On This Day In 2021
Trump becomes the first American to be impeached twice
Until Donald Trump entered political life, only 19 people in the history of the United States had ever been impeached: 2 presidents, 1 senator, 1 cabinet official, and 15 Federal judges. None of them, though, had been accused of attempting to overthrow our government.
OTDI 2021, the House of Representatives determined that Trump had “incited Insurrection,” and thus he was formally impeached on a bipartisan vote. The man who liked to brag that “I alone can fix” the nation’s problems became, alone, the nation’s first federal officer to be impeached for a second time. (Trump’s first impeachment came in 2019 for extorting the leader of a foreign government for Trump’s personal benefit.)
Some defenders claim Trump shouldn’t have been impeached. Maybe it didn’t make sense because he only had one more week in office? Or it was “politically motivated?” Or Trump wasn’t really plotting a coup to keep himself in power? To us, none of these ring true.
But, regardless, let’s ask: Why did Trump even put himself in a position to be impeached? Why did he beg election officials to “find” votes? Why did his team threaten officers across the country? Why did he invent a scheme to send counterfeit “official” state results to Congress? Why did he rile up a bloodthirsty mob in our nation’s capital? Why didn’t he try to stop the rioters from breaking into the Capitol while he could?
Why did he continue to lie about the election results when even his Attorney General told him his claims were nonsense? Why did he refuse to concede the election?
Any one of those actions was a dereliction of his duty to “protect the Constitution.” Any one of those plots should have warranted impeachment. Together, they certainly did.
As the Colorado Supreme Court noted, “President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection…he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty…These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.”
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ump becomes the first American to be impeached twice