Adam Boulton Diary – Trump: You’re Fired!

The words “unprecedented” and “historic” have become as commonplace as armed troops in Washington DC as we approach the last few days of Donald Trump’s rapacious four-year presidency.

The United States are in shock as records are shattered.

The US Capitol, seat of the second co-equal branch of government, came under attack by Trump supporters for the first time since British Redcoats invaded in 1814 – if you don’t count Al Qaeda’s thwarted airborne attempt on 9/11 2001.

Donald Trump became just the third President to be impeached by the US House of Representatives and sent for trial in the Senate. He is the only President to suffer the indignity twice. After listing a number of Trump’s statements the latest article of indictment is comprehensive: “Wherefore, Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law.”

The USA is about to inaugurate its oldest ever President, 78-year-old Joe Biden. The Vice President elect, Kamala Harris, will be the first woman to occupy a top executive office. She is of African American and Indian heritage, with a Jewish husband (soon to be Second Gentleman). Those last two ethnicities are new to the presidential family.

Meanwhile the Coronavirus death toll here in the US is surging towards 300,000 at its fastest rate yet, especially in Arizona and California. It is the highest loss of life to the virus in any country. Only half of the twenty million vaccines “rolled out” have been injected into patients.

Because of the pandemic and the enormous and belated security clampdown, the streets at the heart of “the Nation’s Capital” are deserted except for the forces of law and order. It is the first time since the Civil War that armed military have “bivouacked” inside the Capitol building. Not since the Second World War have there been so many soldiers in the city. National Guards alone are due to top twenty thousand by Joe Biden’s Inauguration next Wednesday, the deployment here dwarfs the numbers now based in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump loves superlatives. He may even be gratified privately by the record-breaking mayhem his behaviour and negligence has unleashed. He won’t want to claim the title he is earning though. By his favourite measure he is the Greatest Presidential “Loser” of all time, with the US Congress joining the American electorate to tell the master of The Apprentice; “You’re Fired!”.

Trump is the only man to make it to the Oval Office while losing the popular vote twice. That failure might have been a mere footnote to a controversial presidency had he conceded that he lost the election with the customary grace of previous defeated candidates. Trump could still have been in a strong position to remain the leader of the Republican Party and to run as the nominee for a second term in future. Such an unending campaign also looked like the best remaining revenue stream for Trump.

Instead his demented truculence over the past ten weeks is destroying Trump as a viable businessman and politician and he is taking the Republican Party down with him.

Enterprises ranging from New York City ice-rinks to the PGA golf tournament to Deutsche Bank, which holds $300m of Trump debt, are severing links with the Trump Organisation. Some, led by the Marriott Hotel chain, say they will cancel donations to Republican candidates.

Other Republican candidates did better than Trump in November’s General Election. They gained seats in Congress, though still in the minority, and would almost certainly not have lost their two normally safe Senate seats in Georgia, had Trump not denounced and attempted to suborn the Republican officials responsible for elections there.

Trump lost the Senate, the House and the Presidency for the Republicans.

In the impeachment debate, some Republican speakers praised Trump’s record, mainly for a tax cut and improving relations between Israel and some Arab countries. One or two stressed that the President used the word “peaceful” [once] at the “Save America” rally he called in Washington to coincide with Congressional certification of the Election result. They overlooked that he also used variants of the word “fight” more than twenty times, while other speakers urged the crowd to “fight” and “kick ass”. The best the most partisan Trump defenders could come up with was that the Democrats had wanted to impeach him from the beginning and that they took a different attitude to the Black Lives Matter protests last year.

No one, including several Congress members now alleged to have aided the protest, defended the invasion of the Capitol.

The violence and vandalism which followed directly claimed the lives of five people including a member of the US Capitol Police Department. Many politicians inside the building feared for their lives, including Vice President Mike Pence as the mob outside erected a gibbet and chanted “Hang Pence!”.

The House voted 232 to 197 for the impeachment resolution, mainly down party lines. But ten Republicans, including Lynn Cheney, a former Vice President’s daughter, broke ranks, to make it “the most bi-partisan impeachment” ever. Richard Nixon might have taken that record had he not resigned before being formally impeached. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton enjoyed continuing loyalty from their factions.

The Republican Party is in a quandary. Trump has fired up a large base of personal support, some of whom are the MAGA hatted activists ready to take part in aggressive protest. Then there are worried suburbanites who have been increasingly open to vote right-of-centre but who are alienated by any threat to their security. For victory the Republicans need the support of both but after last week’s violence, that coalition seems impossible.

So, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the outgoing Republican Senate majority, is hedging. He is facilitating an impeachment trial and says he is waiting for the legal arguments before deciding whether to vote for or against Trump.

He is also listening favourably to Joe Biden’s requests to launch his Administration without too much Trump distraction. McConnell abominated Barack Obama and obstructed him from day one. But he and Biden describe each other as friends and served together on either side of the aisle in the Senate for twenty-four years.

McConnell has exploited Trump’s era to stuff the federal judiciary with conservatives and to entrench the Republican party’s grip on States’ governance and districting – gerrymandering constituency boundaries to benefit the party. But Trump has outlived his usefulness. Unlike Trump’s recent efforts, McConnell has no interest in undermining the Electoral College system, with its bias favouring less populated agricultural “Red” states.

If McConnell gives Trump the thumbs down, it is almost certain that there will be 17 Republican senators to make up the total of 67, two thirds, required to condemn Trump. This will happen. Not because of Republicans’ love and respect for their senatorial leader but because if this wily operator reckons it is safe to do it, it probably is in their own electoral interests.

Donald Trump would then chalk up another historical and unprecedented achievement. He would become the first of the forty-five American presidents to be found guilty of “High Crimes and Misdemeanours” by the US Congress.