Trump
Might Be Impeached. What About Everybody Else?
The president’s enablers have regrets — but then again, too few to
mention.
By
January 11, 2021, 6:00
AM CST
He now calls Trump’s rhetoric “reckless.”
Photographer: OLIVIER DOULIERY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Timothy L.
O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
Donald Trump may face the consequences of seeking to
overthrow the federal government. There is pressure on him to resign and
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning to formally call on Vice
President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and strip the
president of his office and powers. The House of Representatives is
considering charging him with “incitement of insurrection,” according
to a draft of impeachment papers circulating in Congress.
Good. That’s exactly what Trump did — in three recent phone calls to Georgia officials seeking to rig election
results there and in the grotesque calamity he engineered last week that prompted
seditionists to lay siege to the Capitol, leaving five people dead and the
seat of the U.S. government seriously breached for the first time since the War
of 1812.
What’s in
store for everybody else who helped empower Trump or incite the
insurrectionists? It will be easy to treat Trump like a piñata, penalizing a
sole actor for an attempted coup and all the other damage he visited on the
country over the past four years. But the likelihood that Trump’s demented,
menacing behavior would generate street violence was foreseeable for years.
Many of those closest to him either failed to put a stop to it or enabled it.
“I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell ya,” Trump advised a throng at one of his rallies in early 2016,
after a protester disrupted his speech. “We’re not allowed to punch back
anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that
when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher,
folks.” At a different rally shortly after that, Trump said of another
protester:
“The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” A 2017 lawsuit filed by protesters alleging that Trump incited
supporters to attack them at yet another rally was later dismissed by a federal
appellate court, which ruled that Trump’s words (“Get ‘em out of here”)
were protected speech and didn’t specifically advocate violence.
Three years ago, after white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked clashes and a woman was
killed, Trump was initially unwilling to condemn the marchers. When pipe bombs
were sent to prominent Democrats (including two former presidents), a TV
network and others shortly before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump briefly
condemned the anger he had stoked before blaming it all on the media. In White House meetings in
2019, he suggested shooting undocumented migrants crossing the U.S. border,
which he also wanted protected by moats stocked with alligators. During a
summer rally in 2019, he laughed along with an enthusiastic crowd about the
virtues of shooting migrants he claimed were swarming the border.
Early last year, amid the Covid-19 outbreak, Trump encouraged
protesters to march against state governments mandating lockdowns.
"LIBERATE MICHIGAN!; LIBERATE MINNESOTA!; LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your
great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!" he tweeted in April. Armed protesters breached the state
capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, later that month.
A June letter that Trump’s presidential campaign sent to
potential supporters reminded them that they were his “fiercest and most
loyal defenders” and would “make an excellent addition to the Trump Army.” For
months prior to Election Day, Trump repeatedly lied about the election being
rigged and called on an “army” of “poll watchers” to take to the streets on his
behalf on Nov. 3. The violence that might have erupted that day was
postponed to Jan. 6, when Trump’s mob took note of the president’s warning that
“if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and
stormed the Capitol.
It was
all right in front of our eyes.
Broader
culpability for the current round of upheaval and lawlessness runs
the gamut from those who spent years whitewashing and
forgiving Trump’s behavior — which encouraged him to continue abusing the
powers of his office — to those who directly fomented last week’s insurrection.
Both these realities explain the wave of reputation-laundering that Republican
politicians, White House staff members, Trump’s lawyers and children,
like-minded media networks and other enablers have engaged in over the past
several days.
“Orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable,” former
Attorney General William Barr advised last week. “The president’s conduct yesterday was a
betrayal of his office and supporters.” This is the same Barr who, before
resigning from his Justice Department post, made a series of public statements
supporting Trump’s claims that the presidential election might have been
hobbled by fraud. Barr eventually reversed himself, asserting about a month
after the election that there was no widespread fraud.
And he’s
the same Barr who earlier gave Trump and his advisers legal cover and
maneuvering room when they tried to poison the electoral process or obstruct
justice. The first go-around involved former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
probe of whether the president’s team colluded with Russia to sabotage the 2016
election, an investigation Barr undermined. The second involved Trump’s calls
to Ukraine seeking dirt on a high-profile opponent in the 2020 election, Joe
Biden. Democrats in Congress impeached Trump for that one, but Barr downplayed
the severity of the Ukraine misdeeds when they were revealed to his prosecutors
and gave every appearance of trying to bury the problem.
For Barr, Trump was a useful idiot, a vehicle for crafting an
all-powerful executive branch. Trump was happy to test the limits of
presidential authority, claiming incorrectly, shortly after Barr took office,
that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” Barr, who prides himself on
hewing to a clear moral code, was content to overlook Trump’s vices and
predations. “I think all human beings have flaws. Everybody,” Barr told the
Washington Post in an interview published in September. “And if we were to insist on
perfection in our leaders, you wouldn’t really have leaders.”
While
Barr may have been the most significant enabler in Trump’s cabinet, others in
the White House also greased the wheels.
“Don’t avert your eyes & don’t excuse this,” Kellyanne Conway,
a former Trump adviser, tweeted Saturday night, commenting on the insurrection.
“The more we see & learn, the worse it is.” Conway, who spent years
disseminating propaganda for Trump, and famously spun lies and disinformation
as “alternative facts,” was part of a communications team stretching from Sean
Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Stephanie Grisham, Kayleigh McEnany and
Alyssa Farah, that freely lied in Trump’s service.
Three days ago, Conway issued a statement condemning the Capitol assault and noting that
she had never “beaten the drum” about election fraud — but added that Trump had
every right to investigate “legitimate claims of malfeasance” in the election.
McEnany and Farah, who both did beat the election-fraud drum, are now singing
new tunes. Farah told Politico she quit her White House job because, in the
wake of the insurrection, she suddenly discovered that “misleading the public
has consequences.” In a recent press briefing, McEnany tried floating the idea that the
seditionists were “the opposite of everything this administration stands for”
and that she now understood it was “time for America to unite, to come together
to reject the violence that we have seen.”
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, an unwavering and incompetent yes-man, and senior trade adviser Peter Navarro fed
Trump the kind of garbage about election fraud he wanted to hear. “It’s time to fight
back,” Meadows tweeted on Jan. 2, encouraging members of Congress to
vote against certification of the election. That was the same day he and Trump
jumped on the phone to try bullying Georgia officials into overturning the election
results there. Meadows also took to Twitter that day to praise Senators Ted
Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson and more than 100 other Republican legislators
who planned to vote against certification.
Cruz, like Hawley and Johnson, claimed he was merely respecting
voters’ desire to investigate electoral fraud — though he, Hawley and Johnson
helped instill suspicions in voters’ minds in the first place. After the
insurrection, Cruz suddenly became a Trump critic. “The president’s rhetoric
was irresponsible. I think it was reckless and I don’t think it was remotely
helpful,” he said. “What I was doing, and what the other senators were
doing, is what we were elected to do, which is debating matters of great import
in the chamber of the United States Senate.”
Hawley, like dozens of his Republican colleagues, voted
against certification even after violence had unspooled around the Capitol. He
tweeted that “the violence must end,” without offering any reflections on
his own role in stoking the chaos.
While Hawley was decertification’s ringleader, he had plenty of company. There
was Representative Mo Brooks. “BAM! The fight for America’s Republic IS ON!” he tweeted on
Jan. 6. “Today is the day that American Patriots start taking down names and kicking
ass.” There was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who also ran interference
for Trump during last year’s impeachment proceedings. “President Trump won this
election, so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet,” he said on Nov. 5. “We cannot allow this to happen before
our very eyes.” This is the same enabler who, after Trump’s 2017 inaugural
address invoking “American carnage,” said he welcomed “a new period in our country’s great
history.”
Home-state newspapers have called on Cruz, Hawley and Johnson to
resign, but it’s not clear that they or other legislators — including
Representatives Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham — will pay a price for enabling Trump.
Trump also enjoyed the support of influential and dangerous
crackpots such as his former campaign manager, Steve Bannon. YouTube recently banned Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,”
after he had spent months promoting violence and revolution on behalf of Trump
and in opposition to what he described as a stolen election. In one broadcast,
Bannon discussed beheading Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. After the
Capitol siege, Bannon, who is also battling federal fraud and money laundering charges, claimed that,
“We don’t believe in taking matters into our own hands; we believe in the rule
of law.”
Lin Wood, an attorney who’s hatched multiple conspiracy theories on Trump’s behalf, appeared on a Bannon podcast in late November and advised
Trump supporters to “be prepared to fight for their freedom” against “people
trying to take over our country.” The day after the Capitol was stormed, Wood
advised followers on one social media platform to consider whether Pence had
committed treason by presiding over the certification process: "Get the
firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." Amid mounting criticism for those
remarks, Wood tried clarifying things: "I have reliable evidence that
Pence has engaged in acts of treason,” he told CNN. “My comments were rhetorical hyperbole.”
Wood has
been part of a clutch of lawyers, including Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and
Cleta Mitchell, who unsuccessfully weaponized the legal system to try to
undermine the 2020 election. Sitting atop this group is Trump’s personal
attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani, a ubiquitous Trump apologist who was an architect of the
president’s efforts to smear Biden in Ukraine, fired up the crowd at the “Save
America” rally. Before Trump came out to speak, Giuliani shouted that waging
war on the 2020 election results might require “trial by combat.” He’s now
engaging in some of the most tragicomic and unintelligible reputation-laundering
out there, claiming he “meant we would have trial by the machines
being in combat with each other, and the ballots being in combat with each
other.”
Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan recently criticized Fox News for leading the way among media
organizations in peddling pro-Trump lies in recent years, singling out Sean
Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham as primary forces responsible
for radicalizing Trump’s mob.
Hannity, the Energizer Bunny of election-fraud fearmongering who
enthusiastically promoted the Save America rally, has dutifully condemned the violence at the Capitol. But
in a broadcast after the siege, Hannity spent a relatively short
portion of a segment analyzing the insurrection and inveighing against violence
before reminding his viewers that Trump “was right” and the election was a
“train wreck.” He went on to wildly inflate the number of people
attending the Save America rally and wonder why Democrats don’t
understand concerns Trump’s supporters have for election fraud. “This is why
millions of Americans no longer trust the system,” he noted, before spending
the bulk of the segment ranting about Democrats’ tolerance for
violence, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden’s laptop and a hot mess of his other
hobbyhorses.
The business community and Trump’s financial backers have, at a
minimum, some soul-searching to do. Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive
officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. took the financial community to task last week for its
willingness to overlook the dangers Trump presented in exchange for tax cuts
and deregulation. “If you are willing to overlook bad character because they do
good things for you, then that comes back to bite you,” he said.
Reputation-laundering with the business crowd appears to involve largely going
mum. Two dozen wealthy Trump supporters — including Peter Thiel, John Paulson,
Richard LeFrak, Andy Beal, Charles Dolan, and Richard and Liz Uihlein —
largely declined to comment when Bloomberg News asked them for
their views of the insurrection.
“I am
shocked and horrified by this mob’s attempt to undermine our Constitution,” the
financier Stephen Schwarzman, a longtime Trump backer, told Bloomberg News. “As
I said in November, the outcome of the election is very clear and there must be
a peaceful transition of power.”
Trump’s three eldest children are also trying to reposition themselves as law-and-order folks after each
of them, to varying degrees, threw fuel on the election-fraud fire. Ivanka
Trump yanked a tweet she posted as violence escalated at the Capitol, in which
she referred to the insurrectionists as “American Patriots” who needed to march
peacefully. She tried refining her pitch in a second spin cycle, tweeting that “Violence is unacceptable and must be
condemned in the strongest terms.”
Their father looms large over this trio (and Ivanka’s husband,
Jared Kushner). They’ve watched Trump enabler after Trump enabler — including,
most recently, Pence — get shunted aside for not showing sufficient loyalty to
the paterfamilias. That reality, along with family ties and their own
ambitions, have made them incapable of doing anything in public other than
cheerlead for him.
But the
president who once bragged he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose
political support has now been caught on tape and TV screens repeatedly
pursuing a political coup. Another impeachment looms. Law enforcement is
circling. His political future is, at best, clouded. And regardless of how all
this plays out, history is likely to remember Trump and his enablers as
dangerous and destructive insurrectionists.