Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial was an artifact of his Presidency. It was a battle of meaning against noise, against nothing-means-anything-and-everything-is-the-same nihilism—and nihilism won.
Over the course of three days, the House impeachment managers meticulously lined up facts, images, and arguments. What had been a fragmented understanding of the events of January 6th became an ordered narrative. President Trump had incited a violent insurrection. For months, he had acted consistently on his belief that he deserved to be reinstalled as the President. His actions on January 6th mirrored his earlier statements, such as his praise of a militia plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, and his method of communicating with his supporters through sequences of provocations, promises, and praise. In his opening statement, the House impeachment manager, Jamie Raskin, promised to be brief and specific, offering a case “based on cold, hard facts. It’s all about the facts.” Among the facts was a graphic video of the insurrection, beginning with a fragment of the Trump speech that sent the mob on its way. Later in the day, Raskin described the facts of his own family’s harrowing experience inside the besieged Capitol, and then more facts. “People died that day,” he said. “Officers ended up with head damage and brain damage. People’s eyes were gouged. An officer had a heart attack. An officer lost three fingers that day. Two officers have taken their own lives. Senators, this cannot be our future.”
Then Bruce Castor, the co-leader of Trump’s defense team, opened for his side. He spoke for more than half an hour, mentioning the Federalist Papers; three of the Founding Fathers; the Bill of Rights; having worked in the Capitol building forty years ago; having visited the Capitol earlier in the week; the importance of the Senate; the fall of Rome; the inherent fragility of democracy; Benjamin Franklin; Philadelphia; independence from Great Britain; an unnamed member of Congress; the First Amendment; the absence of criminal conspiracy charges against Trump; the exceptional nature of impeachments; Bill Clinton; former Attorney General Eric Holder; Operation Fast and Furious; the late senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, Dirksen’s speeches, and the old technology of record players; the state of Nebraska, its judicial thought, and its senator Ben Sasse; all the other senators and how great they are; floodgates, whirlwinds, and the Bible; the Fourteenth Amendment; the concept of hearsay as illustrated by an apparently clairvoyant driver speaking to his wife in a hypothetical car; a supposed Senate rule that says, “Hey, you can’t do that” (not at all clear what); the ostensible “real reason” for the impeachment, that is, Trump’s political rivals’ fear of facing him in an election; some examples of one-term Presidents; the wisdom of voters; the fear that voters inspire in members of Congress; and the filibuster; then finally concluded, “President Trump no longer is in office. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.” Journalists described the speech as meandering, rambling, and incoherent, and it was all that. It was also an insult to the proceedings and an assault on reason.
The defense also had their own videos, including an eleven-minute montage of Democratic politicians and others—many of them Black women—speaking out against Trump. The video began with a clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying, “I just don’t know even why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be”; transitioned to a series of fighting-words clips from a range of people, including the singer Madonna; and ended with a mashup of Democratic politicians using the word “fight.” One of the videos used a clip of Vice-President Kamala Harris, then a senator, speaking on Ellen DeGeneres’s television show, in 2018. Another juxtaposed Trump’s pronouncements about law and order with footage of Black Lives Matter protests. To call these examples “false equivalences” would be to elevate them. A false equivalence is the act of erroneously equating two things by using flawed reasoning or incorrect information. Equating incitement to insurrection by a sitting President with passionate political rhetoric, talk-show quips, and just about everything else—without acknowledging an actual insurrection—is an attack on the very concept of reason and the very idea of information. These videos, like Castor’s bizarre opening speech, countered the clear, factual case presented by the House managers with noise. They flooded the zone.
In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt identifies a paradoxical pair of qualities that characterize the audiences of totalitarian leaders: gullibility and cynicism.
Another quality of totalitarian leaders and their followers alike is the belief that the end justifies the means; this makes it easier to accept the lie as a tactical move, even to support it—and to accept the next lie, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Trump’s defense team assumed that its audience was both gullible and cynical. That their audience was willing to believe, contrary to prevalent legal opinion, that Trump, as a former President, shouldn’t be subject to impeachment proceedings; that he hadn’t intended to incite violence; that he didn’t realize that his supporters had invaded the Capitol; or simply that none of this meant anything—that he didn’t incite and yet he did, that he lost the election but won it, that Antifa members were in the building, as Trump apparently told the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, over the phone. That Trump’s words were as devoid of meaning as those of his lawyers, and that impeaching the former President for “just words” was the beginning of a slippery slope to gratuitous impeachments and the repression of free speech. Arendt wrote that the qualities of gullibility and cynicism were present in different proportions depending on a person’s place in the totalitarian movement’s hierarchy. A senator may be more cynical, for example, and a rank-and-file conspiracy theorist more gullible. I suspect that the proportion of gullibility to cynicism can fluctuate over time, depending on one’s mood or circumstances—because everything is possible and nothing has meaning.
Castor’s apparent meandering in his opening statement laid the groundwork for splicing together everything and nothing in the defense team’s videos. This, in turn, enabled Trump’s attorney Michael van der Veen to claim, on Saturday, that the insurrection was carried out by groups “on the left and right.” It paved the way, too, for Saturday’s discussion of the impeachment managers’ motion to call witnesses. The history of the issue is telling: the managers had not initially planned to call witnesses, at least in part because they knew that their potential witnesses—elected officials all—could not be trusted to tell the truth under oath. One potential key witness, McCarthy, had already changed his story about his crucial January 6th phone conversation with Trump several times. Things changed on Friday night, when Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from Washington State, went on the record with her recollection of McCarthy’s initial story of the call, making it possible that McCarthy, or at least basic facts, could be nailed down. The Senate voted to call witnesses, but then Trump’s defenders threatened to clog up the works by calling hundreds of witnesses of their own, dragging out the trial and blocking Senate work on President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and nominations. In other words, Republicans threatened to drown out the facts in the trial and the business of politics in the Senate. Senators threatened to derail bills that could ease and even save the lives of their constituents during a pandemic and a concurrent economic crisis; this was the very definition of cynicism. The Democrats gave up, agreeing to forgo witness testimony if Herrera’s written statement was entered into the record of the impeachment hearings. I wonder what Arendt would have made of their Hail Mary for the historical record. In 1967, she wrote in this magazine that, once elided, historical facts can almost never be restored. What if they are hidden in a file?
Then it was over. Trump was acquitted. After voting to acquit Trump, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, gave a speech in which he acknowledged that Trump had incited the insurrection:
And yet, McConnell said, he believed that a former President could not be subjected to impeachment proceedings. This statement would seem to have wiped out most of Trump’s defense team’s efforts, but an audience of gullible cynics wouldn’t hear it this way. They’d say that they’d known all along that Trump was guilty but should get away with it. They can hold on to this knowledge until the next lie comes along.
Read More About the Attack on the Capitol
- The risks of the second Trump impeachment trial.
- A reporter captures the siege on video.
- John Sullivan claims that he attended the insurrection as a journalist. Others believe he urged the mob on.
- Identifying the Bullhorn Lady, a Pennsylvania mother of eight who became a fugitive from the F.B.I.
- The crisis of the Republican Party has only begun.
- Sign up for our daily newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists, and subscribe to the magazine.
