally wrong.

You know, they really make a point to say that over and over and over again. But they also make the point that there is evidence and growing evidence that a lot of the attack on the Capitol was premeditated by extremist groups. They don't mention the extremist groups, but we know extremist groups like the Proud Boys had been laying the foundation for this attack prior to the events of January 6th. Their point obviously being that these were events that could have been happening regardless of what the president said that day. Now, we could also note that the president has a very long track record of statements that undermined the election. But the Democrats are making a case that this specific January 6th speech was sort of the kerosene on the fire that made them go up into the Capitol.

As long as the Democrats focus on January 6th, the Republicans will be where they want to be, which is arguing only about that speech. In that brief that the Trump defense team put out, they said he can't be responsible if a small group of criminals who came armed completely misunderstood him. And even though they said they did it in his name, they brought a gallows to the Capitol, they chanted hang Mike Pence. They said after they were arrested that they were there because the president told them to. And it took hours for the president after being begged by White House aides to tell them to leave. But as long as it totally focuses on January 6th,

the Trump team feels that's easier for them to defend. But let me ask you both something. I mean, when Bill Clinton was impeached, everyone was trying to go back more than 100 years. When Trump was impeached, the first time we were all going back 20 years. Now we're going back to things that we were like podcasting about this time last year. Right. And it was so clear. Literally. Yeah.

It was so clear last time around that it was almost totally irrelevant what was being said during this trial. A lot of Republicans hung on the fact that they didn't like the tone or the approach from the House Democrats, but they weren't voting to convict anyway. How much does any of what we're talking about right now, how much does this have any bearing on what we expect the final vote outcome will be? Probably very little. I mean, but the big difference is that there are a handful of senators who are open to convicting because they voted against saying that this trial was unconstitutional. The Ukrainian conversation was kind of hard to understand, but the Democrats are going to put forward this video argument that's going to show

a lot of horrific scenes of rioters talking about how they're doing this in the president's name. That's going to be easier for people to understand. I don't know if it'll sway any votes. Sue, what do you think? You know, I mean, we've said from the beginning, and I think it's still true, we know that they don't have the votes to convict. But there certainly seems to be more votes in play than just Mitt Romney's. He was the only Republican in the last impeachment trial to vote with Democrats on one count of impeachment. There's more than that. And I think, yeah, we talk so much about the threshold of conviction. But if a group of Republicans do side with Democrats here and you have bipartisan support for conviction, that will still be a pretty damning political statement

on Donald Trump and the events of January 6, even if it doesn't result in his removal from office, and will further sort of exacerbate, which we've been talking about a lot right now, is this sort of ongoing divide in the party of how much of a role do you want Donald Trump to be playing here, not just in 2022 or 2024 and beyond. And there is a big divide among the Republican Party right now over that. And if you get a bigger than expected vote, I think right now our ceiling's probably around five senators. If it goes higher than that, then I think I still think that could be a pretty impactful vote. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about how these arguments are being crafted by both sides in this upcoming trial.

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 Sirius alone. Listen now to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast from NPR. All right, we're back. And so we've talked around this a lot, but just to address it, you know, in one point directly, it's been a month and a couple days now since this attack. There are so many ways that this attack is lingering at the forefront of everybody's brain who works in and around the Capitol.

But there are also a lot of ways that the political dynamics have already shifted, especially when it comes to Republicans. What's the best way to describe what's different on February 9th, tomorrow when this trial starts, from January 7th? It's a complicated question. I don't have a clear answer for you yet. I think that the Republican response to this event is still unfolding. And one of the most fascinating splits to me right now in Washington is between the two Republican leaders in Congress. You have House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who initially was critical of the president, even went so far as to suggest he could support a censure resolution to condemn

him for his actions on January 6th, who snapped right back into line and was flying down to Mar-a-Lago to get his picture taken with Trump and publicly commit to working together to winning a majority in Congress in the midterm elections. And then you have Mitch McConnell, who has been way more critical of Trump in public, who has not spoken to him in more than a month, who is making quite clear in his own McConnell way that he would very much like the Republican Party to move away from this man, who has floated this sort of wink and nod through McConnell land orbit that he could possibly be a vote to convict, although that seems pretty unlikely. And I think that tells you a lot about where the Republican Party is right now. They're pretty torn apart. They don't know what to do here. And they're trying to, you know, keep a party together that

is still at the base level, fully, deeply animated by the support for Donald Trump. And the only, in terms of the outside the Beltway politics of this, the only backlash for Republicans have been backlash to Republicans who voted for impeachment or criticized the president. That's been the local politics. Though I've seen none of them have backed off that, including Liz Cheney, who just gave her first interview this weekend. None of them have backed off, but they're fully expecting primary challenges. And it'll be really interesting to see. We don't know. But this conflict inside the Republican Party is not going to be resolved till after the 2022 elections.

So let me let me end on this note. Maybe it's because we all watched the Super Bowl last night, which was filled with pandemic optics, right? Large gatherings of people, maskless. We're going to have 100 and plus people in a room for hours at a time over the next couple of weeks. Sue, what has the Senate done and not done to make sure gatherings like this are done safely? Yeah. And I think, you know, once the public sees this image, it's going to be pretty striking. A Senate floor full of people is one that's going to raise COVID concerns. There's a couple of things I would say about that. One is

members of Congress have had access to the vaccine. So according to our own NPR analysis of contacting offices, at least 69 senators have had at least one dose to the vaccine. So according to our own NPR analysis of contacting offices, at least 69 senators have had at least one dose of the vaccine. There could be more than that, but that's just the ones we've confirmed. I've also talked to some aides who say, you know, because of the pandemic, the building's closed to the public, that they're going to open up the galleries of the Senate. So senators can choose to not sit, they're not going to require senators to sit at their desk for this proceeding the way that impeachment trials normally call for, so they can watch from the galleries and social distance. But you know, all of this is like back in people's minds, because just this

morning, the first death of a member of Congress happened today. A two-term congressman from Texas, Ron Wright, he had been, he had cancer, but he was diagnosed with COVID-19 and died. And I think that, you know, it's a reminder that COVID is still a big threat on Capitol Hill, even though clearly members are getting access to the vaccine in real time. Yeah. All right. That does it for today's preview. NPR will be covering this trial.

We will be on your radio. Sue and I will be two of the people hosting our live coverage as the trial happens. And then each night we will be in your feeds late in the night with an update on everything that happened on the floor that day. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.