Trump’s turbulent and lawless presidency will end with historic

On Jan 13, 2021

Fast-moving developments in the run-up to the vote have left Trump more politically vulnerable than he has ever been.

At least a handful of House Republicans plan to vote with Democrats to impeach.

By the end of the day, Trump will be saddled with a stain he will never be able to erase, as the first President to be impeached twice after his refusal to admit his election defeat shattered assumptions on the unassailability of stable government and the previously unbroken chain of peaceful US transfers of power. Save for the fracturing of the union before the Civil War, this country’s system of political checks and balances has never before been under the kind of strain imposed by an autocratic President desperate to cling to power.

A sense of unfolding history is magnified by growing evidence that America is fighting for democracy itself in a struggle that will endure after Trump leaves office next week at the latest. New warnings of violence by pro-Trump extremists in 50 states and militias on the march toward Washington are instigating the most oppressive sense since 9/11 that the homeland is under threat. But this time the danger to US freedom comes not from a foreign terrorist group but radicalized Americans.

McConnell believes impeachment push will help rid Trump from the GOP, but has not said if he will vote to convict

The sole article of impeachment that the House is expected to pass Wednesday charging Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors is damning. Its simple clarity explains why this impeachment is no mere futile partisan ritual in the waning days of the most aberrant presidency in history.

“Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law,” the article reads

It is an extraordinary mark of turbulent times and a lawless term that Trump will become the first president to be impeached twice — only 13 months after the House first resolved that his abuses of power merited removal from office.

In a poetic twist, the vote will take place in the very same chamber that lawmakers fled a week ago in fear of their lives from an invading mob seeking to harm Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and to thwart the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden.

In time, the events of this disorienting week will take their place alongside milestones — including the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John Kennedy — that make up America’s sweeping narrative. But history is experienced in retrospect. Current events are lived forward in all their alarming intensity and are frightening because no one knows how they will end. And the country’s nerves were already at a breaking point nearly a year into a once-in-a-century pandemic that has brought death and sickness and further deepened stark political divides.

‘Armed combat’ in the Capitol

The formal impeachment vote in the House…