In today’s opening statement at the impeachment trial against Trump taking place in the Senate chambers, the people making the case for Trump to be convicted on the impeachment charges showed a powerful video taken from many sources that interspersed Trump’s speech on January 6th to the mob with the processing within the Capitol building where the Electoral College votes were being certified and the mobs rioting is support of Trump.
You can see the video.
Trump’s defense team got off to such a bad start in their rebuttal that even Trump-supporting Newsmax and Trump-supporting Alan Dershowitz could not make any sense of what he was saying.
'There is no argument – I have no idea what he is doing,' @AlanDersh on Trump's defense lawyer Bruce Castor 'talking nice' to U.S. Senators – via Newsmax TV's 'American Agenda.' https://t.co/VlT7z8drtO pic.twitter.com/7P7uVk5X19
— Newsmax (@newsmax) February 9, 2021
Trump is guilty as hell.
The question isn’t if Trump is guilty. The question is can they shame or scare (with the threat of devastating election adds against them) enough Republican senators that 17 plus will join the vote to declare Trump guilty.
Also on prominent display the reason why there should at least be an effort made to get neutral jurors.
As has been pointed out, a conviction of Trump is a conviction of all in Congress who have spent the past 4+ years enabling him. The “jurors” here aren’t even in the same universe as fair and impartial.
Trump is guilty as hell.
How unfair! At least Trump™ has been proven to exist, and to have done many illegal things; Hell has not.
If the republiclowns don’t convict, they’ll spend the next four years trying to the voters why they didn’t. Forget “the base”, they’re a minority of the population. If they can’t convince swing voters, they won’t govern for twelve years.
@4, Voter suppression… teh thugs are further increasing their efforts. Also gerrymandering, teh thugs have control in enough state legislatures to continue to, and to further, marginalise people who are unlikely to vote nazi. And flat-out lying, combined with the filibuster; teh thugs can slow or sabotage a whole range of badly-needed reforms, and then blame others for nothing changing, for the “swamp”, and for lesbian socialist reptiles from outer space. And there are razor-thin majorities in both the House and Senate; historically, the party not in the White House tends to gain during the mid-term elections, which would flip the Senate back to teh thugs, and could also flip the House.
@Intransitive(#4):
They won’t be explaining it to the voters. To the Republicans the world poofed into existence on Jan 20th. Aside from this meaning that everything bad that they did is somehow the fault of Biden it also means that Trump is not to blame while the Democrats do this witch hunt against him and the Republicans.
The whole thing is that the Republicans are so scared of what Trump might do in a year or two against them that they rather vote to keep their job in two years then vote to insure that their party will never have to fall in line behind the madman again. The exception are the few cynics who expect him to die in the next four years, just don’t mention Biden being four years older then Trump to those.
The republicans are all in. Next time they’ll have a non-idiot figurehead like a general, and it’ll be game over for US’ pathetic attempt at democracy. The threat isn’t trump. The threat is that the republicans can read the writing on the wall and will fight like cornered rats.
Marcus Ranum@7,
This grossly underestimates Trump. Just because he’s ignorant and in some ways unintelligent does not mean he lacks political skills -- observe the way he won the nomination in 2016, and has managed to keep control of the Republican Party despite losing them the Presidency, Senate and House. And the way he gained 11 million more voters in 2020 than in 2016; he only lost because enough Americans made the effort to vote against fascism. The Republicans can’t just pick a non-idiot general and expect the latter to have the same appeal.
Trump reminds me of these descriptions of Hitler by Otto Strasser:
In Trump’s case it’s not the whole nation (something of a exaggeration even in Hitler’s case), but it is a very substantial part of it.