US Politics

Perhaps the most powerful shocks, the most painful surprises, are the ones that we saw coming yet refused to believe would happen. Our ability to fear something and, at the same time, assume it will never occur is one aspect of human nature that seems particularly ill-suited to our continued wellbeing and survival.Throughout the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, as journalists and politicians expressed their stunned astonishment, one couldn’t help wondering: hadn’t they heard about the hundreds of people, some of them armed, who stormed the Michigan state capitol building in April, objecting to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order? Had they forgotten that a young woman was killed during the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia – a neo-Nazi event that Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn? Had their interns not been keeping up with – and informing their bosses about – the popular Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of far-right hate groups and extremist conspiracy theorists? Had no one explained that the Proud Boys’ T-shirt insignia – 6MWE – means “Six Million [Jews] Weren’t Enough”?During the assault on the Capitol, as I listened to the panic and horror in the voices of the journalists who, until now, had reported on Donald Trump with something closer to detached disapproval, I wondered: is this what it takes to finally make them understand who this man is – and what he wants for our country? What did they think he meant when he tweeted about the gathering planned for 6 January: “Be there. It will be wild.”Even as the “wild” rioters were scaling the walls of the Capitol, some news media persisted in calling them “protesters” and “demonstrators”. These insurgents were far more than that. Images of politicians sheltering in “safe locations” in the Capitol complex reminded me of how, on 13 November 2015, my son – whose band was playing at the Trianon theater in Paris that evening – sheltered backstage while jihadis murdered 89 people at the Bataclan auditorium, a few blocks away.The difference between protesters and terrorists is critical. Demonstrators are expressing their response to a policy, an event or a series of events – systemic racism, for example. But terrorists plot violent mayhem, rehearse, fail, come up with a new plan, try again and again until they succeed. We all recall that the destruction of the World Trade Center was preceded by a 1993 attempt to bomb the WTC parking garage. The attack on the Michigan state capitol and the Charlottesville march were rehearsals for what transpired in DC last week.Donald Trump is clearly responsible for the 6 January attack. His speech to the crowd that day was an incitement to violence. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the fury and lawlessness of his supporters will disappear when he retires to Mar-a-Lago, goes to jail or begins campaigning for the 2024 presidential election. It’s important to recall that Trump has been the accelerant but not the fuel, not the kindling that has allowed the flames of hatred and bigotry, of anti-democratic rightwing fanaticism to blaze as brightly as they do now.Many of us have a film clip or photo, taken on 6 January, that most haunts us. A friend posted an image of some thugs trying to burn a heap of costly equipment – cameras, recorders, microphones – abandoned, during the rout, by Associated Press reporters. But the image I find most troubling is a short video clip of a dozen or so rioters idly wandering the Senate floor, picking up papers from the senators’ desk, then strolling on. If these Trump loyalists believe – as they kept chanting – that the duly-elected, soon-to-be Biden-Harris administration is not their government, it’s not only because their president told them so. And the framed portraits, the statuary, the gleaming chandeliers they saw in the Capitol building were unlikely to change their minds. The interlopers on the Senate floor looked less triumphant than bewildered, and their bewilderment is not unrelated to the sources of their rage: the massive income inequality, the epidemic unemployment, the opioid and Covid pandemics, the sense of being excluded and forgotten that helps inspire xenophobia, racism, sexism and violence. The rapid decline of our public educational system and the rise of far-right media are not unrelated; among the things that education gives us is the ability to think, to distinguish the truth from the lie, to process and evaluate the information we’re given.These are the problems and the perils that the Biden-Harris administration will have to deal with, and which all the palliative talk about unity, reconciliation, and “working across the aisle” is not going to come remotely close to fixing.Let’s be clear: the Biden-Harris administration has exactly four years to repair some large part of the damage that’s been done – a short time to begin a massive and necessary project. Otherwise, these violent groups are going to rehearse, retry, recoup, try again and again – until they succeed. With or without Donald Trump, the violence, if it ever goes away, will come roaring back. Lawmakers like Josh Hawley, loudly voicing their objections to the 2020 election results, are already campaigning for the job of anti-democratic dictator in 2024. Unless some substantive changes are made – something more sweeping than the middle-of-the-road policy tweaks that seem to be in the offing – the next coup attempt may very well succeed.And we’ll be left to marvel at something else that we always suspected was possible, but that we never believed would actually happen here, and certainly not to us. More

How amazing. Until a few years ago – 2016, in fact – if you asked people for the most absurd example of the politico-showbusiness complex in the 21st-century United States, they would have said Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recall election as governor of California in 2003, his candidacy being announced on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was re-elected in 2006, and just about maintained a cheerfully Reaganesque public image of a moderate Republican – uneventfully standing down in 2011 to resume his movie career.We all took the mickey out of the governator. But, right now, he is America’s moral governator with real moral authority. It was the governator who uploaded a video telling Americans to stay home during the Covid crisis. And now it is the governator who has issued a clarion call for decency on YouTube with his admittedly cheesy but genuinely stirring, heartfelt and relevant rebuke to the Trumpians and their desecration of the Capitol – a desecration that even now many Republicans and many sophisticates on the right cannot bring themselves to condemn fully.In his mature Reaganesque style, Schwarzenegger addressed the nation from a presidential-style desk, with the stars and stripes and Californian flag in the background, and a photo of himself in his bodybuilding pomp. With Hollywood-style music on the audio track, he denounced the complicit enablers of Trump’s fascism – culminating in a hilarious flourish of Conan the Barbarian’s sword.That should have been ridiculous. It should have been silly. But, compared with the seedy rightwingers and Fox News alternative-fact merchants and the giggling cynics who said Trump didn’t matter, Schwarzenegger’s sword was rather glorious. I found myself thinking of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy – and, yes, however preposterous, there was something honourable about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan sword.Schwarzenegger called the vandalising of the Capitol (and the killing of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick) America’s “Kristallnacht”. Like many others, I have seen it as America’s beer hall putsch (and who knows if that may not turn out to be the closer analogy?). But, for the time being, Schwarzenegger is absolutely right. And from personal experience, Schwarzenegger was able to address the openly Nazi stylings of the Capitol attackers, with the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts, because he grew up in an Austria that, in contrast to Germany, went into fierce denial about its role in the second world war. Schwarzenegger spoke about his angry, depressed and abusive father who beat his children. (Schwarzenegger did not speak in detail, but throughout his governorship much press research went into Gustav Schwarzenegger, the Austrian police chief and Stalingrad military veteran who applied for Nazi party membership in 1938 before the Anschluss, but was not found to have been responsible for war crimes or abuse.)Schwarzenegger’s video today, however schmaltzy and hokey in style, was a real reminder to the fatuous callow right that Nazis and nazism are not just death-metal icons or gamer fantasies. They really did exist, with America-first cheerleaders such as Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh encouraging their fellow citizens to look the other way. And he also showed us that the immigrant experience can bring wisdom.Arnold’s video is exactly what we all needed. More

In the wake of Donald Trump’s instigation of a shocking attack on the US Capitol, it’s easy to demand that Trump be barred from social media.“These corporations should announce a permanent ban of his accounts,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the House homeland security committee. “Nothing short of that will meet this moment.”Indeed, Facebook, Google and Twitter have taken action, suspending the president from their platforms or removing videos.But whatever one thinks of stopping Trump fomenting violence by limiting his ability to communicate, the ability of democratically unaccountable monopolies with extraordinary control over communications infrastructure, like Facebook and Google, YouTube’s parent company, to silence political speech is exceptionally dangerous. It also sidesteps the underlying problem – that it’s their dominance and business model that promotes conspiratorial, fake and violent content to millions.Policymakers must recognize the choices that enabled the rise of these toxic but wildly lucrative business modelsTrump is not the first demagogue America has seen and he won’t be the last. But his power is amplified by a corrupted information ecosystem created by Google, Facebook and media barons like Rupert Murdoch. Those who came to the Capitol to riot sincerely believed they were stopping the subversion of American democracy because an entire information ecosystem encouraged them to discount any political or media institution that told them otherwise. That ecosystem of disinformation, extremism, rage and bigotry won’t go away by banning Trump or his supporters. That’s because the driving force behind it is profit: Facebook and Google make billions by fostering it.To understand why, policymakers must recognize the choices that enabled the rise of these toxic but wildly lucrative business models. Traditionally, US media regulation encouraged localized press and a neutral system of information distribution, starting with the Post Office in 1791. But beginning in the 1970s, policymakers changed their philosophy to encourage consolidation.They altered rules around advertising, publishing and information distribution markets, weakening antitrust laws, killing important protections like the Fairness Doctrine and passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which lifted local media ownership caps and unleashed a wave of mergers and acquisitions. They also enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that today allows tech platforms to escape liability for illegal content they help shape and monetize. And over the last 20 years, policymakers enabled Google and Facebook to roll up the entire digital advertising and communication space by permitting hundreds of mergers, without a single challenge.The net effect is that two giant corporations, Facebook and Google, dominate online communications, profiting by selling advertising against cheaply produced, addictive clickbait and conspiratorial content. Making matters worse, in seeking ad money and quick profits, Facebook and Google, as well as private equity, have killed the pro-social institutions on which we rely, such as local newspapers, by redirecting advertising revenue to themselves. More than one-fourth of American newspapers have disappeared in the last 15 years, with many of those left being hollowed out as “ghost papers” with no news-gathering ability.Filling their place are conspiracy theories like QAnon, which these platforms amplify to turn a handsome profit. Survey results show Google provided ad services to 86% of sites carrying coronavirus conspiracies.This isn’t a uniquely American problem: Facebook, with its addictive user interface designed to maximize engagement, has helped foster deadly mob attacks in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar and bent to the will of autocrats elsewhere. It’s not just the dramatic, either. More than three in five Americans feel lonely, and there is evidence that social media usage isolates and alienates us, changing our brains and drawing some to political extremism.The problem, in other words, won’t go away with banning Trump, because the problem is that the steady supply of toxic, addictive content that keeps eyeballs on ads is at the heart of these monopolies’ business models. Trump is far from the only supplier of that content now, and there’s no doubt others will rise up to replace him, with a boost from Facebook and Google.The Biden administration and the new Congress can fix these twin problems of monopoly power and profit motive by returning to a traditional policy framework of fair competition, neutral communication networks and business models that finance local news and a diversity of voices.For the tech platforms, Congress and agencies like the Federal Trade Commission have the authority to ban targeted advertising, much in the same way Verizon, for example, is prohibited by law from listening to your private calls and using that information to directly or indirectly advertise to you based on that surveillance.Breaking up these goliaths and prohibiting mergers by dominant firms would force them to compete over users based on data privacy and safety, as Facebook once had to do when it was in a competitive social networking world in the early 2000s. And imposing neutrality, like non-discrimination rules and interoperability requirements, would end the tyranny of algorithms that push us towards incendiary content.The good news is Republican and Democratic attorneys general in 48 states have filed historic antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, seeking to break them up, and the Biden administration and many in Congress seem wide awake to the pernicious role of social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, in the fraying of America’s social fabric.But until political leaders recognize that these tech barons make their billions by selling tickets to the end of American democracy, it will continue to creep ever closer. Seeing Trump booted off Facebook may be emotionally satisfying and even potentially prevent dangerous behavior in the short term. But only a wholesale restructuring of our online communications infrastructure can preserve democracy. More

The motives that drove a pro-Donald Trump mob to attack Congress last Wednesday ranged from hazy to proudly hateful. But the actions of certain ambitious Republican officeholders in the days leading up to the tragedy were not clouded by confusion.Trump may have lost the election, but his movement was on the march, and for politicians hoping someday to succeed Trump as president, that meant an opportunity was afoot.With Trump now finally accepting he will leave office, the future leadership of his movement is increasingly up for grabs, with a ragtag band of senators, congressman, Trump family members – and Trump himself – already jostling for the position.Whether anyone apart from the president is able to successfully ride the tiger of racism, nihilism and grievance politics that carried Trump to near-re-election after four years of American chaos and hundreds of thousands of preventable pandemic deaths is an open question.It also might be an irrelevant question, if Trump decides to stage a 2023-24 stadium tour doubling as a new presidential campaign.“Absent disqualification, the 2024 GOP presidential nomination remains his if he wants it,” tweeted Dave Wasserman, Congress editor of the Cook Political Report.But with Trump gone, for the moment, after years of rock-like reign over the Republican party, powerful currents of political ambition and realignment have swirled into the vacuum.Longtime Trump loyalists, chief among them the vice-president, Mike Pence, have suddenly broken with the president over his fight to reverse the election result. Mick Mulvaney, the former chief of staff and special envoy to Northern Ireland whose loyalty helped Trump escape conviction in the impeachment scandal, resigned over the Capitol riot debacle, saying: “I can’t do it. I can’t stay.”Two firebrand conservative senators, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, went the other direction, taking up Trump’s cause – only to see their campaign result almost immediately in the death of a police officer and four others, and the vandalization of the US Capitol.A third young senator with designs on the presidency, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, blasted his plotting colleagues “who, for political advantage, were giving false hope to their supporters”, he said. The Republican old guard, meanwhile, in the guise of Mitt Romney, who has actually run for president – twice – accused his colleagues of being “complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy”.Even the former Republican House speaker John Boehner, who since his 2015 retirement has mostly limited his commentary on politics to tweeted pictures of himself mowing his lawn, said the Grand Old party (GOP) was in trouble.“I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap,” Boehner wrote on Thursday. “The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken.”For certain Republicans, the violent and deadly near-sacking of the Capitol on Wednesday by white supremacists and other Trump sympathizers seemed to be only the second most disturbing event of the week.The night before, Republicans had lost two runoff US senate elections in Georgia, a state that until 2020 had not voted for a Democrat for president for 30 years. The two Georgia losses meant that Republicans lost control of the Senate – and leader Mitch McConnell lost his majority.“Emotions [are] running high among McConnell-aligned Republicans,” National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar reported, “after [the] reality of what transpired in Georgia settled in. May be the heat of the moment, but mood is for declaring war on Team Trump.”A former McConnell chief of staff and campaign manager, Josh Holmes, was quick to knock down the idea.“A lot of emotions. People are angry,” Holmes replied on Twitter to Kraushaar. “Nobody is declaring war on anything. We’ll get through this.”But even the people with money, whose interests McConnell has expertly defended, grew agitated at the mess Trump had made.“This is sedition and should be treated as such,” Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, an influential business trade group, said. “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy.” The chiefs of multiple Wall Street banks echoed the sentiment.That is not even to mention the cavalcade of Republicans who had long since broken with Trump, who piled on the president after the Capitol was sacked. The conservative columnist George Will said: “The three repulsive architects of Wednesday’s heartbreaking spectacle” – Trump, Hawley and Cruz – “will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of sedition.” The conservative National Journal declared: “Trump must pay.” Matt Drudge’s web ite ran the sarcastic banner “Thanks, Donald”. The National Review hailed “Trump’s final insult”. A second former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, joined those calling for his immediate removal from office.The Republican cross-currents do not mean that the party will not find direction in time to win back the Senate, plus the House, in 2022 – or to win the presidency in 2024, whether with Trump’s name on the ticket or tattooed on the nominee’s forehead.But Trump’s role in the party, and the politics, has never been to introduce order, except when that means that everybody falls behind him. For now, everybody is doing the opposite: falling out. More

Oliver Laughland, US southern bureau chief: It was somewhere along the 700-mile night-time drive from Tampa, Florida, to my home in New Orleans that I realized filming the Anywhere But Washington series was becoming one of the hardest assignments in my career.Hours earlier, my colleague Tom Silverstone and I had interviewed a conservative radio host spreading baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 to a crowd of at-risk, Donald Trump-supporting senior citizens. We had been forced to make a sharp exit, and got caught in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm that drenched us through. Thankfully, we’d managed to keep the camera dry and preserve the footage, but the whole day became a precursor to the rest of our two and half month long trip through America.Fiery interactions, pervasive disinformation and mammoth car journeys became normality. Alongside countless nasal swabs, hundreds of disposable face masks, and seemingly endless nights editing the films over Zoom on increasingly tight deadlines, while preparing for shoots in the coming days.It was not only an immense logistical challenge and a constant battle to establish facts, but an eye-opening journey into a bitterly divided country during the most important election in a generation.Tom Silverstone, senior video producer: For many months, I’d been confined to making short videos through Skype – fuzzy webcam interviews that make it hard to go deep into a story. So it was with some relief, and a bit of a trepidation, that Oliver and I, along with our video-editor colleague Noah Payne-Frank, who is based in London, were given the go-ahead for the series.Trying to encompass how an entire country feels about its election is tricky at the best of times. America’s deep complexities, size and diversity have always made singular narratives hard to find. But the pandemic made everything a lot more difficult. As we travelled from state to state, we found empty streets and cancelled public events, and few political events to attend – particularly on the Democratic side as the party toed a stricter, safer line on the pandemic.This meant that canvassing public opinion became a harder task and we had to organize almost every element of each episode, days – sometimes weeks – beforehand.OL: It was clear throughout our journey that two diametrical forces were underpinning this election and it was vital for any viewer seeking to understand the state of US politics to encounter both in our films.We made a commitment to visit as many diverse communities as possible to examine how Joe Biden’s candidacy was viewed, and interrogate his platform as best we could. We were interested in how progressive politics and rapidly diversifying populaces in once conservative strongholds might tip the outcome of the election, prompting trips to Georgia, Texas and North Carolina.But we were also determined to robustly engage with the post-factual, conspiracy-tinged world ushered in by the Trump presidency, as well as to hold him accountable for the numerous policy failures of his tenure.TS: Four years ago I filmed our 2016 version of the series and watched as Trump successfully motivated his base with cultural and racial narratives to create anger and division.This time, what Oliver and I encountered was even more extreme. At mainstream Republican events we came into contact with groups like the Proud Boys – the far-right “western supremacists” who now patrol Maga [Make America Great Again] marches across the country. We interviewed Republican candidates running for Congress who pushed baseless conspiracy theories tied to QAnon.After years of Trump repeating cries of “fake news”, his rallies have become hostile places for reporters, and we were often met with deep distrust. On one occasion a small group of his supporters followed us back to our car, labelling us “agitators” as we tried to film their public event. It did not always feel safe.But away from these rallies, we found people who were curious about two reporters roaming across the country, eager to speak to us about their lives. We met unemployed factory workers in Ohio, let down by Trump’s broken promises; evangelical Christians in North Carolina, loyal to the president despite his transgressions; and progressive Latina Democrats looking to flip a historically conservative Texas. After four years of Trump, this is a country in a passionate and frequently angry debate about what it was, what it is – and what it could be.OL: We ended the series as the news networks eventually called the election Joe Biden, acutely aware that this was far from the end of the story.The shocking events in Washington last week, a mob invasion of the US Congress, only serve to emphasize this further. Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud alongside four years of extremist rhetoric and policy have fundamentally altered the fabric of American democracy. And the end of Trump’s presidency is far from the end of Trumpism.So Tom and I will continue to produce new Anywhere But Washington episodes, starting from Biden’s inauguration later this month. We want to examine if the 46th president will deliver for the communities he promised, what efforts he makes to restore faith in institutions, and what the long-term legacy of Trump’s four years in office will be. It all starts from day one, when Biden’s desk will be landed with a public health crisis, a humanitarian disaster on the southern border, and a host of other national and geopolitical issues stemming from the past four years.We’ve been blown away by the support from Guardian viewers in the US, UK and around the world, and appreciated the dozens of encouraging emails and direct messages sent to us over the course of the series.We’d love to hear more suggestions about where to visit next, the sort of stories you’d like to see us engage with. We’re keen to visit new areas of the country and revisit many of the communities we spent time with last year, and we hope you’ll continue with us throughout the journey. More

President Donald Trump is extremely unlikely to capitulate to pressure to resign in the final days of his presidency. And his Cabinet is equally unlikely to force him out by invoking the 25th amendment of the Constitution, despite calls from the Democrats to do so.
So, in the wake of last week’s insurrection at the US Capitol, which left five people dead and the Trump White House in free fall, the final option available to lawmakers who want to punish the president for his role in encouraging the rioters is impeachment. Again.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today the Democrats “will proceed” with impeachment proceedings this week if Vice President Mike Pence does not immediately respond to a resolution calling for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment.
This will no doubt be a complicated task in the waning days of the Trump presidency. No US president has faced impeachment twice. And there are many questions about how the process will play out, given Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the US in just nine days.

Pelosi says the House ‘will proceed’ with bringing legislation to impeach Trump to the floor this week. J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Impeachment: a two-step process
This is how the impeachment process works under the Constitution. (Trump will be familiar with this since he’s already been through it before on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.)
Impeachment requires both chambers of Congress — the House of Representatives and the Senate — to act. The House has the “sole power of impeachment” for federal officials, and all that is required is a simple majority to initiate proceedings. The House essentially takes on the role of a prosecutor, deciding if the charges warrant impeachment and a trial.

The Senate is where the actual trial takes place. Under the Constitution, the chamber acts like a court, with senators considering evidence given by witnesses or any other form deemed suitable.
Impeachment managers appointed by the House “prosecute” the case before the Senate and the president can mount a defence. The chief justice of the Supreme Court acts as the presiding officer.
While these proceedings have many of the trappings of an actual court, it is important to bear in mind that impeachment is a political process.
Under the impeachment clause of the Constitution, a president may be removed from office “on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
This language has been the source of considerable debate, with some legal experts, like Trump’s first impeachment lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, arguing that impeachable offences are limited to actual crimes. Others (correctly) disagree.
Read more: Does impeachment need a crime? Not according to framers of the Constitution
Conviction requires two-thirds of senators — a deliberately high threshold to prevent politically motivated impeachments from succeeding. No previous impeachment of a president has ever met this bar: Andrew Johnson (1868), Bill Clinton (1998) and Trump (2019) were all acquitted.
Even though some Republican senators have indicated they would vote in favour of impeachment — or at least be open to it — the number is likely nowhere near enough for conviction.
Trump was acquitted in a Senate trial in his first impeachment along largely party votes. Erik S. Lesser/EPA
Complicating factors: time, shifting majorities and a difficult process
With only days left before Trump leaves office on January 20, time is of the essence. Pelosi has said the Democrats in the House will start the process this week. They have drafted a resolution listing one article of impeachment for “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States”.
The Constitution does not mandate any particular timeline for the proceedings to take place. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated a Senate trial could not begin before January 19, as the Senate is in recess until then.
Moving that date up would require all 100 senators to agree — an unlikely prospect.
Read more: ‘Delighting in causing complete chaos’: what’s behind Trump supporters’ brazen storming of the Capitol
But this may not be an obstacle to starting the process. The Constitution is silent on the question of whether a Senate trial can be held after a president has left office. The 1876 impeachment of War Secretary William Belknap for graft after he left office may serve as precedent.
William Belknap was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate. Library of Congress
So, if the House votes to impeach Trump before January 20, a trial could theoretically happen after that date. The maths also change slightly in the Democrats’ favour on that day. The Democrats will take back control of the Senate, albeit on a 50-50 split with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris casting any tie-breaking vote.
Democrats are pushing for impeachment because the Constitution not only allows conviction, but also provides for barring Trump from holding federal office again. This would thwart his ambitions to run for president in 2024 — a prospect not lost on Republicans with the same goal.
The Constitution does not stipulate how many senators need to vote in favour of disqualifying an impeached official from holding office again, but the Senate has determined a simple majority would suffice. This tool has also been used sparingly in the past: disqualification has only occurred three times, and only for federal judges.
The bigger hurdle, however, is that it still requires Trump to first be convicted of impeachment by a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
Political implications of impeachment
Biden has remained lukewarm at best to suggestions of a Senate trial after January 20. Such proceedings would allow Trump to style himself a political martyr to his followers even more than is already the case.
This would distract from the critical goals Biden has for his first 100 days and beyond: tackling spiralling COVID infection numbers and the country’s lagging vaccination program, providing immediate financial relief to struggling families, rejoining international climate action efforts and repairing the damage done to the fabric of government by the Trump administration. Last, but not least, it would make confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet picks more difficult.
Achieving these goals while Trump sets off the political fireworks he so cherishes is implausible.
Biden has said impeachment is for Congress to decide. Susan Walsh/AP
The Democrats have floated the idea of impeaching Trump before January 20, but not sending the article of impeachment to the Senate for trial until weeks later — or even longer — to give Biden a chance to get started on these initiatives. But a distraction is a distraction no matter when it happens.
Democrats would also do well to remember that political fortunes can change. It’s understandable to want to punish Trump for his actions, but rushing into a political trial in the Senate, which Democrats are bound to lose, may have unintended consequences for the future.
Read more: ‘America First’ is no more, but can president-elect Biden fix the US reputation abroad?
What’s to stop the Republicans from pursuing impeachments of future Democratic leaders they disagree with, even in the face of certain defeat in the Senate? This could poison the political atmosphere even further.
Democrats may also want to consider the fact that Trump could face federal charges for allegedly inciting the violence at the Capitol or state charges for urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat to Biden.
While this outcome is far from certain, the chances of conviction in a court of law would likely prove to be less toxic politically for both Democrats and Republicans alike. More

The House is prepared to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump as early as this week if Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet refuse to remove him from office for his role in inciting a mob that carried out a deadly assault on the seat of American government.
The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, delivered the ultimatum in a letter to colleagues on Sunday night that described the president as an urgent threat to the nation.
On Monday, the House will move forward with a non-binding resolution that calls on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, and strip Trump of his presidential authority. If the measure fails to receive unanimous support, as is expected, the House will vote on the resolution on Tuesday. Pence, Pelosi said, would have “24 hours” to respond.
Next, Pelosi said the House “will proceed with bringing impeachment legislation to the floor.” Though she did not specify an exact timeline, top Democrats have suggested the House could begin proceedings as soon as midweek, with a Senate trial delayed – possibly for months – so as not distract from Joe Biden’s agenda.
Quick guide Impeaching Trump
Show
Hide

Will Trump be impeached for a second time? Yes. Congressman Ted Lieu has said most Democrats in the House have signed on to articles of impeachment accusing the president of having “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions” that are due to be introduced on Monday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on board.
Is Trump heading to the Senate for trial? It seems so. A House majority will send the articles to the upper chamber, and it is hard to see any Democrats deserting their party. Some Republicans have also said the president needs to go.
Can the Senate try Trump so close to Joe Biden’s inauguration? Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that it can, although the narrow timeframe means the earliest a trial could be held would be after inauguration day, 20 January, when Trump will be out of power. The wait may be longer, however: on 10 January, House whip James Clyburn, who is close to Biden, indicated that Democrats may not send articles to the Senate until it has confirmed the new president’s cabinet nominees – a vital process.
Will he be convicted? Unlikely. Conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority. The chamber is split 50-50, and though some Republicans have either said Trump should go or indicated sympathy for impeachment, nowhere near enough seem likely to cross their own supporters by voting against the president to whom the party remains overwhelmingly loyal.
So what happens if he gets off again? Barring a presidential pardon – which Trump may try to give to himself, a move most scholars doubt will work – once out of the White House Trump will be vulnerable to federal prosecution over acts in office. State investigations, including those under way in New York, can proceed and business creditors will circle.  Martin Pengelly

Photograph: Brian Snyder/X90051

“In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both,” she wrote. “As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”
Pelosi noted urgency was required because Trump was due to leave office on 20 January.
She explained that the resolution called on Pence “to convene and mobilize the cabinet to activate the 25th amendment to declare the president incapable of executing the duties of his office.”

Jake Sherman
(@JakeSherman)
🚨NEW … ⁦@LeaderHoyer⁩ is asking for consent for the 25th amendment bill tomorrow. And then the House will move to impeach trumpHere’s ⁦@SpeakerPelosi⁩ letter to her Dem colleagues. pic.twitter.com/CubXVVvgli

January 10, 2021

Under the procedure, the vice president “would immediately exercise powers as acting president,” she wrote.
On Sunday, Pelosi told 60 Minutes Trump was “a deranged, unhinged, dangerous president of the United States,” adding that he has done something “so serious that there should be prosecution against him”.
Pence is not expected to take the lead in forcing Trump out, although talk has been circulating about the 25th amendment option for days in Washington.
Earlier it had been speculated that House Democrats could try to introduce articles of impeachment as early as Monday.
One touted strategy was to condemn the president’s actions swiftly but delay an impeachment trial in the Senate for 100 days. That would allow President-elect Biden to focus on other priorities as soon as he is inaugurated 20 January.
Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat and a top Biden ally, laid out the ideas on Sunday as the country came to grips with the siege at the Capitol by Trump loyalists trying to overturn the election results.
“Let’s give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn said.
The push by House Democrats came after the office of the Colorado Democratic representative Jason Crow released a readout of a call in which army secretary Ryan McCarthy “indicated that [the Department of Defense] is aware of further possible threats posed by would-be terrorists in the days up to and including Inauguration Day”.
According to the readout, McCarthy said the Pentagon was “working with local and federal law enforcement to coordinate security preparations” for 20 January.
Crow, a former US army ranger, said he had “raised grave concerns about reports that active duty and reserve military members were involved in the insurrection” and asked that “troops deployed for the inauguration … are not sympathetic to domestic terrorists”. The readout said McCarthy agreed and said he was willing to testify publicly in the coming days.
On Sunday Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined colleague Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in calling for Trump to “resign and go away as soon as possible.”
“I think the president has disqualified himself from ever, certainly, serving in office again,” Toomey said. “I don’t think he is electable in any way.”
Murkowski, who has long voiced her exasperation with Trump’s conduct in office, told the Anchorage Daily News on Friday that Trump simply “needs to get out.” A third Republican, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, did not go that far, but on Sunday he warned Trump to be “very careful” in his final days in office.
Corporate America began to tie its reaction to the Capitol riots by tying them to campaign contributions.
Citigroup said it would be pausing all federal political donations for the first three months of the year. Citi’s head of global government affairs, Candi Wolff, said in a Friday memo to employees, “We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law.”
House leaders, furious after the insurrection, appeared determined to act against Trump despite the short timeline.
Another idea being considered was to have a separate vote that would prevent Trump from ever holding office again. That could potentially only need a simple majority vote of 51 senators, unlike impeachment, in which two-thirds of the 100-member Senate must support a conviction.
The Senate was set to be split evenly at 50-50, but under Democratic control once Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and the two Democrats who won Georgia’s Senate runoff elections last week are sworn in. Harris would be the Senate’s tie-breaking vote.
The FBI and other agencies are continuing their examination of the circumstances of the insurrection, including allegations that Pentagon officials loyal to Trump blocked the deployment of national guard troops for three hours after officials called for help.
“We couldn’t actually cross over the border into DC without the OK and that was quite some time [coming],” the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, told CNN.
“Eventually I got a call from the secretary of the army, asking if we could come into the city, but we had already been mobilising, we already had our police, we already had our guard mobilised, and we were just waiting for that call. More

Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a stinging rebuke of Donald Trump on Sunday, comparing the riot at the US Capitol which the president incited to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Nazi thugs attacked Jewish Germans and their property, a harbinger of horrors to come.
He also compared American democracy to a weapon he wielded onscreen in the loincloth of Conan the Barbarian nearly 40 years ago, saying: “Our democracy is like the steel of this sword. The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes.”
Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on Wednesday after the president told them to “fight like hell” in support of his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden. Five people died, including a Capitol police officer who was hit with a fire extinguisher and a rioter shot by law enforcement.
Authorities have made numerous arrests, among them one man charged with bringing firearms and explosives to Washington and another who allegedly threatened to kill House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Chants of “Hang Mike Pence” were heard and one rioter was seen carrying plastic “zip tie” handcuffs, suggesting plans to kidnap lawmakers.
Trump, who will leave office on 20 January, now faces a second impeachment.
As a two-term governor of California as well as the star of the Terminator franchise and other action classics, Schwarzenegger maintains a presence and a voice in Republican politics. He has clashed with Trump before.
On Sunday, in a video posted to social media and scored to rousing classical music, the 73-year-old said he “would like to say a few words to my fellow Americans and to our friends around the world about the events of recent days”.
“I grew up in Austria and was very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass,” he said. “It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out [by] the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys [a quasi-fascist group of Trump supporters].”
“Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. It has shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”
On Sunday it was reported that another officer had died, though it was not immediately clear if the death was related to the Capitol riot.
Schwarzenegger described a traumatic childhood in post-war Austria, the son of a police officer who joined the Nazi party.
“I have seen firsthand how things can spin out of control,” Schwarzenegger said. “I know there is a fear in this country and all over the world that something like this could happen right here. I do not believe it is.
“But I do believe that we must be aware of the dire consequences of selfishness and cynicism. President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election. And a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies. My father and our neighbours were misled also with lies. I know where such lies lead.
“President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is he soon will be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
Schwarzenegger appealed to Americans’ patriotism and commended lawmakers who regathered after the assault on the Capitol to confirm Biden’s victory, despite objections from 147 Republican representatives and senators. More