About ninety minutes before Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial began, I spoke by phone with Senator Sherrod Brown, the progressive Democrat from Ohio, who was preparing to serve as a juror. Brown is the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and he had been occupied with the main legislative business of the new Congress, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. When I asked Brown whether he viewed impeachment as being secondary to this business, he said that wasn’t quite right, but it was “not primary” either. He did not sound optimistic that many Republicans would vote to convict. “Still with Trump, fear does the business,” Brown said. But he also thought the trial was necessary. “I think you do it because you’ve got to hold the President accountable,” Brown said. “You can’t just walk away from a President who attacks the United States of America like that—what happens with the next President who thinks he can get away with so much?” In Brown’s account, the trial sounded less like a grand historical drama than a routine oversight function, like holding a hearing to discuss an audit of the General Services Administration.
At the time, waiting for the trial to begin, I saw it in a similar light. The Senate never really surprises you; the votes are always counted and recounted in advance, and everyone knows the math. Forty-five Republican senators had already voted in favor of the argument that the trial was unconstitutional, because President Trump no longer holds office, and it was hard to imagine that they would change their minds. News reports confirmed that the Democratic impeachment managers would call no witnesses. The footnotes in their brief drew from the reporting of publications including the Washington Post and The New Yorker—information that was already in the public domain. Scenes we had already seen, a predetermined outcome. Feeling more like an obligated citizen than an interested observer, I flicked on the opening statements on Tuesday. Shortly after the trial began, the lead prosecutor, Jamie Raskin, surprised me: what the Democrats would deliver, he said, slowing his words so that no one missed their meaning, was not theory but “cold, hard, facts.” What followed must have been some of the most interesting hours ever broadcast on C-SPAN.
The House managers realized that the near-perfect surveillance of the storming of the Capitol on January 6th allowed them to make a forensic case. Trump is facing the somewhat nebulous charge of incitement, but, using a split screen, the House impeachment managers could prove it. On the left side of the screen, viewers could see Trump at his rally that afternoon, instructing the crowd to march to the Capitol and “stop the steal,” and, crucially, to “fight like hell.” Trump concluded his speech at 1:11 P.M. On the right side of the screen, in real time, Nancy Pelosi gavelled in, at 1:03 P.M., for the “steal” itself—the certification of election results. The chronology alone erased any plausible deniability for Trump.
The real news was delivered on Wednesday, from security cameras and emergency calls, which showed how close the encounters had been between major American political figures and the rioters calling for their deaths. The Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman has been celebrated as a hero since shortly after the insurrection, when footage, captured by the reporter Igor Bobic, showed Goodman confronting the mob alone and leading them away from the House chamber. On Wednesday, security footage showed that Goodman, running toward the crowd, had crossed paths with Mitt Romney, perhaps Trump’s most prominent opponent in the Senate, and directed him toward safety. What caught my eye about Goodman was his footspeed. He was running down a marble hall at a dead sprint.
Raskin’s presentation emphasized that Republicans had been targeted by the mob. The video that Democrats showed on Tuesday lingered on the stunned faces of Republicans inside the Senate chamber. The Democrats also made an interesting decision to keep returning to the figure of Mike Pence, Trump’s long-loyal number two, who had publicly refused Trump’s command to overturn the election. On Wednesday, they showed footage of the crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” with special intensity while the Vice-President was sheltering with his family.
For four years, Pence was a Trump stalwart. He shared the crowd’s conservatism and had backed their champion in every endeavor. If Trump had not spent months insisting that the election had been stolen from him, and then demanded that Pence back that lie, the people in the crowd would have had no gripe with Pence. We tend to view radicalism as a grassroots phenomenon, and political leaders as having the choice to either smother those flames or fan them. But the Pence case suggests that Trump has a greater culpability: had he just fanned those extremist flames, or had he created them? The House managers played one clip from Trump’s January 6th rally in which he slowed his speech and spoke deliberately: “You have to get your people to fight like hell.” Get your people. That doesn’t sound like fanning flames; it sounds like giving orders.
Contained within the House managers’ case was a contrarian essay about the nature of violent extremism, which might have interested Senate Republicans if they had noticed it. Instead, most of them seemed likely to follow the lead of the Trump lawyer David Schoen, who denounced the trial itself, rather than the mob attack that precipitated it, as the violation of decency. It was the Democrats who were debasing politics, Schoen insisted, and deepening divisions: “They want to put you through a sixteen-hour presentation over two days focussing on this as if it were some sort of blood sport. And to what end? For healing? For unity? For accountability? Not for any of those.”
One of the House managers’ points was that plenty of people could have seen something like the January 6th attack coming, and that is true in the world of ideas as well as in the news. From Trump’s first campaign, which reintroduced street fighting into the American political scene, there has been a detectable anxiety that the cold civil war might turn hot, and that there might be some prudence in retreating to separate corners. Last September, the conservative political columnist David French published “Divided We Fall,” an anxious warning about the possibility of secession. French envisioned two scenarios. In one, California attempts to confiscate all guns in the state but is overruled by the Supreme Court, leading to militia standoffs, killings, and eventually a peaceful secession. In the other, perhaps closer to French’s heart, a charismatic Black evangelical governor of Alabama, who believes “with all his heart” in the rights of the unborn, leads a coalition of conservative states away from the Union. French’s book takes for granted that readers would want to avoid such a scenario, but plenty of readers seemed to think that it might not be such a bad idea to be rid of the other tribe. Last fall, French told the Times’ podcast “The Argument,” “One of the questions that I have been asked the most that I did not expect to be asked was, Well, then, why should we stay together?”
The pull of secession is deeper than we’d like to acknowledge. This winter, the journalist Richard Kreitner, a contributor to The Nation, published “Break It Up,” which makes use of several historical case studies to argue that Americans have long had a sense that the country is simply too big and ideologically divided. Much of the book takes place at a reassuring historical distance—three-quarters of the way through, we are still on Clement Vallandigham’s 1862 challenge to Lincoln’s war of reunification—but Kreitner persuasively notes how closely contemporary talk of division echoes attempts at secession in the past. Kreitner credits Barack Obama’s “quite profound” plea for national unity in his Presidential-campaign speeches, his Scripture-echoing call to “set aside childish things,” come together, and meet the challenges of the day. Could we do it? Kreitner asks. “No, we couldn’t.” It is a bleak conclusion, if not for the fate of the Republic, then at least for the prospects for Joe Biden’s Administration.
But there is another way to think of the division between Americans, one that emphasizes mistrust. It tracks a growing skepticism about the idea that churches, corporations, police, the media, and government will treat people fairly. Often, these doubts about institutions have a material, rather than a political, cause. As Dhruv Khullar has written, many nursing aides’ resistance to vaccination might have something to do with their mistrust of their employers, who put them in dangerous conditions with inadequate protection for little pay. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out that the reluctance of many teachers to return to schools might have something to do with the poor condition of school buildings, and a lack of resources to carry out health and safety protocols. Though the pandemic is often described as something that we are enduring together, the Harvard economist Raj Chetty has shown that the past year has been a major accelerant to inequality.
Liberals who see disunity worry, with increasing desperation, about how to change conservative hearts. Those who focus on mistrust see an obvious solution: change the policies. However genuine Biden’s Scranton credentials, fixing disunity may be beyond him, but fixing mistrust might not.
Biden has avoided addressing the impeachment trial at any length, though not out of any decorous instinct to repair relations with Trump, whom his press secretary, Jen Psaki, called “erratic” this week. Instead, Psaki said the President “will not spend too much time” watching the impeachment trial of his predecessor, focussed as he is on getting his rescue act through Congress. Yet impeachment has so crowded the legislative calendar that, on Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to hold a press conference to insist that the trial would not distract from passing the rescue package. That package seems likely to get few Republican votes, and in the daily White House briefings reporters have been asking Psaki about the unity that Biden’s campaign had promised. On February 8th, she said smoothly, “The President ran on unifying the country, not on creating one political party.”
When Sherrod Brown and I spoke, he had just participated in Schumer’s press conference. Like Biden, Brown is a Democratic lifer, having held elected office almost continuously since 1975, in an era dominated by deregulation, rising inequality, and the defeat of the progressive economic programs that Brown has championed. But change is in the air. Brown is helping to steer a rescue package through the Senate that, in the current draft, includes expansive benefits for the unemployed and families with children, and a universal fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage. The Democrats expect to pass it through budget reconciliation, which wouldn’t require a single Republican vote. There is an obvious contrast with the Obama Administration, which often trimmed its ambitions to win the support of conservative Democrats. Brown said he didn’t believe that the change was ideological. “Janet Yellen, I don’t see her as moving to the left,” Brown said. “They see what works, and it’s pretty clear that nothing short of going big will work.”
There is something a bit illusory about the impeachment trial, in that its central dramas are all about Republicans, and the real action in Washington is about the Democrats. One question about the Biden Administration, as it begins, is whether it is a restoration of Obama’s, or something else. One simple difference might be that in 2009 many Democrats saw a still conservative country that Obama himself might somehow bring along. In 2021, they believe that there is a slight majority for their program, unity or not. Brown mentioned Mitch McConnell’s support for the expansive CARES Act last year. “Republicans and Democratic voters alike think that government can be a positive force in their lives, and they haven’t heard that from many Presidents or members of Congress for the last three or four decades,” he said. “This really could be—tipping point is the wrong word—a decisive change in our history.”
That sounded like an optimistic gloss on 2021, given that Brown was headed to the fourth impeachment trial of a President in nearly two hundred and fifty years. But he wasn’t especially focussed on it. “This stuff is popular,” he said, of the recovery package, sounding pleasantly surprised. “It’s what the public wants.”