Reading the effect of the Wednesday riot at the US Congress has been interesting. The Trump position has as usual been as infantile and self-adsorbed as all of his disaster of a presidency has been.
Trump remained out of sight Saturday, and unnaturally silent. Twitter had permanently revoked his account Friday evening, removing his accustomed direct broadcast system to nearly 90 million followers.
Trump spent much of the day Saturday railing about Twitter taking his account, according to two officials. The president has not said anything about the five people who died in the attack, including a Capitol Police officer, nor has he moved to lower the flags of the U.S. government in their honor. He does not plan to make that order and has complained to advisers that he is being treated unfairly, two people familiar with his comments said.
Washington Post: “Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in inciting it“
This fits with similar reports of Trump wandering around the White House during the riot there puzzled about why his aides weren’t ecstatic about the action as he was.
There are preparations in the House of Representatives to create a resolution of impeachment and warnings from speaker Pelosi that the house may be called back to get it underway.
In the Senate, there has been one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, stating that she wants Trump to resign. Currently 3 others are known to have stated that they would look at impeachment if it came through.
The key issue here is that any impeachment can proceed even after Trump has left office in the 117th session of Congress.
McConnell (R-Ky.) is circulating a memo to Republican senators that outlines how a potential Senate trial would work in proceedings that would all but certainly occur after Trump leaves the White House.
Washington Post: “Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in inciting it“
I’d guess that the depth of feeling about Trump screwing up Republican control of the Senate with his behaviour in the Georgian runoff is running deep.
ATLANTA — A few days after the presidential election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called President Trump to talk strategy in the pivotal Senate races in Georgia. But Trump quickly shifted the conversation. He wanted to talk about his claim that the presidential race had been stolen from him.
In calls with the Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Trump regularly turned the discussion to his own fortunes, a person familiar with the calls said.
And when Trump finally agreed to head to Georgia to campaign, hosting two rallies here, the president was far more focused on his own grievances against Georgia’s GOP leadership than on helping the party win two key races.
“We’d have people call him every day in the week or so before he came,” said one Republican strategist involved in the race. “They’d all call to say good things about the candidates. But he always wanted to talk about his own race and the fraud.”
It was the overriding theme throughout the nine-week runoff campaign that ended in disaster for the Republican Party — handing the Senate majority to the Democrats and serving as a prelude to a deadly week in which Trump’s bogus fraud claims incited a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Washington Post: “‘Always about him’: How Trump’s obsession with baseless election claims cost Republicans in Georgia“
Mitch McConnell in particular will probably be enraged at losing his control on the processes of the Senate that he spent so much time nurturing and using. Certainly he seems to be organising to make sure that the process in the 117th session is clear to the Senators.
Apart from putting an emphatic underline on the failure of the Trump presidency, any successful impeachment process would mean that Donald Trump wouldn’t be able to stand for president in 2024.
His current presidency has managed to drop the Republicans from having control of the two houses of Congress and the presidency to just extending a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. Quietly, it probably means that many Republican politicians are looking forward to an impeachment that means they don’t have to rely on McDonald’s cheeseburgers to remove their self-appointed loser in chief.
However few have been willing so far to pull their heads out of the sand and say that in public yet. However their actions are pointing to making sure that Donald Trump can’t screw up their planned success again.
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