US Politics

I read Andy Beckett’s column (Think bigger: that’s the message for Starmer from Biden’s bold beginning, 11 February) with interest and a certain amount of agreement. Joe Biden has hit the White House floor running with his overturning of Donald Trump’s divisive issues and, indeed, confounding some of his critics. I feel, too, that Keir Starmer needs to take a leaf out of his presidential book, because it is not just enough to be “the grown up” in the chamber at prime minister’s questions. He needs to be radical and persuasive. I used to relish his forensic questioning but now find it slightly stale and predictable.He has real capabilities of forging the party into a fighting and vigorous entity, and not one to appeal to just one demographic. Biden is proving to be quite radical and forward thinking. Starmer needs behave in a similar manner before the public simply forgets all the government’s mistakes with the pandemic and just centres on the great success of the vaccine rollout. So please, Sir Keir, harness your inner passions and go for it, without weighing up all the pros and cons first. Judith A Daniels Great Yarmouth, Norfolk• Andy Beckett is right to encourage the new Labour leadership to “think bigger”. But the real lesson from the US is the way in which the existing political system handicaps parties of the centre-left.So Labour needs to work with other progressive parties to show how the necessary supply of public goods – health, housing, education, social care, social security, infrastructure – cannot be obtained without changes to the political system: ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote can actually do so; introducing some form of proportional representation so that no one is deprived of a vote by where they live; placing limits on private political funding; and introducing much tighter control over the veracity of political claims and statements.This is the “bigger picture” that Labour needs to draw if there is to be any hope of another genuinely progressive government. Prof Roger BrownSouthampton• If we can learn anything from Joe Biden’s success, it is that a principled, centre-left man of integrity could be exactly what the population of the UK so badly needs. What we do not need is a populist masquerading as a committed politician, but who cannot unite the Labour party, let alone the country. Jeremy Corbyn was more inclined to alienate the core of the centre-left.Beckett rightly pairs Trump with Boris Johnson but, weirdly, chooses to call them charismatic! It may well be that Keir Starmer, whose integrity, intelligence and competence are indeed what Labour needs, will readily follow Biden’s values of “family, community and security”. What, after all, is the alternative? Boris Johnson? A man who has publicly praised Donald Trump and whose values would appear to fall short of those espoused by Biden and Starmer. Carolyn Kirton Aberdeen• I have to disagree with Andy Beckett when he credits the “surge” in leftwing politics in the US with Donald Trump’s defeat. While acknowledging the professional and pragmatic approach taken by the Democrats in their campaign both for the White House and Congress, it was clearly the damage wrought by Covid to the US economy, as well as the ensuing loss of life and its exposure of the inadequacies and downright incompetence of Trump and his ragbag administration, that gave Joe Biden and his party the ultimate victory. John Marriott Lincoln More

Richard Burr’s vote to convict Donald Trump did not bring down the former president but it may have made Lara Trump “almost certain” to be nominated for the US Senate, key Trump ally Lindsey Graham said on Sunday.“Certainly I would be behind her because she represents the future of the Republican party,” the South Carolina senator said of the former president’s daughter-in-law, adding that the future should be “Trump-plus”.Burr, a former chair of the Senate intelligence committee, will retire as a senator from North Carolina at the end of his current term.On Saturday, he and six other Republicans voted to convict Trump on a charge of insurrection linked to the US Capitol attack. It made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan ever but he was acquitted nonetheless.Burr’s state Republican party condemned what it called his “shocking and disappointing” vote.Lara Trump is married to Eric Trump, the former president’s second son. She has been reported to be interested in running for Senate in her native state.“The biggest winner I think of this whole impeachment trial is Lara Trump,” Graham told Fox News Sunday. “My dear friend Richard Burr, who I like and I’ve been friends to a long time, just made Lara Trump almost a certain nominee for the Senate seat in North Carolina to replace him if she runs.“Now certainly I would be behind her because she represents the future of the Republican party.”In 2016, Graham famously predicted Trump would “destroy” the GOP if he was made its nominee for president. Once Trump won power, the senator switched to become one of his biggest boosters.On Sunday, in an interview in which he occasionally spoke directly to the former president, he said his party should be “Trump-plus”, because “the most potent force in the Republican party is President Trump”.“And at the end of the day I’ve been involved in politics for over 25 years,” Graham said. “The president is a handful and what happened [at the Capitol] on 6 January was terrible for the country. But he’s not singularly to blame. Democrats have sat on the sidelines and watched the country being burned down for a year and a half and not said a damn word, and most Republicans are tired of the hypocrisy.”On Saturday, Graham first voted against the calling of witnesses in the impeachment trial, then switched to support it. After a deal was done to avoid that step, he voted to acquit.Other Trump family members have been linked to runs for office. For example, the Florida senator Marco Rubio is widely expected to face a primary challenge from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s oldest daughter.Lara Trump, 38, is a former personal trainer and TV producer who became a key campaign surrogate. Among other controversies, she claimed Joe Biden was suffering “cognitive decline” and mocked his stutter. She earned widespread rebuke.“These words come without hesitation,” Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the airline pilot and all-American hero who also stuttered as a child, wrote in the New York Times.“Stop. Grow up. Show some decency. People who can’t have no place in public life.” More

Donald Trump’s acquittal in the US Senate (Report, 14 February) surely provides the best possible evidence for never allowing politicians to get involved in judicial decision-making. Their priorities lie in other directions. Les Baker Fordingbridge, Hampshire• The Queen gets £220m a year for seabed lease options for windfarms (Queen’s property chief delays sale of Scottish seabed windfarm plots, 12 February). Really? Perhaps she could give the country her cut given the future costs of the climate crisis, Covid and the expected hardships to come? Stephen King London• While I can empathise with Elizabeth Kerr (Letters, 11 February) my own travel aspirations are more mundane. I would just like to be able to visit Scotland to hand-deliver the teddy bear I have bought for my first grandchild, born six weeks ago. Nick Denton Buxton, Derbyshire• I assume that the original site in Wales was the manufacturer’s showroom (Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales, 12 February). After all, you wouldn’t buy a circle of standing stones unless you’d seen it standing up and circular, would you? Katy JennisonWitney, Oxfordshire• If the people of Wales call – quite rightly – for the return of the “Preseli marbles” (Letters, 12 February) please can the stones go home by the same route and method so that we can all enjoy the spectacle? Sue BallBrighton More

“I have lost tons of sleep thinking he may get away with what he did,” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said. “Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”The “he” who vexed Senator Graham’s sleep was not Donald Trump. It was Bill Clinton. And Graham worked to make sure Clinton would not get away with lying under oath about his little affair, voting, in 1999, to convict the president and remove him from office.On Saturday, Graham reached a different conclusion. In joining 42 of his Republican colleagues in voting to acquit Donald Trump of inciting a violent insurrection, Graham commented: “I think most Republicans found the presentation by the House managers offensive and absurd.”Whatever else we might think about the Republicans’ vote of acquittal, it answers a question that millions of Americans have been pondering since Donald Trump took office four years ago. At what point would congressional Republicans say “enough”? Having first indulged and then endorsed Trump’s trampling of constitutional norms and abuse of the presidency, when would Republican lawmakers say, “No more”?McConnell’s argument brings to mind Robert Jackson’s observation that ‘the US constitution is not a suicide pact’Now we have our answer. Never. If Trump’s act of inciting a mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to subvert the certification of a fair and democratic election does not constitute impeachable conduct, then it’s hard to imagine what does. Still, history will record that the vast majority of Republican senators voted to acquit, a group that included eleven lawmakers who, two decades ago, agitated for Clinton’s removal.True, seven Republicans voted to convict Trump, led by the stalwart and principled Mitt Romney, who, a scant eight years ago, was the party’s standard bearer. And among those voting to acquit, there appeared to be a handful who agonized over their vote, most notably Mitch McConnell, until recently the Senate majority leader.In a remarkable speech delivered on the heels of the trial’s conclusion, McConnell sounded like a late addition to Jamie Raskin’s formidable team of House managers. Indignantly demolishing the absurd claim by Trump’s lawyers that the president was simply the victim of a “constitutional cancel culture,” McConnell accused Trump of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” in provoking the violence of 6 January.All the same, McConnell voted to acquit on jurisdictional grounds, insisting that the constitution’s impeachment clause does not authorize the conviction of a former president, now a “private person”. The argument is not silly: the text is ambiguous and past practice does not offer a particularly clear guide. Such precedents as there are – most notably the impeachment trial of William Belknap, Ulysses S Grant’s former secretary of war, after Belknap had resigned his post – never resulted in a conviction.But McConnell’s argument does bring to mind US supreme court Justice Robert Jackson’s observation that “the US constitution is not a suicide pact”. For that is how McConnell would have us read the impeachment clause. According to McConnell, the constitution empowers the US Senate to remove a sitting president and to disqualify them from holding future office, but it does not permit the disqualification of a disgraced former president from seeking a return to power. By McConnell’s peculiar logic, only if Trump should run again in 2024 and win, could he be convicted for his actions of 6 January 2021.McConnell would leave the constitution powerless to check a sitting president, who, like Trump, is prepared to attack the peaceful transfer of power. Either the would-be authoritarian is successful, in which case they need not worry about impeachment, having effectively smashed democracy, or they will fail in their putsch and be spared any form of constitutional reckoning.McConnell’s insistence the Senate lacks the power to convict a “private person” also misleadingly characterizes Trump’s present status. Were Trump now merely a private person, Republican senators would not be bending over backwards to appease him. It is precisely because Trump continues to control the base of the party – with millions viewing him as the rightful president in exile – that Republican lawmakers remain unwilling to cross him.Finally, while McConnell was surely right to hold Trump responsible for the violence of 6 January, his insistence that Trump bore “sole” responsibility rings almost facetious. Aiding and abetting the president were the likes of Missouri senator Josh Hawley, pumping his fist in solidarity with the insurrectionists; Texas senator Ted Cruz, smoothly insisting that the Senate shouldn’t certify Biden’s victory so long as millions of Americans bought into the myth of stolen election that the senator had helped spread; and even McConnell himself, who spent years feeding the beast. Republican senators didn’t just acquit Trump yesterday; they also voted to let themselves – Trump’s co-conspirators – off the hook.Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, at Amherst College, Massachusetts. His book on the 2020 election, Will He Go? was published by Hachette in 2020. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US More

There was something poignant on Saturday about the lengths gone to by some media organisations in the US to try to make the result less appalling. “Most bipartisan support for conviction in history,” declared the New York Times, clutching at the pitiful seven Republicans who voted in favour of impeaching Donald Trump, well short of the 17 needed to uphold a conviction. Four years ago, at a campaign stop in Iowa, Trump famously declared: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Here we were, a month after five people died during the storming of the Capitol, living some version of that promise.It should have helped, perhaps, that the result was anticipated before the trial even got under way. There was no suspense, no surprise; the votes needed to convict were never there. Nor, seemingly, was the appetite for investigation: both sides agreed at the 11th hour not to call witnesses and draw this thing out, a lassitude mirrored across the electorate. What was the point of even watching the proceedings, stoking one’s outrage or being moved by the closing arguments of Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, when it was apparent that Trump would get off scot-free? Better to avoid and move on.There is a point, of course, which is to enter into public record a detailed, forensic account of what happened at the Capitol on 6 January, even if it didn’t result in conviction. This hurried process and hasty conclusion – the impeachment hearings took all of five days – instead felt like a shrug, an afterthought, leaving us with little more than a flat sense of disgust and latent fury with nowhere to go.What to be angry about most? Perhaps it was the absurdity of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who led a blistering attack on Trump minutes after voting to acquit him. This vote, said McConnell, was a result of what he labelled a period of “intense reflection”, which is certainly one way to describe political cowardice. On the other hand, he said: “There’s no question – none – that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”Or perhaps the most galling figure was Mitt Romney, who has never been able fully to commit to his self-image as a man of high morals. He was one of the seven Republicans voting against Trump, a stance less evident four years ago when he sucked up to him for a place in the cabinet, or more recently, when he voted to rush through confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. If anything, the Republicans who voted with the Democrats on Saturday seemed worse than their Trump-supporting counterparts: these were the people who, one understood, had always had the measure of the man, but while it suited them had gone happily along with him.For the rest of us, the spectacle of Trump and his sons crowing about acquittal was just one more breach of normality. “It is a sad commentary on our times,” wrote Trump in a statement after the verdict, “that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance.” It was one, final expression of his role as America’s gaslighting spouse, fighting any accusation with the counter: “No, you did it.” Only Trump would hail surviving a second impeachment trial as a victory: the kind of behaviour that we have learned to understand does nothing to penetrate the reality of his base. The hurried trial and acquittal, designed to allow us to move on, will in all likelihood contribute to the survival of Trumpism.There isn’t much scope for closure or relief. In a political culture in which Twitter, Trump’s enabler, has taken more strident action against him than the US government, we are left only with the consolation of personal belief. When news of the acquittal came in on Saturday, I found myself defaulting to a childish form of vindictive speculation reserved for those who escape official censure. Look at Trump and his progeny, I thought, holed up at Mar-a-Lago, threats of bankruptcy on the horizon, imprisoned by their various delusions. How unhappy they must be. More

The Republicans’ twin losses in the Georgia Senate runoffs have bound Mitch McConnell to Donald Trump for as long as the Kentuckian remains in office. The ex-president owns the Republican party. The Senate minority leader? He’s a rent-collector in a banker’s shirt.To McConnell’s disgust, so evident in his excoriation of Trump on the Senate floor on Saturday, moments after voting to acquit, he must labour in Trump’s shadow. Nationally, Kentucky’s senior senator is even more disliked than Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia’s conspiracy-mongering congresswoman.Even among Republicans, McConnell is relatively unpopular, and unlike Liz Cheney of Wyoming he is unwilling to risk their wrath. McConnell suffers his own precarity.The fact is, GOP senators who bucked Trump on impeachment offer cautionary tales for those who dare to cross him. By Saturday night, at least three had received home-state smackdowns.The Louisiana GOP censured Bill Cassidy while the chairs of the North Carolina and Pennsylvania parties upbraided their renegade senators. Richard Burr “shocked” Tar Heel Republicans while Pat Toomey “disappointed” those in the Keystone state. Both had already announced they will not seek re-election.But not all those who are leaving the Senate followed suit. Rob Portman of Ohio and Richard Shelby of Alabama fell into line. One more time.Trump risked turning Pence into a corpse and ultimately went unpunished. That hangman’s noose was built to be usedWhat was once the proud party of Lincoln and Reagan is now a Trump family rag – something to be used and abused by the 45th president like his bankrupt companies, namesake university and hapless vice-president, Mike Pence.If the impeachment trial established anything, it is that Trump risked turning Pence into a corpse and ultimately went unpunished. That hangman’s noose was built to be used.[embedded content]Yet even the former vice-president has remained mum and his brother, Greg Pence, a congressman from Indiana, voted against impeachment. Talk about taking one for the team.In the end, devotion to a former reality show host literally trumped life itself. The mob belongs to Trump – as the Capitol police can attest. So much for the GOP’s embrace of “law and order”. When it mattered most, it counted least.Like Moloch, Trump has elevated human sacrifice and personal devotion into the ultimate test. His indifference to Covid’s ravages was a harbinger of what came next, his raucous and at times violent rallies mere warm-up acts.When Trump mused about shooting some on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it, he wasn’t joking. He was simply stating a fact.His acquittal ensures that he and his family will be a force to be reckoned with over the next four years. Faced with a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump, Florida senator Marco Rubio months ago lavished praise on a Trump caravan that swarmed a Biden bus in Texas. He was ahead of the curve.Among the presidential wannabes, only Ben Sasse has grown a spine. His chances of winning are close to nilSince then, Nikki Haley, Trump’s first United Nations ambassador and a one-time South Carolina governor, has twisted herself into a pretzel to craft a message that will keep her former boss disarmed while convincing donors to empty their wallets. Good luck with that.Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are in a competition all their own as to who makes a better doormat. Among the 2024 presidential wannabes, only Ben Sasse has grown a spine. His chances of winning the brass ring are close to nil.A church-going Presbyterian, Sasse got it wrong when he announced that “politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude”. The Senate’s vote says otherwise.Still, McConnell’s post-trial denunciation of Trump had some value. On top of labeling Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the events of 6 January, he provided an invitation and roadmap for law enforcement and the justice department.“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet.”Already, prosecutors have homed in on Trump’s strong-arm efforts to overturn Georgia’s elections. Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is locked in a death duel before the supreme court over Trump’s tax returns.Talk about synchronicity. Just hours before Saturday’s vote, reports emerged of Vance having expanded his investigation into Trump and four of his properties over loans extended by subsidiaries of Ladder Capital, a finance operation that also lent to Jared Kushner.Politically, Trump will likely hit the road for a vengeance tour aimed at those who opposed him. McConnell may yet emerge as another punching bag. And if Trump does, don’t expect anyone to have McConnell’s back. It is Trump’s party now. Everyone else is expendable. More

The seven Republican senators who broke rank by voting to convict former president Donald Trump at his impeachment trial faced immediate hostility and criticism from fellow conservatives revealing the potentially high cost of opposing Trumpism within the party.These senators – North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s Mitt Romney, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey – brought the total number of guilty votes to 57. That was not nearly enough to secure a conviction, but easily enough to ensure instant attack from fellow Republicans and others on the right.Thereaction was a powerful illustration of the strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican party even though he is out of office.“Let’s impeach RINOs from the Republican Party!!!” Trump’s son and conservative favorite Donald Trump Jr said on Twitter, using the insulting acronym for Republicans In Name Only.The instant backlash came from powerful rightwing media figures also.Conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham commented: “Prediction: none of the Republicans who voted in the affirmative today will speak at the 2024 GOP convention.”For Cassidy, there was almost instant retribution in his own state. Jeff Landry, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, tweeted: “Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote is extremely disappointing.”The local party agreed and its executive committee unanimously voted to censure Cassidy for his vote. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him,” the Republican Party of Louisiana similarly said in a statement.Cassidy was not alone, as Burr’s state party in North Carolina also went immediately on the attack.Michael Whatley, North Carolina Republican Party chair, condemned his colleague in a statement, saying: “North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing.”Even Republicans who voted to acquit Trump were not necessarily spared from conservative backlash, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. The lawmaker said that he voted to acquit over a jurisdictional issue and because Trump was no longer in office, McConnell didn’t think impeachment was in its purview.However, McConnell also firmly criticized Trump following the acquittal, saying “there’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically, and morally, responsible for provoking the events of the day” and that he’s “still liable for everything he did while he’s in office. He didn’t get away with anything yet.”Trump’s circle was displeased at the lack of fealty, despite the vote to acquit.“If only McConnell was so righteous as the Democrats trampled Trump and the Republicans while pushing Russia collusion bullshit for 3 years or while Dems incited 10 months of violence, arson, and rioting. Yet then he just sat back and did jack shit,” said Trump Jr.These attacks come as party-line Republicans have ratcheted up their efforts to unseat dissenting conservatives in upcoming primaries. The ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are already seeing primary opponents trying to unseat them and replace them with Trump loyalists.Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican congressman and dogged Trump loyalist, even flew to Cheyenne, Wyoming in late January to hold a rally against senior Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney who backed impeachment.“Defeat Liz Cheney in this upcoming election,” Gaetz commented, “and Wyoming will bring Washington to its knees. How can you call yourself a representative when you don’t represent the will of the people?”Gaetz also described Cheney – the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – as “a Beltway bureaucrat turned fake cow girl that supported an impeachment that is deeply unpopular in the state of Wyoming.” More

Former president Donald Trump has repeatedly been called “Teflon Don” during his presidency – a moniker used for the late mob boss John Gotti to describe how consequences for his bad actions apparently don’t stick to him.While Gotti was ultimately convicted of 13 counts in 1992, Trump has fared far better in beating allegations of misconduct. He has now been acquitted twice by the US Senate – once under Republican control and under Democratic control. He has thus skipped being charged with inciting the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol and prior to that allegations of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.Both times the acquittals felt virtually inevitable, given Trump’s Republican allies remained largely loyal. But his second acquittal now speaks to something increasingly problematic about the American political system’s ultimate ability to curtail presidential abuses of power: for many the impeachment process no longer presents much of a threat or deterrent to bad, or even illegal, behavior by the most powerful figure in the land.During Trump’s second trial no witnesses were even called – spurring some commentators to condemn Democrats’ decision as a moral failure.“This is why I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican … One side is a front business for a white nationalist terrorist organization and the other doesn’t feel threatened enough by white nationalists to actually wield power to make our multicultural democracy sustainable,” MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson said on Twitter when it was revealed witnesses wouldn’t be called.Historians believe the acquittals will have long-term impacts, some of which are not yet known, according to an Axios analysis. Historian Douglas Brinkley told the website that acquittal would show that the power of impeachment is virtually nil. “Impeachment is a political process, and we got a political result out of it,” Brinkley said.Meanwhile, Andrew Rudalevige, an expert on presidential power at Bowdoin College, told Axios: “Congress not even pushing back against a physical assault suggests that there’s a lot they will put up with.”Meanwhile, CNN commentator Doug Jones, a former Democratic Alabama US senator, wrote earlier this week that the evidence in the second impeachment trial appeared overwhelming.“In any trial, the accusing party must connect the dots between the words and actions of the defendant to the harm that occurred. Over the last two days, the House managers did just that,” he stated. “The House managers connected all of these dots to the video of Trump finally telling insurrectionists to leave but also that they were ‘special,’ that he loved them and that they should ‘remember this day forever’.”Jones concluded: “If Trump’s actions are not impeachable, then nothing is, and we may as well strike that provision from the constitution.”After the vote, Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell, who predictably was among the 43 not guilty votes, gave a speech in which he seemed to condemn Trump while not addressing at all why he had also voted to find him not guilty.“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically, and morally, responsible for provoking the events of the day.” McConnell said and also remarked that Trump is “still liable for everything he did while he’s in office. He didn’t get away with anything yet.”Yet, when presented with a chance to find Trump guilty himself, McConnell chose to acquit.That seems to show that the impeachment process and trial in the Senate will lose its power of deterrence, as politics – not any judgment of law or right or wrong – is what actually informs its decisions. Therefore, Trump’s strong political power among Republicans was actually the deciding factor in the trial, not any legal argument or burden of proof of wrongdoing.That is not likely to instill a fear of impeachment for future presidents. In fact, it is likely to encourage strong-arm behaviour.Kurt Bardella, a onetime Republican congressional aide who changed to the Democratic party, recently told the Guardian: “It’s a demonstration that his status as the leader of the Republican party is unchanged, even though the results of the election have shown that his agenda is a losing agenda for the Republican party.”“If you send a signal that someone who vocally led a violent insurrection against American democracy can do so without consequence, you’re only sending the message that he should do this again, that it’s OK: you are condoning that behavior,” Bardella commented. More