Sandara Park: On Politics: The G.O.P.’s New Distancing Policy

January 9, 2021

By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.

“Enough is enough,” says Senator Lindsey Graham.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

First came the mob’s deadly rioting. Then the G.O.P.’s reputation laundering.

With less than two weeks left in the Trump administration, a number of Republicans are experiencing some last-minute revelations about the president’s character, inflammatory rhetoric and polarizing leadership of the country.

“All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of President Trump’s strongest allies, who once promised “earth-shattering” revelations of voter fraud that he falsely argued had cost Mr. Trump the election. Now, after the violent breach of the Capitol this past week, Mr. Graham is refusing to rule out using the 25th Amendment to strip his former friend of his presidential powers.

Mr. Graham is far from alone in scurrying away from all the praise he’s lavished on the president over the past four years. As a shaken Washington recovered from the violent attack on the Capitol, Republicans embraced the traditional tools of political self-preservation, offering resignations and strongly worded letters, anonymously sourced accounts of shouting matches and after-the-fact public condemnations.

Administration officials anonymously spread the word, through Axios, that they would defy any requests from Mr. Trump that “they believe would put the nation at risk or break the law,” raising the obvious question of whether they would have carried out illegal or dangerous orders over the past four years.

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Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos quit their posts, saying they were “deeply troubled” by the president’s handling of the riot. Ms. Chao, it’s worth noting, stood next to Mr. Trump at the 2017 news conference where he insisted that “both sides” deserved blame after white supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va.

At least seven lower-ranking members of the Trump administration also resigned, while many more fretted that they would be unemployable.

“Now it will always be, ‘Oh yeah, you work for the guy who tried to overtake the government,’” said Mick Mulvaney, the president’s former acting chief of staff who resigned Wednesday as special envoy to Northern Ireland.

Mr. Mulvaney told CNBC that the president was “not the same as he was eight months ago,” when they spoke more frequently. Left unstated was whether Mr. Trump was the same as he was four years ago, when Mr. Mulvaney called him a “terrible human being” ahead of the 2016 election.

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Mr. Mulvaney’s journey with the president highlights one of the most striking features of the ongoing Republican revisionism. Many in the G.O.P. warned publicly during the 2016 campaign that Mr. Trump was fomenting exactly the kind of violence that the country witnessed on Wednesday — concerns that were quickly set aside once he took office.

Of course, some Republican officials may be truly horrified by Mr. Trump’s egging on of his supporters on Wednesday and his refusal to take immediate action to stop a violent takeover of the Capitol. Many of those same Republicans frequently offered private condemnations of his actions throughout his presidency — objections they studiously kept off the record.

But with less than 275 hours left in the Trump presidency, it’s hard not to see the political posturing embedded in their now-public condemnations.

Many inside and outside Washington are setting their sights on the new political reality to come with a Democratic-controlled government. After years of declining to police Mr. Trump’s falsehood-filled and threatening social media posts, Twitter on Friday permanently suspended his @realDonaldTrump account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Mark Zuckerberg had earlier barred the president from Facebook and Instagram through at least the end of his term.

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Many of Mr. Zuckerberg’s employees noted that Democrats had secured control of the Senate before he took the action.

But at this point, it’s an open question whether any powerful Republicans will pay a serious price for their implicit or explicit support of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and dalliances with violence. So far, the penalties seem to be measured mostly in bad media coverage.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who championed efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election, was publicly disowned by his political mentor, disavowed by some of his donors and dropped by his book publisher — a move he blamed on a “woke mob.”

Other elected Republicans were condemned by their hometown newspapers in scathing editorials. Cracks even emerged in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which has been a regular Trump cheerleader for years, called on the president to resign.

Meanwhile, Democrats are pressing for resignations and permanent bans from the public sector for Trump aides, supporters and allies. Many would like to see criminal prosecutions once President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Some are even pushing to rid the federal government of all political appointees and civil servants who supported Mr. Trump.

It’s unclear whether Mr. Biden will back such efforts. Tough investigations into the previous administration could complicate his campaign promise to unite the country and his ability to get Republican support for his legislative goals. On Friday, he avoided expressing views on specific punitive actions, saying that he’d leave those judgments to his Justice Department and that voters should determine the future of politicians like Mr. Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, another Trump ally who backed the effort to overturn the election results.

For all the Republicans attempting to distance themselves from the president, 147 of them still voted to reject the results even after the siege of the Capitol. Since then, a segment of the party has embarked upon an effort to reshape reality, downplaying the violence and suggesting that far-left activists had infiltrated the crowd and posed as fans of the president.

This is obviously ridiculous: The rioters discussed plans to invade the Capitol for weeks in public social media posts. And Mr. Trump didn’t blame antifa for the rampage — instead, he told the mob, “We love you.” Still, those claims will echo through right-wing media, major news sources for the large number of activists and voters who remain loyal to Mr. Trump.

Some Republicans may be trying to jump off the Trump train at the final station. But they’ve already spent years helping fuel the engine.

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25th Amendment vs. impeachment: How would they work?

In the days after the violent attack on the Capitol, Democrats have begun championing efforts to remove President Trump from his final days in office.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has threatened Mr. Trump with impeachment if he does not resign immediately. But the idea of invoking the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to strip Mr. Trump of his powers seems less likely because Vice President Mike Pence opposes that effort.

With the clock ticking to Inauguration Day, here are the details of how both of these procedures would work.

The 25th Amendment would permit Mr. Pence and a majority of the cabinet to provide a written declaration to congressional leaders that Mr. Trump “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That would immediately strip Mr. Trump of the powers of his office and make Mr. Pence the acting president.

But Mr. Trump could immediately send a written declaration of his own saying that he is in fact able to perform his duties. That would immediately allow him to resume his duties, unless Mr. Pence and the cabinet sent another declaration within four days restating their concerns. Mr. Pence would take over again as acting president.

That declaration would require Congress to assemble within 48 hours and to vote within 21 days. If two-thirds of members of both the House and the Senate agreed that Mr. Trump was unable to continue as president, he would be stripped permanently of the position, and Mr. Pence would continue serving as acting president.

Impeachment is a two-part process: First, the House votes on whether to impeach — the equivalent of indicting someone in a criminal case. If a simple majority of the House votes in favor of pressing charges, the Senate must promptly consider them at a trial.

In the Senate, the threshold for conviction is much higher. Two-thirds of the senators seated at any given moment must agree to convict. If all 100 senators were seated at the time of trial, 17 Republicans would have to join Democrats to obtain a conviction — a high bar to clear.

While it may seem pointless to impeach a president just as he is about to leave office, if Mr. Trump were convicted, the Senate could vote to bar him from ever holding office again. Only a simple majority of senators would have to agree to successfully disqualify Mr. Trump, who is contemplating another run for president in 2024. A ban would be an appealing prospect not just to Democrats but also to many Republicans who are eyeing their own runs.

Both processes were designed to be difficult, and therefore rare. While the 25th Amendment provides a speedy remedy if a president is, say, physically incapacitated, it is even more difficult to strip an unwilling president of power under the amendment than it is under the impeachment process. A president can be impeached by a simple majority in the House and removed from office by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Stripping a president of power under the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers.

With Mr. Trump set to leave office on Jan. 20, one of the biggest political and logistical hurdles for impeachment is the calendar. Past presidential impeachments, including the one the House undertook in 2019, have been drawn-out affairs. But if Democrats and some Republicans are in agreement that they must act, they can move in a matter of days to draw up charges, introduce them and proceed directly to a debate and vote on the floor of the House.

History gives little guide on the question of whether a president can be impeached or convicted once he leaves office, but there is precedent for doing so in the case of other high government officers. In 1876, the House impeached President Ulysses S. Grant’s war secretary for graft, even after he resigned from his post; he was acquitted in the Senate.

For more details, read our full guides to impeachment and the 25th Amendment.

— Nicholas Fandos, Michael D. Shear and Lisa Lerer

By the numbers: 147

… That’s the number of Republicans who objected to the results of the election, after being evacuated from their chambers as a violent mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday.

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