House impeachment manager’s closing argument: ‘I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose because he can do this again.’
House impeachment manager’s closing argument: ‘I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose because he can do this again.’
A s the case against Donald Trump drew to a close, House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin argued that January 6 was not an aberration but the culmination of Trump’s record of condoning political violence.
To bolster his argument, Raskin played several clips of Trump’s past comments. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them would you, seriously? I promise you. I will pay for the legal fees,” Trump said in a rally during the 2016 primary. At the time, Trump’s 2016 rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz strongly condemned Trump for such rhetoric. The two men watched intently in the Senate chamber as a video rehashed Trump’s comments praising political violence from the 2016 campaign.
Raskin then played a clip of Trump praising the Montana gubernatorial candidate who grabbed a reporter by the neck and threw him to the ground after the reporter asked a question about health care that the candidate didn’t like. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind [of guy],” Trump said in 2018.
By declining to exercise their constitutional authority to convict and disqualify Trump for his unprecedented behavior that led to the January 6 attack on Congress, Raskin argued, the Senate would be setting up history to repeat itself in 2024. “Is there any political leader in this room who believes that if he is ever allowed by the Senate to get back into the Oval Office, Donald Trump would stop inciting violence to get his way?” Raskin asked. “Would you bet the lives of more police officers on that? Would you bet the safety of your family on that? Would you bet the future of your democracy on that?”
“President Trump declared his conduct ‘totally appropriate,’” Raskin continued. “So if he gets back into office and it happens again, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.”
It was a powerful argument that included one big oversight. For history to repeat itself in 2024, Trump doesn’t need to return to the Oval Office first: He merely needs to run again for the presidency, suffer a legitimate loss, and then behave the way he did after his 2020 defeat.
House impeachment manager Ted Lieu got to the point when he said that he wasn’t worried about Trump winning in 2024: “I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose because he can do this again.”
“That was pretty clever,” Texas senator John Cornyn said of Lieu’s comment.
“Several of us wrote that down. I think that was a strong statement,” South Dakota GOP senator Mike Rounds told me.
Do any Senate Republicans have any reason to believe that Trump learned a lesson in 2020 and would concede in 2024 if he suffered a legitimate loss? “Did he learn a lesson?” Cornyn replied. “I wouldn’t say that.”
None of the Senate Republicans I spoke to on Thursday evening expressed confidence that Trump would accept the results of a 2024 loss, but enough Senate Republicans still intend to acquit him. They say the Senate can’t convict a president once he has left office.
Raskin urged senators on Thursday to consider the jurisdictional question settled by Tuesday’s 56–44 vote holding that this Senate impeachment trial is constitutional. “To me, the jurisdictional question is still the biggest one,” Rounds said. “I’m one of the individuals who believe we do not have jurisdiction here.”
“House managers provided some enlightening information laying out the timeline, laying out the videos,” Wisconsin GOP senator Ron Johnson said. On the matter of whether Trump incited the January 6 attack, Johnson said that House managers “put forward a good case.”
Asked if he thought Trump would accept the results of a loss in 2024, Johnson didn’t directly answer the question. “First of all if he were to run again, he’s going to have to run through the primary system and there will be plenty of elections. You know, it would be a long time before he got down to a national election,” Johnson said. “It’s the voters who should decide this, not the Senate.”
Still, some Senate Republicans did not grasp Lieu’s point that January 6 was a consequence of Trump legitimately losing the 2020 election — and then telling supporters fraud had stolen a landslide victory from them, refusing to accept the results of the Electoral College on December 14, and whipping up his supporters by telling them that Mike Pence and Congress had the power to overturn the results of the election on January 6.
Florida senator Marco Rubio skipped Lieu’s presentation on Thursday, and when I asked him about Lieu’s argument, Rubio replied that Trump “can’t get elected again unless voters vote for him.” When I pointed out again that the argument was that Trump would incite violence by refusing to concede, Rubio shook his head as his subway car in the Capitol basement pulled away.