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      Trump Schedules Address Before CPAC Next Sunday

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021)ObituaryLimbaugh’s LegacyPresidential Medal of FreedomLimbaugh and TrumpAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Schedules Address Before CPAC Next SundayThe former president will make his first lengthy remarks since leaving office before the annual conference of conservatives Feb. 28.President Donald Trump at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 6:19 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump will speak at the conservative event known as CPAC on Feb. 28, his first public appearance and lengthy address since he left the White House for a final time last month.A senior aide to Mr. Trump confirmed that he would attend the Conservative Public Action Conference, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., this year, and that he planned to talk about the future of the Republican Party as well as President Biden’s immigration policies, which have been aimed at undoing Mr. Trump’s.What Mr. Trump plans to talk about and what he ultimately says once he’s onstage often diverge, as he discards scripts that aides prepare for him.But it will be the first time that he has spoken in a public setting since the deadly Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol building.The former president, who was permanently banned from Twitter and who is facing investigations into his businesses as well as whether he has culpability for the assault on the Capitol, has generally kept a low profile, except for giving a small round of interviews to sympathetic news outlets about the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh last week. Even though the interviews were supposed to be about Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Trump still strayed into repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.But CPAC is traditionally a cattle call for Republican candidates for office as well as aspiring figures in the party. And Mr. Trump has signaled to several allies and advisers in recent days that he is focused on running for president again in 2024.Whether he actually does is an open question. But his presence could freeze the field for the next two years, preventing other candidates from developing operations and, more important, networks of donors to sustain their candidacies.Mr. Trump is currently locked in a battle with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, over the party’s future and what kind of candidates it attracts. Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he wants to try to minimize Mr. Trump’s influence after the deadly riot.But Mr. Trump has said he will try to encourage candidates who will carry his brand of politics forward.The CPAC conference is the event where, a year ago, when it was held in Washington, D.C., Mr. Trump gave a speech downplaying the threat of the novel coronavirus and insisting that his administration had the situation in hand. A New Jersey man who attended the conference tested positive for the virus, setting off a scramble by officials with the American Conservative Union, who run the conference.Within two weeks of Mr. Trump’s speech, the pandemic was a full-blown crisis, one that ultimately engulfed his administration. The administration’s failed response to the virus was a key issue for voters in the 2020 election.Mr. Trump’s modern political life began with a speech at CPAC in 2011.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Democrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?Disappointed by down-ballot losses, Democratic interest groups are joining forces to conduct an autopsy of the election results. Republicans do not yet seem willing to reckon with the G.O.P.’s major defeats.Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaking outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., after winning the election on Nov. 7.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETDemocrats emerged from the 2020 election with full control of the federal government and a pile of lingering questions. In private, party leaders and strategists have been wrestling with a quandary: Why was President Biden’s convincing victory over Donald J. Trump not accompanied by broad Democratic gains down ballot?With that puzzle in mind, a cluster of Democratic advocacy groups has quietly launched a review of the party’s performance in the 2020 election with an eye toward shaping Democrats’ approach to next year’s midterm campaign, seven people familiar with the effort said.There is particular concern among the Democratic sponsors of the initiative about the party’s losses in House districts with large minority populations, including in Florida, Texas and California, people briefed on the initiative said. The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing.Democrats had anticipated they would be able to expand their majority in the House, pushing into historically red areas of the Sun Belt where Mr. Trump’s unpopularity had destabilized the G.O.P. coalition. Instead, Republicans took 14 Democratic-held House seats, including a dozen that Democrats had captured in an anti-Trump wave election just two years earlier.The results stunned strategists in both parties, raising questions about the reliability of campaign polling and seemingly underscoring Democratic vulnerabilities in rural areas and right-of-center suburbs. Democrats also lost several contested Senate races by unexpectedly wide margins, even as they narrowly took control of the chamber.Strategists involved in the Democratic self-review have begun interviewing elected officials and campaign consultants and reaching out to lawmakers and former candidates in major House and Senate races where the party either won or lost narrowly.Four major groups are backing the effort, spanning a range of Democratic-leaning interests: Third Way, a centrist think tank; End Citizens United, a clean-government group; the Latino Victory Fund; and Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black Democratic candidates.They are said to be working with at least three influential bodies within the House Democratic caucus: the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist lawmakers. The groups have retained a Democratic consulting firm, 270 Strategies, to conduct interviews and analyze electoral data.The newly elected Democratic Representatives Jason Crow, Antonio Delgado, Jared Golden and Abigail Spanberger participated in a forum hosted by End Citizens United in 2019.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockDemocrats are feeling considerable pressure to refine their political playbook ahead of the 2022 congressional elections, when the party will be defending minuscule House and Senate majorities without a presidential race to drive turnout on either side.Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said there was a recognition in the party that despite Mr. Biden’s victory the 2020 cycle had not been an unalloyed Democratic success story.“I think people know that there was good and bad coming out of ’20 and there is a desire to look under the hood,” Mr. Sena said.Among the party’s goals, Mr. Sena said, should be studying their gains in Georgia and looking for other areas where population growth and demographic change might furnish the party with strong electoral targets in 2022.“There were a series of factors that really made Georgia work this cycle,” he said. “How do you begin to find places like Georgia?”Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, confirmed in a statement that the four-way project was aimed at positioning Democrats for the midterm elections.“With narrow Democratic majorities in Congress and the Republican Party in the thrall of Trump-supporting seditionists, the stakes have never been higher,” he said. “Our organizations will provide Democrats with a detailed picture of what happened in 2020 — with a wide range of input from voices across the party — so they are fully prepared to take on the G.O.P. in 2022.”In addition to the outside review, some of the traditional party committees are said to be taking narrower steps to scrutinize the 2020 results. Concerned about a drop-off in support with Latino men, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas earlier this year, one person familiar with the study said. It is not clear precisely what conclusions emerged from the exercise.So far there is no equivalent process underway on the Republican side, party officials said, citing the general lack of appetite among G.O.P. leaders for grappling openly with Mr. Trump’s impact on the party and the wreckage he inflicted in key regions of the country.As a candidate for re-election, Mr. Trump slumped in the Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest — giving up his most important breakthroughs of 2016 — and lost to Mr. Biden in Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally red states where the G.O.P. has suffered an abrupt decline in recent years. The party lost all four Senate seats from those states during Mr. Trump’s presidency, three of them in the 2020 cycle.But Mr. Trump and his political retainers have so far responded with fury to critics of his stewardship of the party, and there is no apparent desire to tempt his wrath with a comprehensive analysis that would be likely to yield unflattering results. One unofficial review, conducted by Mr. Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, concluded that Mr. Trump had shed significant support because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with particularly damaging losses among white voters.In the past, Democratic attempts at self-scrutiny have tended to yield somewhat mushy conclusions aimed at avoiding controversy across the party’s multifarious coalition.Donald J. Trump spoke on election night at the White House.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Democratic Party briefly appeared headed for a public reckoning in November, as the party absorbed its setbacks in the House and its failure to unseat several Republican senators whom Democrats had seen as ripe for defeat.A group of centrist House members blamed left-wing rhetoric about democratic socialism and defunding the police for their losses in a number of conservative-leaning suburbs and rural districts. Days after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said the party should renounce the word “socialism,” drawing pushback from progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.That airing of differences did not last long: Democrats quickly closed ranks in response to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, and party unity hardened after the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But there are still significant internal disagreements about campaign strategy.It has been eight years since either political party conducted a wide-ranging self-assessment that recommended thorough changes in structure and strategy. After the 2012 election, when Republicans lost the presidential race and gave up seats in both chambers of Congress, the Republican National Committee empaneled a task force that called for major changes to the party organization.The so-called 2012 autopsy also recommended that the G.O.P. embrace the cause of immigration reform, warning that the party faced a bleak demographic future if it did not improve its position with communities of color. That recommendation was effectively discarded after House Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate, and then fully obliterated by Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy.Henry Barbour, a member of the R.N.C. who co-authored the committee’s post-2012 analysis, said it would be wise for both parties to consider their political positioning after the 2020 election. He said Democrats had succeeded in the election by running against Mr. Trump but that the party’s leftward shift had alienated otherwise winnable voters, including some Black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities that shifted incrementally toward Mr. Trump.“They’re running off a lot of middle-class Americans who work hard for a living out in the heartland, or in big cities or suburbs,” Mr. Barbour said. “Part of that is because Democrats have run too far to the left.”Mr. Barbour said Republicans, too, should take a cleareyed look at their 2020 performance. Mr. Trump, he said, had not done enough to expand his appeal beyond a large and loyal minority of voters.“The Republican Party has got to do better than that,” he said. “We’re not just a party of one president.”Henry Barbour, a member of the Republican National Committee, at the party’s 2020 convention in Charlotte, N.C.Credit…Carlos Barria/ReutersIn addition to the four-way review on the Democratic side, there are several narrower projects underway focused on addressing deficiencies in polling.Democratic and Republican officials alike found serious shortcomings in their survey research, especially polling in House races that failed to anticipate how close Republicans would come to retaking the majority. Both parties emerged from the campaign feeling that they had significantly misjudged the landscape of competitive House races, with Democrats losing seats unexpectedly and Republicans perhaps having missed a chance to capture the chamber as a result.The chief Republican and Democratic super PACs focused on House races — the Congressional Leadership Fund and House Majority PAC — are both in the process of studying their 2020 polling and debating changes for the 2022 campaign, people familiar with their efforts said.The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican group, is said to be undertaking a somewhat more extensive review of its spending and messaging, though it is not expected to issue any kind of larger diagnosis for the party. “We would be foolish not to take a serious look at what worked, what didn’t work and how you can evolve and advance,” said Dan Conston, the group’s president.Several of the largest Democratic polling companies are also conferring regularly with each other in an effort to address gaps in the 2020 research. Two people involved in the conversations said there was general agreement that the industry had to update its practices before 2022 to assure Democratic leaders that they would not be caught by surprise again.Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster involved in reviewing research from the last cycle, said that the party was only now digging more deeply into the results of the 2020 election because the last few months had been dominated by other crises.Several Democratic and Republican strategists cautioned that both parties faced a challenge in formulating a plan for 2022: It had been more than a decade, she said, since a midterm campaign had not been dominated by a larger-than-life presidential personality. Based on the experience of the 2020 campaign, it is not clear that Mr. Biden is destined to become such a polarizing figure.“It’s hard to know what an election’s like without an Obama or a Trump,” Ms. Greenberg said, “just normal, regular, ordinary people running.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Neera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to Confirmation

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNeera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to ConfirmationSenator Joe Manchin III said he would oppose President Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a move that could scuttle her chances.Neera Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to pass confirmation, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 8:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III announced on Friday that he would oppose the nomination of Neera Tanden, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, imperiling her prospects for confirmation in an evenly divided Senate.The announcement by Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, underscored the fragility of the ambitions of the new Democratic majority in the Senate and the outsize power that any one senator holds over the success of Mr. Biden’s administration and agenda.The fate of the nomination is now in the hands of a party that Ms. Tanden has frequently criticized in the past, particularly moderate Republicans she has previously scorned. Ms. Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to to be confirmed, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Given Ms. Tanden’s previous litany of critical public statements and posts on Twitter against members of both parties, it is unclear whether such support exists.Mr. Manchin cited statements from Ms. Tanden that were personally directed at Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader; Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent now in charge of the Senate Budget Committee; and other colleagues.“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” said Mr. Manchin, who will also cast a decisive vote on Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination. As I have said before, we must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics.”Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday that he did not plan to withdraw her nomination.“I think we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,” he said.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated that position in a statement: “Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties.”But the lack of support from Mr. Manchin could be enough to derail the nomination altogether, should Republicans remain united against her selection.Ms. Tanden would be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget, an agency that is critical to the execution of the administration’s economic and policy agendas. But Mr. Biden’s decision to nominate her even before Democrats won control of the Senate in January stunned several lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill, given the slim margins in the upper chamber and Ms. Tanden’s prolific venom on social media.The New WashingtonLatest UpdatesUpdated Feb. 19, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ETGeorgia legislators want to restrict voting methods popular among Democrats.Lloyd Austin addressed a viral video about sexual harassment in the Marine Corps.House Budget Committee unveils a 600-page, $1.9 trillion economic relief bill.A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Ms. Tanden had frequently clashed with Mr. Sanders and other prominent liberals long after the conclusion of the primary race that year. Once she was formally nominated to oversee the budget agency, Ms. Tanden deleted more than 1,000 negative tweets, and liberal senators rallied to her defense.But she faced tough questioning from both Republicans and Democrats during her two confirmation hearings this month, with lawmakers from both parties examining her previous tweets and statements and grilling her over the millions of dollars of corporate donations that her think tank, Center for American Progress, received.Republicans spent the first hour of her first hearing before a Senate homeland security committee asking Ms. Tanden to explain her past tweets and why she deleted more than 1,000 shortly after the November election.Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, read aloud posts in which she called Mr. McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and said that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” a Republican senator from Texas.Her second hearing was no less fiery, with Mr. Sanders confronting Ms. Tanden over her history of leveling personal attacks on social media. He also demanded details about the donations the Center for American Progress received from corporations under her leadership and a promise that it would not influence her work in the Biden administration.Ms. Tanden apologized to lawmakers during both hearings, saying she regretted many of her previous remarks, and she vowed that the donations would carry no weight over her role as budget director.“I worry less about what Mrs. Tanden did in the past than what she’s going to do in the future,” Mr. Sanders said Friday night on CNN. “I’m talking to her early next week.”Many Democrats accused Republicans of unfairly singling out Ms. Tanden’s social media posts after years of evading queries about President Donald J. Trump’s tweets, even when they espoused racist and offensive commentary or targeted their own colleagues.“Honestly, the hypocrisy is astounding,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at the time. “If Republicans are concerned about criticism on Twitter, their complaints are better directed at President Trump. I fully expect to see some crocodile tears spilled on the other side of the aisle over the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.”Mr. Biden’s pick for deputy director of the agency, Shalanda Young, is respected by lawmakers and aides in both parties after serving as staff director for House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. The first Black woman to serve in the role, she helped wrangle the compromise that ended the nation’s longest government shutdown in 2019 and the coronavirus relief packages Congress approved in 2020.Jim Tankersley More

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      The Relationship Between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn WashingtonThe Relationship Between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’tThe unlikely alliance delivered results they both wanted but fell apart after the election once their political interests diverged.President Donald J. Trump meeting in July with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time, in the Oval Office.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — At a White House event in November 2019, President Donald J. Trump offered unrestrained praise for one person on hand he regarded as singularly responsible for his administration’s remarkable record of placing conservatives on the courts.“The nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to a man whose leadership has been instrumental to our success,” Mr. Trump said.That man was Senator Mitch McConnell, now enmeshed in an ugly feud with the former president that has significant ramifications for the future of the Republican Party. The rift is extraordinary partly because perhaps no one did more to advance Mr. Trump and his Washington ambitions than Mr. McConnell, who had ambitions of his own and saw Mr. Trump as a vessel to pour them in.“Trump would not have been able to achieve his objectives without a strong Senate leader,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush.The relationship had its rocky moments but was usually cordial enough — until it went extremely bad in recent days as Mr. McConnell excoriated Mr. Trump on the Senate floor after acquitting him in an impeachment trial and Mr. Trump responded with a cutting personal broadside. It was a messy breakup years in the making.Like most Americans, Mr. McConnell expected Mr. Trump to lose to Hillary Clinton in November 2016, and he also braced for the potential loss of the Senate majority as party pollsters and strategists predicted a big night for Democrats. Much to the surprise of Mr. McConnell, Republicans held on and Mr. Trump triumphed, an outcome for which Mr. McConnell could deservedly take some credit.A strong argument can be made that Mr. McConnell, by preventing President Barack Obama from filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, cleared Mr. Trump’s path to the White House.The sudden political focus on the court provided a way for Mr. Trump to assure conservatives wary of his character flaws that he could be their champion. He and his legal advisers assembled a now famous list of potential conservative nominees that he promised he would choose from to calm evangelicals and others on the right who worried he might appoint a more liberal justice to succeed Justice Scalia.Mr. Trump himself recognized the political power of that list and the Scalia vacancy as he lavished praise on Mr. McConnell that day at the White House.“It really did have an impact on the election,” Mr. Trump said at the celebration in the East Room. “People knew me very well, but they didn’t know, ‘Is he liberal? Conservative?’”Mr. McConnell, the canny Senate leader, and Mr. Trump, the Washington novice suddenly ensconced in the White House, became a team. It was not a great personal match. Mr. McConnell spilled nothing of his intentions; Mr. Trump spilled all.Mr. Trump could not relate to the buttoned-lip approach of Mr. McConnell as he made clear this week in his scathing statement describing Mr. McConnell as “dour, sullen and unsmiling.” Mr. McConnell held private disdain for Mr. Trump and saw a flawed personality with a sketchy history who was not at all versed in the customs and rites of Washington.But as the Trump era opened, Mr. McConnell was just happy that Mr. Trump didn’t turn out to be a Democrat, though some congressional Republicans were not so sure. And it didn’t hurt that Mr. Trump brought on Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as transportation secretary.“Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it,” Mr. McConnell told The New York Times in February 2017 as the chaotic White House set up shop. “But if you look at the steps that have been taken so far, looks good to me.”As he looked, Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an occasional go-between who is traveling to meet Mr. Trump this weekend in Florida to try to smooth things over, said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job.”Then came the election. Mr. Trump refused to accept the results, making wild and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Mr. McConnell indulged him and refused to recognize President Biden as the winner until he could avoid it no longer after the states certified their electoral votes on Dec. 14. He congratulated Mr. Biden the next day.The interests of Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump now sharply diverged, with Mr. McConnell fixated on regaining power in 2022 while Mr. Trump was stuck on 2020, making outlandish allegations that threatened to drive off more suburban voters and imperiled two Georgia seats that went to Democrats on Jan. 5. Then the riot the next day found marauders in the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell’s sanctum sanctorum.“This mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell declared on Jan. 19, accusing Mr. Trump of provoking the rioters and prompting rumblings that he of all people might vote to convict Mr. Trump in the coming impeachment trial. But he did not. Instead, he voted to acquit Mr. Trump then tried to bury him minutes later while distinguishing between Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and the Trump voters Mr. McConnell and Republican Senate candidates would need next year.“Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” Mr. McConnell said. “One person did. Just one.”Mr. Rove said Mr. McConnell handled it well.“McConnell reads his conference and he knows that, like him, they thought simultaneously that this was a highly partisan process and not good for country, but also that Trump had played a significant role in fomenting Jan. 6,” he said.Then it was Mr. McConnell doing the provoking. His post-trial speech and a subsequent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal drew the ire of Mr. Tump, who fired back with a call for Republicans to dump their leader — an unlikely prospect — and a threat to mount primary challenges against candidates allied with Mr. McConnell, a more worrisome prospect for members of the party.Now the question is whether Mr. Trump will follow through, causing intramural fights that ultimately lead to Democratic victories. Mr. McConnell’s allies note that he has been in this position before facing challenges from the right and came out on top.“My money,” said Bob Stevenson, a former top Senate Republican leadership aide active in Senate races, “is on Mitch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      McConnell’s Strategy Has Party in Turmoil and Trump on Attack

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMcConnell’s Strategy Has Party in Turmoil and Trump on AttackThe Republican leader’s calculus was simple: Don’t stoke a full-on revolt by Trump supporters by voting to convict the former president, but demonstrate to anti-Trump Republicans that he recognized Mr. Trump’s failings. It didn’t work.Allies of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, acknowledged that former President Donald J. Trump still had a hold on the party’s base.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesCarl Hulse and Feb. 17, 2021Updated 9:41 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell’s colleagues may not have deep personal affection for their often distant and inscrutable leader, but there is considerable appreciation for how he has spared them from difficult votes while maintaining a laserlike focus on keeping the Senate majority.His approach on Saturday at the conclusion of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial seemed aimed at doing just that. After voting to acquit Mr. Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 riot that invaded the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, began a fiery tirade, declaring him “practically and morally responsible” for the assault. In essence, Mr. McConnell said he found Mr. Trump guilty but not subject to impeachment as a private citizen.The strategy appeared twofold: Don’t stoke a full-on revolt by Trump supporters the party needs by voting to convict, but demonstrate to anti-Trump Republicans — particularly big donors — that he recognized Mr. Trump’s failings and is beginning to steer the party in another direction.But it did not exactly produce the desired result. Instead, it has drawn Mr. McConnell into a vicious feud with the former president, who lashed out at him on Tuesday as a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack,” and given new cause for Republican division that could spill into the midterm elections. And it has left some Republicans bewildered over Mr. McConnell’s strategy and others taking a harder line, saying the leader whose focus was always the next election had hurt the party’s 2022 prospects.The miscalculation has left Mr. McConnell in an unusual place — on the defensive, with Mr. Trump pressing for his ouster, and no easy way to extricate himself from the political bind.“McConnell has many talents, there is no doubt about it, but if he is setting this thing up as a way to expunge Trump from the Republican Party, that is a failing proposition,” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said in an interview on Wednesday.Mr. Johnson, who is weighing running for re-election next year in a highly competitive battleground state, said support for Mr. McConnell was already emerging as a negative factor among Trump-backing Republican primary voters he speaks with back home. He said the minority leader risked becoming a full-blown pariah for Senate candidates if he did not move quickly toward unifying the party.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, in an interview Tuesday night with Sean Hannity on Fox News, said the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell were “now at each other’s throats” was imperiling the political outlook for Republicans.“I’m more worried about 2022 than I’ve ever been,” Mr. Graham said. “I don’t want to eat our own. President Trump is the most consequential Republican in the party. If Mitch McConnell doesn’t understand that, he’s missing a lot.”Mr. McConnell needs to be returned to his top role after the 2022 elections to become the longest-serving Senate leader in history in 2023, a goal the legacy-minded Kentuckian would no doubt like to achieve. And there is no imminent threat to his leadership position, though one senator said privately that a challenge could have been incited had Mr. McConnell split with the 42 other Republican senators who voted to acquit Mr. Trump.Mr. McConnell has been conspicuously silent since the attack by Mr. Trump. He made no effort to walk back his Saturday speech or a subsequent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, but, characteristically, he now also appears uninterested in further inflaming the fight by punching back at Mr. Trump. David Popp, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, declined to comment on Wednesday.His Republican allies quickly circled around him, speaking in the void of his silence.Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said that Mr. McConnell was on “very solid ground” and that she had come away from conversations with him convinced he was moving forward with eyes open, prepared for the “slings and arrows” that taking on a vindictive former president would attract.“He’s not exactly a stream-of-consciousness communicator. He is very circumspect, very disciplined in his speech, and I think the speech he gave on the floor regarding former President Trump came right from his heart,” Ms. Capito said in an interview. She added, “His classic technique is to put it out there, say what he thinks and keep moving forward.”Senator John Thune of South Dakota, his No. 2 whom Mr. Trump has already promised to target next year, said in a statement that Mr. McConnell had “my full support and confidence.”Senator John Cornyn of Texas said Mr. McConnell had expressed his horror at what had occurred. “I think it genuinely offended him what happened in the Capitol that night,” Mr. Cornyn said. “Obviously, he spoke his mind.”Mr. Trump spoke his mind as well. In his Tuesday broadside that attacked Mr. McConnell in sharply personal terms despite their close collaboration over the past four years, Mr. Trump urged his party to abandon the Kentucky Republican. He also threatened to initiate primaries against Republican Senate candidates he believed were not sufficiently supportive of his agenda.That is a possibility that worries Senate Republicans. Most are confident about gaining the one seat needed to take back the Senate in the coming 2022 midterm elections — unless their candidates engage in messy primary races that end up producing hard-right candidates who cannot win in the general election, an outcome that harmed Republicans in the past. Those memories have stuck with Mr. McConnell, who has promised to intervene in primaries if he believes a candidate is endangering the party’s chance of winning a general election.Mr. Johnson said Republicans cannot win without the ardent Trump supporters now alienated by Mr. McConnell’s denunciation of Mr. Trump. He lumped the Republican leader in with the Lincoln Project and other anti-Trump Republicans who tried to “purge” the party of Trumpism. “They are not perceiving reality,” he said.“You are not going to be able to have them on your side if you are ripping the person they have a great deal of sympathy for in what he has done for this country and the personal toll President Trump has shouldered,” he said.Mr. McConnell’s allies acknowledged that Mr. Trump still had a hold on the Republican base but one said that Republicans should still be able to come together in opposition to what they saw as a far-left progressive agenda pursued by President Biden and congressional Democrats.“The unfortunate consequences of Democrats’ power was on full display in the opening days of the Biden administration when it effectively fired thousands of union workers, when it canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and froze oil and gas leases on federal lands,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former communications director to Mr. McConnell.Despite the heat of the current moment, some Republicans say they expect Mr. McConnell to weather the current hostile environment as he has in the past, aided by the passage of time and developments that diminish Mr. Trump’s hold on the party. They say he has survived challenges from the right in the past and stamped out primary challenges that threatened his preferred candidate.“Two years from now,” Mr. Cornyn said, “things could look completely different.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Don’t Care for This Impeachment? Wait Until Next Year

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentLatest UpdatesTrump AcquittedHow Senators VotedSeven Republicans Vote to ConvictAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical MemoDon’t Care for This Impeachment? Wait Until Next YearLeaders of both political parties suggest that impeachments, Electoral College standoffs and Supreme Court nomination blockades may become frequent fights in American politics.Representative Jamie Raskin, center, and other House impeachment managers spoke on Saturday after the Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 16, 2021Updated 4:17 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The second season of impeachment had ended less than a day earlier, but Republicans were already talking about next season. It sounded ominous.“I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said Sunday morning on Fox News.Mr. Graham seemed to be suggesting that the vice president might be punished because she had expressed support for a bail fund for Black Lives Matter protesters in Minnesota last summer. “She actually bailed out rioters,” Mr. Graham charged. That statement was false, but his threat was plain: Republicans can impeach, too.In recent days, former President Donald J. Trump’s defenders have darkly accused Democrats of opening a “Pandora’s box” of partisan retribution — leading to a kind of anything-goes future in politics, where impeachments get volleyed back and forth between the two parties like a tennis match, depending on which side controls Congress. “Partisan impeachments will become commonplace,” said Bruce L. Castor Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, as he argued the former president’s case before the Senate on Tuesday.There’s an element of plausibility here, given the hyperpartisan fervor that’s gripped American politics. But in the ensuing environment, Republicans seem to be saying that even the most outlandish accusations against a president — such as those hurled at President Biden by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia in her first days in Congress — should be treated the same as what Democrats impeached Mr. Trump over.In a broader sense, officials of both parties have suggested that regular impeachments may just become one of several regular features of a new and bitter normal in our politics. Previously rare or unthinkable measures could simply start happening all the timeDemocrats argue that, in fact, Republicans have opened several Pandora’s boxes in recent years. They have taken unprecedented actions, led by Mr. Trump, that have abused certain norms to a degree that has destabilized a set of once-reliable government traditions. Senate Republicans’ blockade of President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, for instance, cast doubt on any future president’s ability to fill a Supreme Court vacancy when the opposing party controlled the Senate.By refusing to concede an election he clearly lost, and then maintaining repeatedly it had been stolen from him, Mr. Trump shattered what had been an undisturbed American custom ensuring a peaceful transfer of power between administrations.Mr. Trump’s false claims have persuaded a majority of Republican voters that Mr. Biden had not been legitimately elected, and led 147 Republican members of the House and the Senate to vote against the Jan. 6 certification of Electoral College votes. This level of support to overturn the election result raises the prospect of whether the once-pro forma exercise of certification might now devolve every four years into a heated partisan spectacle — or, worse, riots.Two of former President Trump’s impeachment lawyers, Michael van der Veen and Bruce Castor, spoke on Saturday after the trial concluded.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesIt was the deadly assault on the Capitol, of course, that set into motion Mr. Trump’s second impeachment proceeding. His lawyers attributed the rebuke not to their client’s actions on Jan. 6 but rather to his opponents’ irrational “hatred of President Trump.” They implied impeachment was a vindictive and frivolous maneuver.Democrats bristle at such notions — that they have overused and thus cheapened the power of impeachment, a tool that has been employed only four times in 244 years, but twice in the last 14 months. They agreed that impeachment should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances, but argued that Mr. Trump had engaged in an extraordinary degree of dereliction.“Look, there’s a reason there’s been two impeachments of the same man,” said Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., Democrat of Pennsylvania, in an interview Friday, on the eve of the final vote. “Trump has engaged in conduct that presidents of either party would never engage in.”It’s not like anything about this has been fun, he added. “The last thing I wanted to do these last five days is sit there and listen to this hour after hour instead of working on a full range of issues,” he said.Mr. Casey and others suggest that the Republican Party is now dominated by a former president who has convinced much of the party that any opposition to them is driven by “bad, sick and corrupt people” and should be met with extreme tactics.“The expectation from our base is for retribution,” said former Representative Tom Rooney, a Republican of Florida who did not seek re-election in 2018, in part to escape the extreme partisanship that has overtaken Congress. When asked if his former Republican colleagues would move to impeach Mr. Biden next year if they won back the House, even for something minor, Mr. Rooney rated the prospect as “absolutely possible.”“It might not necessarily be what some of those guys want to do, but it might be what the base expects,” he said. “People want Armageddon.”Let the healing begin!Or not. For as much as Impeachment II ended on Saturday with a significant number of Republican senators (seven) voting to convict Mr. Trump — and was accompanied by tough statements from some who voted not guilty, including the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell — other defenders of the former president turned their focus to a bitter future of impeachment roulette.Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, suggested on Friday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might start looking around for a good impeachment lawyer (because, really, what would partisan Armageddon be without the Clintons?).Mr. Rubio framed his statement around a somewhat tortured rhetorical question: “Is it not true that under this new precedent, a future House facing partisan pressure to ‘lock her up’ could impeach a former secretary of state and a future Senate forced to put her on trial and potentially disqualify from future office?”It was not exactly clear whether Mr. Rubio was criticizing Mr. Trump for whipping up his supporters into a frenzy that led to irrational demands to imprison Mrs. Clinton, or whether he was accusing Democrats of acting irrationally themselves by impeaching Mr. Trump a second time in two years.What was evident, however, was that Mr. Rubio was assuming the worst intentions by the opposition — and the feeling appears extremely mutual. Cable and social media chatter have been awash in bleak scenarios.“If Republicans take Congress, they could not only impeach Biden and/or Harris,” Jon Favreau, a speechwriter for President Obama, tweeted on Sunday, “they could potentially succeed in overturning the results of the 2024 election.”Not everyone believes partisanship has reached the point where Election Day will now merely become the start of a two-month brawl every four years that will build to a potentially ugly climax in January.“I don’t think we’re there yet,” said Brendan Buck, a Republican media strategist and former top leadership aide to two former Republican speakers of the House, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and John A. Boehner of Ohio. He said that many House Republicans wound up voting against Mr. Biden’s Electoral College certification only because they knew it would not pass. If the result was more in doubt, he contended, they would have voted to certify.Trump supporters climbed the walls of the Capitol on Jan. 6.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Buck allowed that the current political and media environment rewarded behavior by lawmakers — and candidates — that is extreme or even unheard-of. “We’re in an era where you need to make loud noises and break things in order to get attention,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you’re breaking — as long as you’re creating conflict and appeasing your party, anything goes.”Mr. Trump himself is the exemplar of anything goes, both in terms of how effective and destructive the approach can be, said Adam Jentleson, who was a deputy chief of staff to former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, and author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” a new book about legislative leadership dynamics.Mr. Jentleson said Republicans had abandoned any coherent policy goals in lieu of pursuing a “negative partisanship” agenda — which he defines as “doing simply whatever will terrorize your opponents the most.” In essence, Trumpism.This shows no signs of abating anytime soon. “That’s clearly what Republicans will continue to run on,” Mr. Jentleson said. “And that includes impeaching whoever is in power on the other side.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      After the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentTrial HighlightsKey Takeaways From Day 5How Senators VotedTrump AcquittedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAfter the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was AttackedNew evidence emerged in the impeachment trial about what President Donald J. Trump did from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. the day of the Capitol attack. But many questions remain unanswered.President Donald J. Trump at a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol siege.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMaggie Haberman and Feb. 13, 2021Updated 9:17 p.m. ETThe impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump largely focused on his actions leading up to the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. But there was a crucial period that day of nearly five hours — between the end of Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and a final tweet telling his followers to remember the day forever — that remains critical to his state of mind.Evidence emerged during the trial about what Mr. Trump was doing during those hours, including new details about two phone calls with lawmakers that prosecutors said clearly alerted the president to the mayhem on Capitol Hill. Prosecutors said the new information was clear proof of Mr. Trump’s intent to incite the mob and of his dereliction to stop the violence, even when he knew that the life of Vice President Mike Pence was in danger.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who on Saturday voted to acquit Mr. Trump but offered a sweeping endorsement of the prosecutors’ case, backed them up: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”Still, many crucial questions remain unanswered about the president’s actions and mood from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. Jan. 6. Here is what is known so far:Mr. Trump concluded his incendiary speech on the Ellipse at 1:11 p.m. He had repeatedly told the crowd that the election was stolen from him and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to stop President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified. Mr. Trump said twice that he would go with them. And days before the march, he had told advisers that he wanted to join his supporters, but aides told him that people in the crowd were armed and that the Secret Service would not be able to protect him.Six minutes later, Mr. Trump’s motorcade began heading back to the White House. He arrived there at 1:19 p.m. as the crowd was making its way up Pennsylvania Avenue and beginning to swarm around the Capitol. Television news footage showed the mob as it moved closer to the doors.At some point, Mr. Trump went to the Oval Office and watched news coverage of a situation that was growing increasingly tense.At 1:34 p.m., Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington made a formal request for assistance in a phone call with the Army secretary, Ryan D. McCarthy. At 1:49 p.m., as the Capitol Police asked Pentagon officials for help from the National Guard, Mr. Trump tweeted a video of his incendiary rally speech.It was around this time that some of Mr. Trump’s allies publicly called on him to do something. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, told ABC News that Mr. Trump needed to say something to stop the rioting.At 2:12 p.m., the same moment that the mob breached the building itself, Mr. Pence — who had defied the president by saying he planned to certify Mr. Biden’s victory — was rushed off the Senate floor. A minute later, the Senate session was recessed. Two minutes after that, at 2:15 p.m., groups of rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”Nine minutes later, at 2:24 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted a broadside at Mr. Pence for moving ahead to certify Mr. Biden’s win: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”At 2:26 p.m., after Mr. Pence had been whisked away, a call was placed from the White House to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, according to call logs that the senator provided during the impeachment proceedings.The president had made the call, but he was actually looking for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama. Mr. Lee gave the phone to Mr. Tuberville, who has told reporters that he informed Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had just been escorted out as the mob got closer to the Senate chamber.“I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville recounted to Politico.This was a significant new piece of information. House prosecutors used it to argue that Mr. Trump was clearly aware that the vice president was in danger and that he had a callous disregard for Mr. Pence’s safety. On Friday, Mr. Trump’s defense team had insisted that Mr. Trump was not aware of any peril facing Mr. Pence.Back at the White House, advisers were trying to get Mr. Trump to do something, but he rebuffed calls to intercede, including those from people wanting to see the National Guard deployed. The president, several advisers said, was expressing pleasure that the vote to certify Mr. Biden’s win had been delayed and that people were fighting for him.“According to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” Mr. McConnell said on Saturday. “He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his own vice president.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Republican ally of the president’s, told The Washington Post that he called Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, to try to get her to reason with her father. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, also called Ms. Trump to see if she could talk to her father. A short time later, she arrived in the Oval Office, urging Mr. Trump to issue a statement.The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, hammered at Mr. Trump to understand that he had potential legal exposure for what was taking place.Finally, at 2:38 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”A short time later, at 3:13 p.m., Mr. Trump added a note, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”Ms. Trump quoted her father’s tweet when she sent out her own, telling “American Patriots” to follow the law. She quickly deleted it and replaced it when she faced blowback on Twitter for appearing to praise the rioters as “patriots.”Around 3:30 p.m., Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader and another ally of Mr. Trump’s, told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell that he had spoken that afternoon with Mr. Trump as the Capitol was under siege.“I told him he needed to talk to the nation,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I told him what was happening right then.”The call became heated, according to a Republican congresswoman, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State, who said that Mr. McCarthy told her that Mr. Trump had sided with the mob as the Capitol attack unfolded, suggesting he had made a choice not to stop the violence.In a statement on Friday night that was admitted into evidence in the trial on Saturday, Ms. Herrera Beutler recounted that Mr. McCarthy had a shouting match with Mr. Trump during the call.Mr. McCarthy had told Mr. Trump that his own office windows were being broken into. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Mr. Trump said, according to a report by CNN that the congresswoman confirmed.“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Mr. McCarthy fired back at one point, CNN reported, including an expletive.Meanwhile, the violence continued. At 4:17 p.m., Mr. Trump posted a video on Twitter of him speaking directly to the camera in the Rose Garden. “I know your pain,” Mr. Trump said. “I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now.”He added, “We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”The violence continued. Well before the Capitol Police announced at 8 p.m. that the building had been secured, Mr. Trump put out a final tweet at 6:01 p.m.: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Democrats Could Have Made Republicans Squirm

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Democrats Could Have Made Republicans SquirmG.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.Mr. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”Feb. 13, 2021, 9:13 p.m. ETRepresentative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, with colleagues after the Senate vote.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesProbably nothing could have moved enough Republican senators to vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.But the way the House chose to frame the article of impeachment made the prospect less likely. If the purpose of the proceeding was to produce a conviction and disqualification from future office, as opposed to mere political theater, the House should have crafted a broader and less legalistic set of charges.The sole article of impeachment was for “incitement of insurrection.” It focused on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when then-President Trump addressed an initially peaceful crowd of supporters and egged them on to go to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” against the recognition of an Electoral College victory for his opponent Joe Biden.Presumably, the drafters of the House impeachment resolution chose to frame their charge as incitement because this is an actual crime. The first impeachment of Mr. Trump was criticized (wrongly, in my view) for failing to allege a crime. But it is not necessary for an impeachment to be based on criminal conduct. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment proceedings “can never be tied down by such strict rules” as “in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors” in criminal trials. Rather, he said, the target of impeachment proceedings is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”By charging Mr. Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime. This is not to say that senators may vote to convict only if those elements are proved, but that the terms of the impeachment article invited the defense to respond in the same legalistic terms presented by the House impeachment managers. They tried to broaden the focus during the trial, though not successfully.One element of the crime of incitement is the intent to induce imminent violence. The evidence shows that Mr. Trump was reckless and that violence was a foreseeable consequence of his incendiary speech, but a senator might reasonably conclude that it falls short of proving that he wanted his followers to assault members of Congress or to vandalize the Capitol.Moreover, the terms of the impeachment article opened the door for Mr. Trump’s defense team to play videos in which various Democrats said things that can be construed to encourage violence — a comparison that should be irrelevant but certainly muddied the waters.The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Mr. Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.Whether or not Mr. Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Mr. Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.Moreover, Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were of a piece with attempts — nonviolent but no less wrongful — to intimidate other officials, such as Georgia’s secretary of state, to use their powers to thwart the election results. The Trump campaign had every opportunity to substantiate its claims of massive fraud in court and failed miserably to do so.By focusing the impeachment resolution on the charge of incitement of insurrection, the House made it easier for Mr. Trump’s supporters in the Senate to dismiss these acts of intimidation as irrelevant to the accusation on which they were voting.It should not be necessary to point out that the use of the presidential office to keep power after losing an election is the gravest possible offense against our democratic constitutional order — one that the authors of the Constitution specifically contemplated and sought to prevent. The violence of Jan. 6 was bad, but even if no one at the Capitol had been hurt that day, Mr. Trump’s attempts to mobilize a mob to impede the democratic process was still a high crime or misdemeanor.To make matters worse, Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence even when he was aware it was occurring. He did not deploy forces to the Capitol to put down the riot and protect members of Congress. He sent two messages to the rioters, but his appeals for peaceable behavior were tepid, and intermixed with words of support and affection for the rioters.Perhaps most egregious was his tweet that “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” at a time when rioters were threatening to hang the vice president. We now know that a senator informed Mr. Trump of the danger to Mr. Pence — but Mr. Trump did not retract his tweet or lift a finger to protect Mr. Pence.This dereliction of his constitutional duty was wholly apart from any incitement and was an impeachable offense in itself. But it was not charged in the article of impeachment.It would be foolish to think that the vote on impeachment would come out differently if the charge had been differently framed. But if House was going to impeach, it should have framed the case to make it as difficult as possible for the Senate to acquit.It is far from clear that Mr. Trump incited the violence of Jan. 6 in a technical legal sense, but it is abundantly clear that he sought to intimidate members of Congress and other officials to block Mr. Biden’s election, and that he failed in his duty to do what he could to end the violence once it started. Those would be ample grounds for conviction, quite apart from whether Mr. Trump committed the crime of incitement.Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More