Even as a mere Florida man, former President Donald Trump sure looks as if he’s trying to knife the Republican Party.
On Saturday morning, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the House’s resident anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, boasted that she had shared a call with the supportive former president. By evening, news emerged that Trump’s legal team had resigned barely 48 hours before his first response to the article of impeachment is due and a little more than a week before the Senate trial begins. The reason: Trump wants to present the one defense that would render it political suicide to acquit him.
Trump could argue that despite inviting his fans to Washington, D.C., during a pandemic and telling them he would lead them to the Capitol to “stop the steal,” his aside that they ought to do so “peacefully and patriotically” shows he was not trying to incite violence. As a matter of process, he could also argue that the trial itself is illegitimate because he is now out of office — a position that 45 out of 50 Republican senators agree on. Either of these arguments might be weak, but both are at least something.
But no. Instead, to defend himself from the charge that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump reportedly wants to claim the election really was stolen from him. As one may notice, this is not a defense against incitement but rather a justification for it.
The Republican Party has carefully avoided defending Trump on the merits of his actions — even Trump’s most loyal supporters. Sen. Rand Paul did him a big favor by forcing a vote on the constitutionality of a post-presidential impeachment trial. That has essentially locked 45 senators into acquittal on constitutional grounds. If Trump goes all-in on this defense and essentially owns the storming, imagine the damage he will do to those senators if they follow through with a logical vote to acquit? Or will they change their minds, pretending they never claimed the trial was basically illegal in the first place? There’s no easy answer to that kind of crazy.
And, of course, Trump knows this. If anything, it’s likely part of the appeal that he can continue to punish the party that spent five years lavishing him with undying loyalty. And it’s because Trump has never been loyal to anyone or anything in his life — not to the wives he cheated on, not to the businesses he bankrupted, and certainly not to the Republican Party.
