The House impeachment managers opened their prosecution of Donald J. Trump on Wednesday with a meticulous account of his campaign to overturn the election and goad supporters to join him, bringing its most violent spasms to life with never-before-seen security footage from the January 6 Capitol riot.
Filling the Senate chamber with the profane screams of the attackers, images of police officers being brutalised, and near-miss moments in which Vice-President Mike Pence and lawmakers came steps away from confronting a mob hunting them down, the prosecutors made an emotional case that Trump’s election lies had directly endangered the heart of American democracy.
They played frantic police radio calls warning that “we’ve lost the line”, body camera footage showing an officer pummelled with poles and fists on the West Front of the Capitol, and silent security tape from inside showing Pence, his family and members of the House and Senate racing to evacuate as the mob closed in, chanting: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
All of it, the nine Democratic managers said, was the foreseeable and intended outcome of Trump’s desperate attempts to cling to the presidency.
Reaching back as far as last summer, they traced how he spent months cultivating not only the “big lie” that the election was “rigged” against him, but stoking the rage of a throng of supporters who made it clear that they would do anything — including resorting to violence — to help him.
The managers argued that it warranted that the Senate break with two centuries of history to make Trump the first former president to be convicted in an impeachment trial and disqualified from future office on a single count of “incitement of insurrection”.
“Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander in chief and became the inciter in chief of a dangerous insurrection,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead manager, told the senators. They watched the footage in silence in the same spots where they had been when the mob breached the building last month.
“He told them to ‘fight like hell,’” Raskin added, quoting the speech that Trump gave supporters as the onslaught was unfolding, “and they brought us hell on that day”.
Though the House managers used extensive video evidence of the January 6 riot to punctuate their case, they spent just as much time placing the event in the context of Trump’s broader effort to falsely claim the election had been stolen from him, portraying him as a president increasingly desperate to invalidate the results.
“With his back against the wall, when all else has failed, he turns back to his supporters,” said Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado.
After dozens of frivolous lawsuits failed, the managers said, Trump began pressuring officials in key battleground states to overturn his losses there. When that failed, he tried the justice department, then publicly attempted to shame Republican members of Congress into helping him. Finally, he insisted that Pence assume nonexistent powers to unilaterally overturn their loss on January 6, when the vice-president would oversee the counting of the electoral votes in Congress.
New York Times News Service
