During the first trial of Donald J. Trump 13 months ago, the former president ordered his party to be close to total allegiance. His Conservative defenders were passionate and numerous, and Republican votes to condemn him – for pressuring Ukraine to help him smear Joseph R. Biden Jr. – were virtually non-existent.
In his second trial, Mr Trump, who was no longer President, received less savage Republican support. His apologists were more sparse and did not seem enthusiastic. Far fewer Conservatives defended the substance of his actions and instead responded to technical complaints while circumventing the question of his guilt for inciting the January 6 uprising at the Capitol.
And this time around, seven Republican Senators voted with Democrats to condemn Mr Trump – the most bipartisan reprimand ever made in an impeachment trial. Several others, including the minority leader Mitch McConnell, suggested that Mr Trump might deserve prosecution.
Speaking from the Senate after the vote, Mr. McConnell condemned Mr. Trump’s “irresponsible behavior” and blamed him for providing “inspiration for lawlessness and violence”.
Still, just minutes earlier, Mr McConnell had joined the vast majority of Republicans to find Mr Trump not guilty, leaving the chamber way behind the two-thirds majority required to convict the former president.
The vote is a pivotal moment for the party that has shaped Mr Trump into a personality cult that is likely to leave a deep stain on historical record. After the Republicans missed the opportunity to oust him by impeachment, it is not clear when – or how – they could turn their party into something other than a vessel for a half-tired demagogue who was rejected by the majority of voters.
Defeated by President Biden, stripped of his social media megaphone, re-indicted by the House of Representatives, and accused of betraying his oath by a handful of dissenting Republicans, Mr Trump remains the dominant force in right-wing politics. Even offline and off-camera at his Palm Beach estate and with a weak impeachment defense from his Washington legal team, the former president continues to enjoy unmatched admiration from Conservative voters.
In a statement to celebrate the Senate vote on Saturday, Trump said his political movement “has only just begun”.
The determination of so many Republican lawmakers to dismiss the mountain of evidence against Mr Trump – including the revelation that he sided with the rioters in a heated conversation with the minority leader of the House, Kevin McCarthy – reflects how thoroughly the party has become defined by a man, and how far it now appears to be separated from deeper political aspirations and ethical or social principles.
After most Republican lawmakers campaigned for a message of law and order last year, they decided not to apply those standards to a former commander in chief who sided with an organized mob. A party that often announced that Blue Lives Matter refused to punish a politician whose angry supporters had attacked the Capitol Police. A generation’s rhetoric about personal responsibility seemed to fail against the perceived imperative of Mr. Trump’s placement.
Lanhee Chen, a scholar with the Hoover Institution and policy advisor to a number of prominent Republican officials, said the GOP must redefine itself as a ruling party with ambitions beyond the allegiance of a single leader.
“If the conservative movement, if the Republican party, was successful, it was a party of ideas,” said Chen, lamenting that much of the party was still taking a Trump-first approach.
“A lot of Republicans are more focused on talking about him than what’s next,” he said. “And that’s a very dangerous place.”
In recent weeks, the party has been so embroiled in internal conflict and so caught up in its fear of Mr Trump that it has only issued a halting and partial criticism of Mr Biden’s signature initiatives, including his request that Congress spend $ 1.9 trillion aims to combat the coronavirus pandemic and revitalize the economy.
Mr. Trump’s tenure as agent of political chaos is almost certainly not over. The former president and his advisors have already made it clear that they intend to use the 2022 midterm elections as an opportunity to reward allies and take revenge on those who crossed Mr Trump. And hanging over the party is the possibility of another run for the White House in three years.
It remains to be seen how aggressively the party leadership will try to counter it. Mr McConnell has advised staff that he intends to wage a national fight against far-right candidates in 2022 and defend the incumbents targeted by Mr Trump.
By refusing to convict Mr. Trump on Saturday, Mr. McConnell invited skepticism about how willing he might be to wage an open war against Mr. Trump in the campaign.
House spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi mocked Mr. McConnell for his ambivalent position after his speech, called his remarks “insincere” and speculated that he had given them in favor of his donors, who dislike Mr. Trump.
The Republican vote on Mr. Trump’s acquittal, she said in a statement, was one of the “most dishonorable acts in our nation’s history.”
Few senior Republicans have gone so far as to say it is time for Mr Trump to lose his lordship status in the party as a whole. Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, the senior Republican in support of impeachment, said in a recent television interview that Mr. Trump “has no role as our party’s future leader.”
Several of the Republican senators who voted for a condemnation on Saturday thundered against Mr Trump after he was acquitted. This was in line with Ms. Cheney’s statement last month in her own voice to indict him.
“By what he did and did not do, President Trump has violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the United States Constitution,” said Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a senior lawmaker supporting Mr. McConnell is close.
But the list of Republicans who voted for the condemnation was in itself a statement of Trump’s political influence over the GOP. Only Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska is up for re-election next year and has survived grueling attacks from the right before.
The rest of the group consisted of two retiring lawmakers – Mr. Burr and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania – and three more who just won new terms in November and won’t be back to the polls until the latter half of the decade become.
More typical of the Republican response was that of Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, a Trump loyalist serving his first term. The process, he said on Saturday, was merely “a political achievement” aimed at undermining a “successful” executive director.
In Washington, a quiet majority of Republican officials appear to be embracing the kind of wishful thinking they got during Mr Trump’s first election campaign in 2016 and then through much of his presidency, and insisting that he soon be through his own outrageous behavior being marginalized or lacking the discipline to make himself an enduring political leader.
Some seemed to see the criminal justice system as a means of getting Mr. Trump out of the way. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who voted for the acquittal, said in a statement: “No president is above the law or immune from criminal prosecution, and that includes former President Trump.”
Law enforcement may not be a far-fetched scenario as Mr Trump is under multiple investigations by local authorities in Georgia and New York regarding his political and business ties.
But giving the money seldom paid off for Mr. Trump’s opponents, who repeatedly learned that the only sure way to contain him was to beat him and his Legislative Legislators at the ballot box. That job fell almost entirely to the Democrats, who captured the house in 2018 to control Mr Trump and then evicted him from the White House in November.
Still, North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer, a longtime ally of Trump who has criticized the former president since the November election, told reporters at the Capitol on Friday that he believed the impeachment process would weaken Mr. Trump, even if it did The Senate chose not to convict him. (Mr. Cramer, who also called the trial “the stupidest week in the Senate”, voted for the acquittal)
“He’s made it pretty difficult to get a lot of support,” said Mr. Cramer of Mr. Trump. “Well, as you can see, there is a support that will never end, but I think that is a shrinking population that is likely to shrink a little after this week.”
An even more categorical prognosis came from Ms. Murkowski.
“I just don’t see how Donald Trump will be re-elected for the presidency,” said Ms. Murkowski.
If that projection seems anchored in hope rather than experience, then there are good reasons for Republicans to choose Mr Trump’s exit from the political arena. He’s extremely unpopular with a majority of voters, and polls consistently show that most Americans wanted to condemn him.
Even in places where Mr Trump has a strong following, there is growing recognition that the party’s loss of the White House and Senate in 2020 and the House two years earlier were not accidental.
In Georgia, the site of some of the party’s worst defeats in the 2020 campaign, Jason Shepherd, a candidate for the presidency of the state party, said he sees the GOP as an examination of the kind of identity crisis that regularly comes with “a loss after you” had a great figure who ran the party, ”compared Mr. Trump’s place in the party with that of Ronald Reagan.
Republicans, Mr Shepherd said, had to find a way to reach out to the voters Mr Trump had brought into their coalition while delivering a message that the GOP was “bigger than Donald Trump”. However, he admitted that the next wave of candidates already saw the former president as a role model.
“The Republicans are trying to position themselves as the next Donald Trump.” he said. “Maybe a kinder and gentler Donald Trump in terms of personality, but someone who takes a left-wing stand and fights for conservative principles that unite Republicans.”
