The impeachment trial was the first in U.S. history of a former president. Trump is also the first U.S. president to face two impeachment trials. The last one was in 2020, when the Senate acquitted him of pressuring a foreign government to help him win the 2020 presidential election.
The trial in the Senate this time came after the House of Representatives impeached Trump in January. The House charged him with inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government by sowing false claims about election fraud and encouraging his supporters to try to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory. Ten Republicans joined all 222 Democrats in the House to vote for impeachment.
The incident at the center of the impeachment trial occurred on January 6. That day, a joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the results of the November presidential election. Trump held a rally for his supporters that morning in front of the White House. After attending Trump’s speech, rioters made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and ransacked the building. One Capitol Police officer was killed and dozens of other officers were injured. Four other people died, including one of the rioters, who was shot by police inside the Capitol. Lawmakers who were in their chambers and in the process of certifying the election results were forced to evacuate and take shelter, before returning hours later to confirm Biden’s victory.
During the Senate trial, which began on February 9, the House managers argued that Trump’s lies about the election being stolen from him and calls for his supporters to “fight like hell” had directly led to the riot and endangered the heart of American democracy. As the 100 members of the Senate—who served as the trial jury—looked on, the House managers laid out their case, using chilling video footage that showed the mob violently pushing past the police barricades, smashing windows and destroying Capitol property, and brutalizing police officers.
The footage also showed near-miss moments, such as Vice President Mike Pence—whom Trump had vilified for not trying to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory—and members of Congress coming steps away from being confronted by the mob. The House managers also argued that Trump disregarded pleas from lawmakers, including fellow Republicans, to more explicitly call on the rioters to stop the attack.
Lawyers providing Trump’s defense called the impeachment politically motivated. They argued that Trump didn’t encourage violence at the Capitol and that the rioters who stormed the building were acting on their own, not at the direction of the president. They also said Trump’s statements before the riot were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and that they were “ordinary political rhetoric” common among politicians, including Democrats.
“The reality is, Mr. Trump was not in any way, shape or form instructing these people to fight or to use physical violence,” Michael T. van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers, said during the trial.
During the vote on Saturday, Trump released a statement denouncing the trial as “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.” He promised supporters that he would return to the political stage.
However, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the seven Republicans who crossed party lines and voted to convict Trump, said in a statement that she believes that Trump’s actions “were an impeachable offense.”
“If months of lies, organizing a rally of supporters in an effort to thwart the work of Congress, encouraging a crowd to march on the Capitol, and then taking no meaningful action to stop the violence once it began is not worthy of impeachment, conviction and disqualification,” she said, “I cannot imagine what is.”
For many other Republicans, though, the trial came down to the question of whether an official could be tried for impeachment in the first place after he’s already out of office. Trump’s lawyers said that doing so was unconstitutional and pointless—arguing that the Constitution requires convicted officeholders to be removed from power and Trump’s term already ended on January 20.
Democratic leaders argued that the Constitution doesn’t prevent an impeachment trial from taking place after someone is out of office. They said that not going through with the trial would send a message to future presidents that they essentially have free rein to abuse their power in the final days of their term—and they warned that Trump could try to stir up violence in the future. If Trump had been convicted, the Senate could have sought to bar him from holding federal office in the future with a simple majority vote.
Democrats also pointed out that Trump was impeached on January 13, when he was still president, but that McConnell, who was the Senate majority leader at the time, decided not to reconvene the Senate, which wasn’t in session, guaranteeing that the trial wouldn’t be completed before Trump’s term ended.