On February 2, the House managers filed an 80-page pretrial brief, promising to prove Trump's responsibility for the Capitol riot. Trump's new legal team filed a skimpy 14-page response, denying Trump caused the riot, contending the Senate cannot convict a former president, and arguing weakly that anything Trump said on January 6 or about election fraud generally was protected by the First Amendment. (As I have explained elsewhere, the First Amendment does not in fact protect speech aimed at inciting insurrection.)
As a technical matter, once the trial commences, establishing Trump's culpability should be easy. Hours of publicly available videos can be assembled and collated to document Trump's plan to retain power at all costs.
Starting in December, Trump began to urge supporters to come to Washington on January 6, tweeting on December 19 that there would be a "[b]ig protest," and inviting them to "Be there, will be wild!" Continuing the theme of impending insurrection in a tweet sent out the day after Christmas, he wrote, "If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen" the Democrat Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death." Referring specifically to January 6 at a rally in Georgia on January 4 to support Republican Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, he pledged, "We're going to take what they did to us on November 3. We're going to take it back."
The House managers also have access to video recordings that show, in real time, that many in the crowd on January 6 thought Trump was urging them to occupy the Capitol by force, and that they were following his orders. And then, of course, there is ample video footage of the actual destruction wreaked by the mob immediately following Trump's speech.
Democrats who need a shot of courage to move forward against the odds must take a broader historical view of the upcoming impeachment trial. It is not just the Senate that will hear the evidence against Trump, but the American people as well. And in a very real sense, it will not just be Trump on trial, but the racist and fascist insurgency he has unleashed. That insurgency will survive Trump and remain a clear and present danger to the nation for years to come. It must be vanquished and crushed by all available legal means.
Instead of anticipating just another legal loss on impeachment, Democrats should take a cue from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, which suffered many legal setbacks along the way to transformational victories.
In particular, Democrats would do well to recall the case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black teenager who was kidnapped, mutilated and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Two white men were indicted by a Tallahatchie County grand jury for killing Till. But despite the overwhelming evidence against them, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury that deliberated for a mere 67 minutes.
The verdict, though cruel and outrageous, surprised no one. The defendants were never made to pay for their crimes -- and in fact, later admitted their guilt in an interview with Look magazine -- but their acquittal became a catalyst for subsequent advances in civil rights.
So, too, can the Democrats link impeachment to the wider struggle against fascism, and in the process turn defeat, if it comes, into a larger long-term triumph. But only if they have the necessary vision and, most essentially, the necessary courage.
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