An Open Letter Re: Impeachment of Donald Trump, ex-President of the United States

An Open Letter Re: Impeachment of Donald Trump, ex-President of the United States

I strongly support the prosecution and conviction of Donald Trump for his efforts to overthrow the recent Presidential election of Joseph Biden as the new President of the United States.

As President, Donald Trump took an oath -- "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Our Constitution is an extraordinary document. At a time when European nations were ruled by Kings, Queens and noblemen; our nation’s founding documents were based on democratic elections and on the rights of all citizens to determine our representatives; they are not our rulers; they are our elected representatives. Our traditions call for a peaceful transfer of power pursuant to electoral decisions made by the American voters. We fought a long and very bloody civil war defending our Constitution and preserving the nation. Trump repeatedly violated his solemn oath to defend the Constitution by seeking to overthrow the election of President Joe Biden so he could retain his hold on Presidential power even though he lost the election overwhelmingly. And he did not do it alone; he had help.

This was not a close election like Bush v. Gore decided by about 500 tightly and legitimately contested votes in the state of Florida. Trump’s own pollster’s post election autopsy concluded that this was a rejection of Donald Trump both for his personal qualities, such as his extreme dishonesty, and his poor performance in handling the Covid epidemic.[1] Donald Trump lost this election by over 7 million votes nation-wide and lost the Electoral College votes by 306 to 232. There was a record turnout.[2]

Trump refused to accept the American voters’ decision rejecting his candidacy; he lied to his voters and the American people about his loss, and then he resorted to both legal and unlawful and dangerous means to overthrow the election and preserve his powers. By his conduct since the election, he has become a clear and present danger to our democracy, and he should have been convicted and barred from future federal office holding by the Senate. He should be prosecuted criminally and sued civilly for his unlawful actions.

Over a year before the election, he began telling his supporters that unless he won, that the elections would be fraudulent. For many months in advance of the election, he sought to suppress the vote of American citizens, including disrupting the US Mail, to advance his electoral prospects. There was, nevertheless, a record turnout in this election; increased turnout was apparent in the states Biden won overwhelmingly, in the states Trump won by big margins, and in the so-called swing states where the election was close.[3] Turnout increased the most in states like Hawaii, Utah, California and Montana, and all had election landslides for Biden or Trump, respectively.[4] Increased turnout was lowest in states like Arkansas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, which had overwhelming majorities for Trump.[5]

After his election loss, Trump asked for recounts in Georgia and Wisconsin; he lost two recounts in Georgia and one in Wisconsin. He brought lawsuits challenging the results in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He lost every one of the over 60 filed. Even though the lawsuits were ill-founded and meritless, these were legitimate exercises of his rights to contest an election up to a point where Trump’s attorneys pretty flagrantly crossed ethical guidelines at his behest.

He then tried to persuade state officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia to throw out his election losses by their state’s voters and instead to award their states to Trump. This in and of itself should be a fully sufficient ground for impeachment; he was asking them to violate state laws and their own oaths of office. Fortunately, the state election officials acted consistently with their oaths of office, with their obligations under state law, and refused to do his bidding. He may be criminally liable for his efforts to violate state election laws.

He fired and removed Administration officials who refused to carry his message of a “stolen election” and to carry out his orders to overturn the states’ election results. This included both Chris Krebs, the Director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, and Attorney General William Barr. Barr, the Department of Justice and the US Attorneys around the nation investigated Trump’s claims and found no evidence of voter fraud to overturn the election results. Trump’s effort crossed the red line and turned into illegality when the President sought, although ultimately unsuccessfully, to install a pliant Justice Department attorney as the acting Attorney General to give false statements about election fraud to Georgia officials in an effort to overturn his election defeat in Georgia.

When recounts, litigation and political pressure failed to overturn his electoral defeat, Trump turned to additional illegal means. First he asked his Vice President to overturn on January 6 the votes in the swing states that had voted against him. Vice President Pence refused because this was not within his lawful powers, which are primarily ceremonial and ministerial in the counting of the Electoral College votes. So Trump asked and aggressively pressured his Vice President to break the law to install Trump as the next President. Pence fortunately refused. Then Trump invited and assembled his most ardent supporters from all over the nation on January 6 to pressure Congress, and the Vice President to prevent the ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes in Congress and to overturn his election defeat and to award Trump the Presidency. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is constitutionally protected to assemble to request the government to address grievances. Trump’s efforts become illegal once the Trump-assembled and incited mob attacks the Capitol, attacks, kills and wounds the Capitol Police and seeks to capture and kill the Vice President and the Speaker among others. Their efforts on January 6 temporarily prevented and delayed but did not preclude Congress from tallying the Electoral College votes. They resulted in multiple deaths, severe bodily injuries, property damage, and property theft of vital classified information. They came armed with explosives, guns, knives, Molotov cocktails, bear spray, pepper spray, iron bars, baseball bats and a variety of arms not typically associated with a peaceful protest rally.

I do not understand why so many of his supporters actually believed Trump’s lies claiming voter fraud and a landslide election victory, but apparently 70% of Republicans still do so.[6] He had consistently lied to the American people about election fraud and stolen votes for more than a year. Ever since the Presidential election, he has lied to the American people, to his supporters, claiming a landslide victory; the election results were the exact opposite.[7] This was a hard-fought and bitter election, and Trump supporters worked very hard for his re-election and lost, a loss that was forecast by all the polls as well as by the internal polling of Trump’s own campaign.[8] His lies about the election reinforce their bitter disappointment and rouse their anger.

Why do people believe Trump’s lies? I think it is because he speaks about important truths in their lives, as opposed to the factual truth or the literal truth; the travesty is that he directs all the financial benefits to the big corporations and the extremely wealthy; his hard core white male working class supporters get psychic, but few if any material, benefits of his Presidency. For a wide range of reasons his supporters wanted him to be President, and they appreciate his unwillingness to accept the literal truth that he lost and his willingness to lie to and delude them.[9] It is a fantasy world, a make-believe world that he has created with his rhetoric, and they enjoy and revel in it until it comes crashing down, and Joe Biden was elected and inaugurated as the next President.

I am even more baffled that he was able to convince some of his most die-hard supporters to invade the Capitol to wreak havoc on those in Congress who opposed their President’s wishes, with some expressing their intent to kill Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi among others, and actually killing a Capitol Police Officer and gravely wounding hundreds more. That is an extraordinary step to take to kill and maim fellow Americans, and Trump deserves much of the credit for it; his rhetoric at rallies from the onset have extolled violence towards any who do not take his side, whether they be politicians, athletes, celebrities, journalists, Democrats or Republicans. A recent survey conducted by American Enterprise Institute indicates that 40% of Republicans now consider political violence acceptable to protect their vision of America, and 30% of all Americans have become enmeshed in totally unsupported conspiracy theories like Q-Anon.[10] About 13% of all Republicans now completely support violent actions, political violence to achieve their goals.[11] This rise in the acceptance of political violence by some Republicans as a tactic to achieve political goals has occurred at the same time as a huge rise in white domestic terror, and increased participation in white supremacy extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Three Percenters, The Base, and Oath Keepers.[12] The right wing extremist groups are not the same as the far right wing of the Republican Party, but they were aligned and joined at the hip in their effort to overthrow the government on January 6 and install Trump as the next US President. The two groups converged in the Trump mob that attacked the US Capitol. Their expressed motivation for their actions was because Donald Trump asked us to be there and “Stop the Steal”.[13] So Trump lit this fuse of lies and violence over many months and many years; it was not one word or one speech; it was an accumulation of Trump lies paired with Trump rhetoric encouraging political violence. In defense of their actions on January 6 in the resultant criminal proceedings, the Trump defense has emerged – “the President told me to do it”.[14] He has been using coded and not so coded calls to violence for many years and these escalated after the election in an effort to overturn its results.[15] This rhetoric is known as stochastic terrorism, and it links to white supremacist violence. The “Trump effect” has been tied to a large growth in hate crimes against minorities; the researchers hypothesize that Trump validates and invigorates pre-existing hatred and racism, giving the perceived imprimatur of the President of the United States to their actions.[16]

When the Capitol take-over, which he had incited, started in earnest, Trump did nothing to stop it. He watched on TV, tweeted encouragement and support for the rioters, and refused requests from Minority Leader McCarthy among others to tell his mob to stop.[17] Eventually Vice President Prince, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell convinced the Defense Department to send National Guard troops who finally arrived four hours after the Capitol takeover by Trump’s mob.[18]

Part of the 4-6 hour hold up was due to the pre-riot decisions of the Sergeants at Arms of the House and Senate not to involve the National Guard in defending the Capitol, and part was due to the unwillingness of Trump to act during the actual riot. The actions and inactions of the National Guard during the Capitol takeover and riot to install Trump in his second term stood in stark contrast to their active role in dispersing peaceful protests close to the White House in order to provide a Bible displaying photo opportunity for President Trump over the summer. The excessive force used then may have predicated the lack of timely response to the Trump inspired riot at the Capitol. DC Mayor Bowser certainly did not want to see a repeat of the National Guard’s use of force against peaceful protests over the summer, and she certainly did not to see a repeat of the street fighting between the Proud Boys and antifa on the streets of DC in November and December. Lurking in the background was the concern that President Trump would call out the troops, impose martial law, invalidate the elections and install himself for a second term – options that were being pushed by several of his allies throughout December and into January in White House meetings with Trump.[19] These discussions sufficiently alarmed the ten living former Secretaries of Defense that they penned an Open Letter warning against military involvement to prevent a peaceful transition of power.[20] So our nation survived a close call that the Trump-inspired mob would capture and kill some or many of the key Congressional leaders, and that Trump would try to actively involve the military in his efforts to hold onto power.

Trump had supporters in Congress who were prepared to use illegitimate means to over-ride the nation’s voters. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, both highly educated and experienced lawyers, and Representative Mo Brooks from Alabama led the effort to overturn the voters’ decisions in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their claims were a repeat of the same Trump baseless claims of election fraud already investigated and repeatedly rejected by state and local election officials, by the US Department of Justice, and by the state and federal courts. The following seven Senators voted to disallow the votes of Pennsylvania’s citizens: Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Rick Scott of Florida. In the House of Representatives, 138 Republican House members, including the House Minority Leader, voted to disallow the votes of Pennsylvania’s citizens.[21] They all had sworn solemn oaths to the Constitution and swore to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic.[22] In my opinion, they each violated their oaths of office by their votes to overturn state elections the night of January 6 and morning of January 7, after the Trump rioters, at least one or more of whom were murderers of a Capitol policeman, had been dispersed and expelled from the Capitol. They were trying to overturn the election of the next President of the United States; they were trying to over-ride the votes of the American people rejecting Donald Trump. These are able politicians; they were not taken in by Trumpian lies. Their conduct on January 6 was only slightly less reprehensible than Donald Trump. They gave hope to Trump supporters rather than tell them the honest truth that Trump had lost by a large margin. They helped to lead on Trump’s supporters to the point that they attacked the Capitol at Trump’s direction. Whether some Representatives gave the soon to be rioters advance tours of the Capitol building is still to be ascertained. A few are likely just as deluded with the conspiracy theories and extremist views as the rioters, but most are simply complicit with Trump, and in the impeachment proceedings, they are/were judge and jury, not only of his conduct but implicitly of their own.

Impeachment is to remove a federal official from an office, he or she has dishonored. This was an open and shut case; there was no dispute about the facts and the House impeachment managers made an overwhelming case. All the members of Congress were witnesses and victims of Trump’s conduct on January 6. Furthermore, it was an assault on the very foundations of our constitutional form of government – the summoning of a mob to overthrow the results of an election, the takeover of the Capitol building during the ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes, the effort to subvert the peaceful transition of power and the failure to protect the Capitol and the lawmakers from the mob summoned by the President. It does not get much worse than this, short of connivance with a foreign power to undermine democracy and the nation’s security – oh, yes that was a concern about four years ago.

However the jury pool for the impeachment was comprised in large parts of Trump’s own support network, those very Representatives and Senators who had been trying to overthrow Joe Biden’s election on and leading up to January 6. Not so very surprisingly, only 10 Republican Representatives and only 7 Republican Senators were willing to do the right thing and impeach and convict him.

Those who stood up to do what’s right in impeaching and convicting Trump are now being pilloried, threatened and vilified by the Trumpian base at a time when we should instead be celebrating their heroism, just as much as the brave Capitol Policeman, Eugene Goodman. It should be mentioned that Trumpistas took over most of the state, local and federal GOP bodies, so the noise is partly Trumpistas talking back and forth to each other very loudly. Trump has amassed a war chest of over $250 million from small contributors who wanted to see him win by any means fair or foul to overturn the November result throwing him out of office. Will he use it to exact revenge in the next Republican primary season or to rebuild his own personal fortune? Will he use it in the 2022 general election to defeat Congressional Democrats and build a loyal coterie looking forward to the 2024 presidential contest? Wanna-be Speaker McCarthy oh so quickly flew down to Mar a Lago to kiss the ring of Trump. Always Trump-obsequious Senator Graham will be following shortly. Senator McConnell will not be making that pilgrimage.

Speaker Pelosi has announced the formation of a bi-partisan commission to investigate and prevent the recurrence of January 6. Let’s hope for the best. However let’s remember there is a big difference between 9/11 and 1/6. The adversaries attacking us on 9/11 were foreign terrorists, and the nation was united. The adversaries attacking the US Capitol on 1/6 were domestic insurrectionaries summoned by the then-President, and the nation is still very bitterly divided by partisan differences.

On another subject, I’m curious about the dog that didn’t bark in the night? Where was the US military and federal law enforcement between noon and 5:40 pm on the day of January 6 and in the days leading up to the Capitol takeover? Next piece.

Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin

Dated: 2/16/21

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/01/trump-campaign-autopsy-paints-damning-picture-of-defeat-464636

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/turnout-soared-in-2020-as-nearly-two-thirds-of-eligible-u-s-voters-cast-ballots-for-president/

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/turnout-soared-in-2020-as-nearly-two-thirds-of-eligible-u-s-voters-cast-ballots-for-president/

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/turnout-soared-in-2020-as-nearly-two-thirds-of-eligible-u-s-voters-cast-ballots-for-president/

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/turnout-soared-in-2020-as-nearly-two-thirds-of-eligible-u-s-voters-cast-ballots-for-president/

[6] https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/02/05/new-nationwide-survey-shows-maga-supporters-beliefs-about-the-pandemic-the-election-and-the-insurrection. Ross Douthat tries to explain the mindset in the following article. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-do-so-many-americans-think-the-election-was-stolen/

[7] https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president

[8] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/22/politics/republican-internal-polling-analysis/index.html In fact Trump did somewhat better than his own internal polls which showed him losing Florida and North Carolina as well.

[9] https://theconversation.com/why-hard-core-trump-supporters-ignore-his-lies-144650

[10] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/after-the-ballots-are-counted-conspiracies-political-violence-and-american-exceptionalism/