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For more than two weeks, I enjoyed not hearing one word from former President Donald Trump.
Mornings were more peaceful without his seditious and angry tweets. My coffee went down much easier. The nation was moving forward, toward some semblance of constitutional normalcy.
All that came crashing down on Tuesday as the Senate began the second impeachment trial of a man who still refuses to acknowledge that he is a former president.
Donald Trump continues to be the all-consuming chaotic mess that dominated the United States for four of the darkest years of our Republic. On Tuesday we revisited the national nightmare.
Representative Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat and lead manager of the second Trump impeachment trial, outlined the stakes for our country. Trump, Raskin said in his opening remarks, may not have known much about the framers of the Constitution, “but they certainly knew a lot about him.”
Raskin played a video of the January 6 insurrection, a terrifying view of the Trump-incited violence. It reduced the Senate chambers to an uncharacteristically silent hall of shame. The recording showed scenes of people screaming Trump’s name and encouraging violence against Vice President Mike Pence. It showed the graphic shooting that cost one insurrectionist her life. It showed people rifling through private papers on the House and Senate floors, calling representatives “motherfuckers.” It showed rioters crushing a police officer, incessant chants of “Stop the steal” in the background. Throughout the video Trump’s tweets were interspersed. One of his final tweets on January 6 seems more eerily dangerous today than it did a month ago: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Even as the rest of the country again seems consumed by the Trump train wreck, Biden is trying to keep his eye on the ball.
As Raskin spoke on the Senate floor on Tuesday, he recounted the events of January 6—the day after he had buried his middle son, Tommy. Raskin never shouted. He never screamed. He never engaged in the hyperbole that has overcome so many in the federal government.
He simply laid out the facts, including that he had told his daughter she’d be safe with him at the Capitol on January 6. She wanted to accompany her dad that day in D.C., to provide him some comfort after her brother’s funeral, but she had heard there might be protests. “Of course it should be safe. This is the Capitol,” he reassured her.
Instead, later that day she was forced to hide under a desk, barricaded inside a House office as rioters ran amok. After the violence, Raskin’s daughter told him she never wanted to return to the Capitol again. Recalling her words to the Senate, he choked up.
The second Trump impeachment has sucked a lot of oxygen out of D.C., and Trump no doubt loves the attention. Biden has offered no opinion on the impeachment—and rightly so. Reporters continue to press him, but he has wisely left it alone. When confronted by journalists in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Biden was blunt: “Look, I told you before: I have a job. My job is to keep—we’ve already lost over 450,000 people, and we’re going to lose a whole lot more if we don’t act and act decisively.… Children are going to bed hungry. A lot of families are food insecure. They are in trouble. That’s my job. The Senate has their job and they are about to begin it, and I am sure they are going to conduct themselves well. That’s all I am going to have to say about impeachment.”
Even as the rest of the country again seems consumed by the Trump train wreck, Biden is trying to keep his eye on the ball.
Where Biden has been most effective, and where Trump utterly failed the country, is in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic task force now briefs reporters three or four times a week via Zoom calls. Though the ability to ask questions is limited, a lot has come out that shows just how horribly Trump handled the pandemic.
Confusion reigned after the Trump administration’s first pandemic press briefing back in 2020. Steve Holland from Reuters told me it was one of the first times he ever left a briefing more concerned than when he entered. That briefing left no doubt that the Trump administration had no handle on the pandemic, a fact borne out by its later actions (or lack thereof), a failure that ultimately contributed to more than 27 million Covid-19 cases in the United States and close to 500,000 dead.
To remedy this failure, the Biden administration has undertaken a Herculean effort to vaccinate 100 million Americans by April 30 (the 100th day of the new administration). Standing in the way are a variety of obstacles, some natural, some artificial and some left over from Trump’s inept handling of this health calamity.
Biden administration briefings are markedly different from anything the Trump administration ever did. I don’t leave confused. I haven’t been told to inject bleach or introduce a bright light into my body. Like Raskin’s Senate remarks on Tuesday, the briefings have been free of hyperbole, fiction, anger and cowardice.
On Monday I asked Dr. Anthony Fauci (now Biden’s chief medical advisor), “Is there any data or scientific concerns that this particular virus is mutating into a more virulent strain or a more dangerous strain and that it is more dangerous as it mutates?”
Trump sent two lawyers into the Senate to tell the world no one has the power to hold him accountable for the deadly insurrection he instigated. He refuses to accept responsibility.
He didn’t flinch. His response was grounded in science—and chilling.
“Right now, we certainly don’t have any data to indicate that it is mutating into a less virulent strain,” Fauci told me. “The initial data that came out from the U.K. about it having a degree of increased virulence, that is still, I think, something—I wouldn’t say that’s questionable, but I think that needs to be confirmed. But thus far, no evidence that it is less virulent.”
The coronavirus remains the single greatest threat to life in America right now—but it’s got neck-and-neck competition from the hell wrought by Donald Trump.
On Tuesday afternoon, as the Biden administration dealt with the very real problem of getting people vaccinated, Donald Trump’s lawyers stood in the Senate—one scene of the January 6 crime—and argued that Trump is a patriot who can’t be prosecuted. The difference between Trump and Biden could not be more stark.
An ex-president who still refuses to admit he lost a fair election sent two lawyers into the Senate to tell the world no one has the power to hold him accountable for the deadly insurrection he instigated. He refuses to accept responsibility. He continues to foment division and antidemocratic discord.
Meanwhile Joe Biden sits in the Oval Office, trying to clean up Trump’s vast mess. The hundreds of thousands dead? Trump doesn’t care. The sick? He doesn’t acknowledge them. The damage to our democratic institutions? Trump welcomes it and always has.
For three weeks it’s been wonderful not to have to deal with a president who sends deranged tweets, who has an angry demeanor, who is stubbornly stupid and who has a complete lack of concern for anyone besides himself.
Watching Representative Raskin in tears as he recounted the January insurrection should reduce us all to tears—not just because of what happened to his daughter, but because of what Donald Trump did to us all that day.
For this country to endure, it can never happen again.