Opinion: On
a bed of lies and rage, Trump’s defense rests
Opinion by
Columnist
Feb. 12, 2021 at 7:42 p.m. CST
If adjectives and adverbs were alibis, former president Donald Trump would be acquitted unanimously.
If hyperbole were
exculpatory, he never would have been impeached in the first place.
But, alas, for the
former president, his lawyers had little to work with — few facts, scant
evidence and unhelpful precedents — to defend Trump against the well-documented
case that he conceived, incited and encouraged the deadly insurrection at
the Capitol on Jan. 6. The defense ran out of steam after consuming just 2
hours and 40 minutes of their allotted 16 hours.
Yet, even in that
brief period, they misstated legal precedents. They invented facts. They
rewrote history. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor, panned for his rambling opening
argument Wednesday, closed the argument Friday by confusing Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensperger with Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback
Ben Roethlisberger.
But Michael van der
Veen, the personal-injury lawyer Trump hired as part of his defense team for
the Senate impeachment trial, did have one thing in abundance: words. The best
words. Towering, hyperbolic words. Leading off Trump’s defense on Friday, he
seemed to believe that if he piled up enough of them, the prosecution’s case
would collapse under an avalanche of tangled, angry verbiage.
“Unjust and blatantly
unconstitutional act of political vengeance.”
“Appalling abuse of
the Constitution.”
“Politically motivated
witch hunt.”
“A preposterous and
monstrous lie.”
“Patently absurd . .
. the ludicrousness . . . sham. . . . Preposterously wrong . . . shameful . . .
constitutional cancel culture!”
And this: “No
thinking person could seriously believe that the president’s Jan. 6 speech on
the Ellipse was in any way an incitement to violence or insurrection.”
No thinking person!
By contrast, van der
Veen apparently can hold complex thoughts in his head. A year ago,
he sued Trump, saying the president’s claims that mail-in voting is “ripe with
fraud” were supported by “no evidence.” Now, he’s defending Trump on the basis
of, well, no evidence.
Van der Veen claimed
that a 1960s legal precedent involving civil rights leader Julian Bond was
about “the exact type of political speech which Mr. Trump engaged in.” Bond’s
speech involved opposing the war in Vietnam, not fomenting
deadly violence.
Van der Veen informed
the Senate that “one of the first people arrested” in the Capitol attack “was a
leader of antifa.” This appears to be something Rudy Giuliani fabricated out of
whole cloth.
Van der Veen
reinvented history for the senators, telling them that “the clearing of
Lafayette Square” last summer, done for Trump’s famous photo-op with a Bible,
actually happened because, in van der Veen’s fanciful vision, racial-justice protesters
had “pierced a security wall.”
Another Trump lawyer,
David Schoen, took it from there. He
announced, dramatically, that he had “reason to believe the House managers
manipulated evidence.” His support for this heavy charge? One graphic wrote the
year as 2020 instead of 2021, and one highlighted tweet should not have had a “blue checkmark.”
Schoen also undertook
a tangential effort to cast Trump’s infamous words after the 2017
Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally (“very fine people on both sides”) in a more
favorable light.
Their arguments were
classics of the Trumpian form. The “no puppet, you’re the puppet” trope: They
argued that Trump’s opponents — those who protested police brutality last
summer — were really the violent ones. The “least racist person in the world”
trope: They argued that Trump had been a longtime champion of nonviolence.
Presenting the
prosecution case, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead impeachment manager,
cited Voltaire and Thomas Paine. By contrast, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly played
videos, set to ominous music, of Democrats (particularly non-White or
non-Christian ones) using violent rhetoric, such as the word “fight.” They
neglected to point out that several of the clips were of Democrats calling for
a “fight” against things such as covid-19, not the election results.
In van der
Veen’s telling, Trump’s attempt
to overturn the election results, including his demand that Raffensperger (not
Roethlisberger) “find” him more votes, was all above board: “His entire
challenge to the election results was squarely focused on how the proper civic
process could address any concerns to the established legal and constitutional
system.”
Nothing says “proper
civic process” like “Stop the steal!”
Van der Veen’s
adjectival avalanche continued.
“Hyperpolitical
hatred.”
“Total intellectual
dishonesty.”
“Double hearsay.”
“Rank speculation.”
“Doctoring the
evidence.”
As the
personal-injury lawyer paused to replenish his stockpile of vituperation,
Castor came in to tell the senators not to believe their lying eyes.
“Clearly,” he said,
“there was no insurrection.”
And when all was said
and done, Trump’s lawyers still refused to acknowledge that their client lost.
Asked whether Trump was “perpetrating a big lie when he repeatedly claimed that
the election was stolen from him,” van der Veen shot back angrily: “It’s
irrelevant.”
On that bed
of rage, insults and lies rests Trump’s defense.