President Trump angrily responded to the impeachment he had long been dreading on Wednesday, lashing out at his Democratic accusers in a rambling two-hour speech and calling for their defeat in November.
Moments after the House passed two articles of impeachment against him, he told a campaign rally in a state he won in 2016 that is crucial to his re-election that the vote was an attempt to “nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans”.
But in his mostly unscripted remarks, Trump claimed he was enjoying himself.
“They said there’s no crime,” he said. “There’s no crime. I’m the first person to ever get impeached and there’s no crime. I feel guilty. It’s impeachment lite.”
He paused before adding, “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time.”
His rejoinder presented the remarkable image of a combative President standing unbowed before his core supporters even as he became the third in American history to be impeached.
But more often he seemed embittered, mocking the physical appearance of his rivals, attacking the news media, calling a female protester a “slob” and a “disgusting person”, and suggesting that John D. Dingell Jr, a Democratic congressman from Michigan who died in February after serving 59 years in the House, had gone to hell.
Above all, Trump insisted that the vote to impeach him was nothing more than a fabrication by Democrats who cannot tolerate his presidency.
“Crazy Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats have branded themselves with an eternal mark of shame,” he said.
Trump showed no contrition for the cause of his impeachment — the pressure campaign he waged against Ukraine, in which he pressed the country’s new President to investigate former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and look into various allegations about the 2016 election, including an unfounded theory that Ukrainians rather than Russians had stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee.
To the contrary, Trump blithely repeated an unfounded charge that it was the former vice-president who had inappropriately pressured Ukraine’s government.
Even by his own standards, the President’s speech was discursive and strange, as when he digressed to complain that modern toilets lack adequate flushing power and that “women” had informed him that dishwashers, too, have lost their historic oomph.
At the moment the House approved the first article of impeachment, for abuse of power, about 17 minutes after he took the stage, Trump was bragging about how F-35 fighter pilots were even more handsome than the Top Gun actor Tom Cruise.
“Is there a better place in the world to be than a Trump rally?” he asked at one point. But as the speech went on, supporters began leaving in significant numbers or in some cases, appeared to doze off in their seats.
In the moments he did return to the subject of impeachment, he framed the results as an affirmation. At one point, Trump — prompted by a campaign aide holding up a sign for him to see from the stage — paused to triumphantly announce that Republicans had voted along party lines, casting the modest three Democratic defections as another victory, drawing cheers from a crowd that seemed to revel in his every claim.
Trump’s decision to hold a rally and immerse himself in the warmth of an adoring crowd at a critical juncture in his presidency was an echo of how he handled his worst public humiliation — the revelation of the “Access Hollywood” tape on October 7, 2016, during the final days of his presidential campaign.
After holing up at Trump Tower the day after that video was released, Trump emerged after seeing on television that a crowd of supporters had gathered on Fifth Avenue. He walked through the glass doors, pumped his fist in the air, then walked back into his building, clapping his hands as if cheering himself on.
