ALEX EDELMAN / AFP) (Photo by ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images
- Tuesday is the start of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, in the wake of the Capitol riot.
- It is a historic low for Trump, who couldn’t secure re-election and has been booted from social media.
- But he will likely be acquitted, giving him a platform to galvanize support and tighten his grip on the GOP.
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Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial should mark an all-time low for the former president.
He’ll be the only president in history to go through the humiliation of two Senate impeachment trials.
During proceedings that will stretch into next week, Democrats plan to make the case that Trump’s conduct during his final months in office was an indelible stain on US democracy.
According to documents previewing their arguments, they will say that in stirring baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from him and in making an incendiary speech to supporters near the US Capitol on January 6, he incited the violent insurrection which ultimately claimed five lives.
His plan appears to be to watch the trial from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, having declined to appear at the trial.
He does not do so from a position of strength - Trump is the only president in nearly 30 years to fail to win a second term, and he'll be watching gagged, deprived after the riot of the social media accounts that were his favored means of expression.
Instead of assessments of his achievements in office, pundits have focussed instead on the calamitous end to his presidency and the divided nation he left to his successor, Joe Biden.
But despite this, the trial could offer a new jolt of energy to Trump, who has been working since leaving office to maintain and even tighten his grip on the GOP.
Some Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, saw the impeachment as a unique opportunity to rid the party of the influence of a president.
In his term, many Republicans praised Trump in public, yet reviled him in private for the ugliness of his rhetoric, and his trampling of democratic institutions. Institutionalists like McConnell, reports suggest, consider him toxic to the moderate voters they need to regain control of government.
But their bid sputtered out in the face of Trump's popularity among the GOP grassroots supporters who've long idolized him.
A Washington Post-ABC poll just after Biden took office found that 7 out of 10 Republicans believe Biden was not legally elected, showing the extent to which Trump's election-fraud conspiracy theory has prevailed among his supporters.
On the day the trial begins, the prospect of Republican senators siding with Democrats in large enough numbers to secure a conviction remains remote.
In a recent Senate vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment, all but five Republican senators voted to reject the trial altogether.
Allies on Fox News, which Trump was convinced was turning against him after his defeat, have remained loyal.
Host Tucker Carlson, a friend of Trump's, has sought to portray media coverage of the riot as overblown, and President Joe Biden's pledge to crack down on white supremacist violence as a covert war on ordinary conservatives.
And though he's been relatively quiet of late, Trump has been far from politically inactive.
Read more: Inside Democrats' plans to make sure there's no Trump 2.0
He's declared his backing for allies on the Republican far right, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is under pressure after her support for a range of conspiracy theories emerged.
He is said to be determined to politically destroy those who have turned against him, such as Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-most-powerful Republican in Congress, who voted to impeach Trump in the House vote on January 13.
Insider revealed last week that Trump is planning a "revenge tour" after the trial to campaign against GOP opponents such as Cheney.
The fact that the Capitol riot did little to tarnish his brand among millions of Republicans means Trump retains vast fundraising power.
And in a mark of of the extent to which Trump changed the GOP in his image, former critics and rivals such as Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz are jostling to portray themselves as heirs to Trump's brand of anti-immigrant, blue-collar conservatism.
The second impeachment trial may not mark the end of Trump's political career, but the beginning of a new phase.