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      Lindsey Graham: Burr impeachment vote boosts Lara Trump Senate hopes

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

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      With Trump's acquittal, it's hard to know what to be most angry about | Emma Brockes

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

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      Republican rebels who voted to convict feel Trumpists' fury

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

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      Trump's acquittal shows paltry punch of impeachment process

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

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      'White supremacy won today': critics condemn Trump acquittal as racist vote

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      The decision by 43 Republican senators to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial has been condemned by many observers as a racist vote which upholds white supremacy.
      The former president was tried this week for his role in inciting the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, where his many of his followers waved Confederate flags and wore racist and antisemitic clothing and symbols while storming the building.
      In his speech before the riot, Trump exhorted his followers to “fight” the vote and called his mostly white audience “the people that built this nation”. His efforts to overturn the election results concentrated in cities with large populations of Black voters who drove Biden’s win.
      Kimberly Atkins, a senior opinion writer at the Boston Globe, tweeted that the mob was trying to stop the votes of Black people like her from being counted.
      Atkins said: “When this is done at the urging of the president of the United States, the constitution provides a remedy – if members of the House and Senate abide by their oaths. A republic, if you can keep it. Is it a republic for me?”
      The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah, said: “White supremacy won today.”
      “History will reflect that leaders on both sides of the aisle enabled white extremism, insurrection and violence to be a permissible part of our politics,” Attiah added. “America is going to suffer greatly for this.”
      For Trump to be found guilty, 67 senators needed to vote for his conviction. The former president was acquitted in a 57 to 43 vote on Saturday afternoon. The Senate is 89% white.
      After the vote, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer addressed the chamber and said it was an “incontrovertible fact” that Trump was guilty and implored the audience to “remember the hateful and racist Confederate flag flying through the halls of our union” during the insurrection.
      Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen, in his closing statement equated the Capitol insurrection with Black Lives Matter protests last summer, repeatedly referring to those demonstrators as a “mob”.
      “Black people can’t object to a knee on our necks or kids getting pepper-sprayed, but whiteness protects its own,” the Rev Jacqui Lewis tweeted after the vote. “This is who America is, and it’s who we’ve always been. And we need to decide if we want to be something different.”
      A professor of history, race and public history at Harvard University, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said Trump’s acquittal made Biden’s election look similar to Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 election win, which was followed by the civil war a few months later.
      “Trump is now the head of the neo-Confederacy, formerly called the Republican party. This is a party made up of people whose ideological ancestors have always been well represented in all levels government, and society. Let’s be clear, this is an America that has always been,” Muhammad said.
      Brittney Cooper, the author of Eloquent Rage: a Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower, said the impeachment trial reminded her of when white juries would rarely convict their peers for lynchings. “Those jurists are political ancestors of the modern GOP,” Cooper tweeted. “It’s shameful, not to mention enraging.”
      “Also to the liberal white people frustrated as the House managers presented an air tight case against a white supremacist insurrection to no avail, I say: welcome,” Cooper added. “This is what it feels like to scream into the wind. Black folks know it well. As you can see, it truly sucks.” More

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      Republicans have betrayed American democracy – and boosted the world's dictators

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      This is not even about Donald Trump any more. It’s about a Republican party that has lost its way, forgotten its core values, and kicked American democracy in the guts.It’s about justice, common sense, and honour, and how they were trampled deep into the churned-up ground of Capitol Hill by a mob of liars and dissemblers who call themselves GOP senators.It’s about how a nation, most favoured on earth, that cast itself as a shining light in enveloping darkness discovered it had feet of clay and laws that did not stand.Just imagine how this latest impeachment travesty – which, despite its last-minute twists and turns, has resulted in acquittal – is viewed in Pyongyang, Minsk, Damascus and other hangouts of dictators, autocrats and war criminals.Myanmar’s generals, universally reviled for this month’s coup, might be forgiven for asking: why is your insurrection so much more excusable than ours?Vladimir Putin, struggling to get past the Navalny conspiracy and Black Sea palace corruption scandal, has been handed a lifeline by Ted Cruz and the rest, abetted by Trump’s third-choice hack lawyers.If an American president can behave like this and get away with it, then who’s to say what Putin’s mafia cronies get up to is so very bad? This is the Trumpists’ morally repugnant, relativist argument. And talking of morality, where are those legions of God-fearing, Trump-worshipping Christian fundamentalists when you really need to draw a line between right and wrong? Praying for the second coming of Mike Pompeo, perhaps.Xi Jinping is not a man who jokes a lot. Global domination is a serious business, after all. It takes a toll. But even China’s big cheese must have cracked a smile as democracy took a beating and the world turned upside down.Everyone likes a Houdini act. Trump’s performance is the political equivalent of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel weighted down by redundant Fox News anchors.We know about China’s rise. But America’s fall?Trump never respected the US constitution. His second impeachment has made a mockery of that hallowed text. Ironically, he claimed it was unconstitutional. He’s the expert.Yet Senate Republicans did not have to follow him over the cliff. Where do they go from here? Who knows? To an all-night bar perhaps, slurping down Kentucky mint juleps in honour of Mitch McConnell.It’s about them now. Senior GOP leaders – the Gain Over Principle party – are discredited beyond redemption. With a handful of exceptions, they abandoned their sworn duty. They gave America the finger.They should all be impeached, too. Except they would acquit themselves. More

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      Convicted or not, Trump is history – it's Biden who's changing America | Robert Reich

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      While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverishedImportantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.Another conservative bromide is that a larger national debt crowds out private investment and slows growth. This view hamstrung the Clinton and Obama administrations as deficit hawks warned against public spending unaccompanied by tax increases to pay for it. (I still have some old injuries inflicted by those hawks.)Fortunately, Biden isn’t buying this, either.Four decades of chronic underemployment and stagnant wages have shown how important public spending is for sustained growth. Not incidentally, growth reduces the debt as a share of the overall economy. The real danger is the opposite: fiscal austerity shrinks economies and causes national debts to grow in proportion.The third canard is that generous safety nets discourage work.Democratic presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense.Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working, thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children. Republican senator Mitt Romney of Utah has put forward a similar plan.This is just common sense. Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished, according to the most recent census data.The pandemic has also caused a large number of women to drop out of the labor force in order to care for children. With financial help, some will be able to pay for childcare and move back into paid work. After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers increased. A decade later, when Canada increased its annual child allowance, its economy added jobs.It’s still unclear exactly what form Biden’s final plans will take as they work their way through Congress. He has razor-thin majorities in both chambers. In addition, most of his proposals are designed for the current emergency; they would need to be made permanent.But the stars are now better aligned for fundamental reform than they have been since Reagan.It’s no small irony that a half-century after Reagan persuaded Americans big government was the problem, Trump’s demise is finally liberating America from Reaganism – and letting the richest nation on earth give its people the social support they desperately need. More

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      Biden press aide TJ Ducklo resigns over 'abhorrent' remarks to female journalist

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      White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo has resigned, the day after he was suspended for issuing a sexist and profane threat to a journalist inquiring about his relationship with another reporter.In a statement on Saturday, Ducklo said he was “devastated to have embarrassed and disappointed my White House colleagues and President Biden”.“No words can express my regret, my embarrassment and my disgust for my behavior,” he said. “I used language that no woman should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she was just trying to do her job. It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful and unacceptable.”It is the first departure from the new administration, less than a month into President Joe Biden’s tenure, and comes as the White House was facing criticism for not living up to standards set by Biden himself in their decision to retain Ducklo.During a virtual swearing-in for staff on inauguration day, Biden said “If you ever work with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I will fire you on the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”Ducklo was suspended for a week without pay on Friday after a report surfaced in Vanity Fair outlining his sexist threats against a female Politico journalist to try to suppress a story about his relationship, telling her “I will destroy you”.The journalist had been seeking to report on his relationship with a political reporter at Axios who had previously covered the Biden campaign and transition.Before Politico broke the story Tuesday, People Magazine had published a glowing profile of the relationship. It was the first time either one had publicly acknowledged that they were dating.White House press secretary Jen Psaki faced a flurry of questions about the controversy on Friday, with reporters highlighting Biden’s comments and questioning the decision to merely suspend Ducklo for a week.Confronted with those comments from the president, Psaki said on Friday that Ducklo’s conduct “doesn’t meet our standards, it doesn’t meet the president’s standard, and it was important that we took a step to make that clear”.She pointed to apologies made by top members of the White House communications team and Ducklo himself to the Politico reporter as ample moves reflecting the seriousness of the situation.On Saturday, Psaki said in a statement that Ducklo’s decision came with the support of White House chief of staff Ron Klain, and added that “we are committed to striving every day to meet the standard set by the president in treating others with dignity and respect, with civility and with a value for others through our words and our actions.” More