Why Trump Should Be Impeached Second Time 

All of the Republican coddling, enabling and unvarnished support of Donald Trump created a dedicated demagogue who ignited an insurrection against Congress that may force him to resign or face a second House impeachment.

These heartless Republicans who ignored the needs of their most vulnerable constituents got their reward: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, widespread deregulation that overturned many environmental laws and more than 200 conservative judges who can have a dampening effect on progressive legislation. We the ordinary people got virtually nothing.

And now the Republicans are in disarray, fighting over their disgraced spoiled brat of a president. The moderates among them should quit and start a new party; the rest should resign in shame.

If Trump had a shred of decency, which is in great doubt because of four years of outright lying to the American people and letting them get ill and die of COVID-19 without doing more to save them, he should quit. President Richard M. Nixon did.

“I want him to resign,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News. “I want him out. He has caused enough damage.”

He certainly has, beginning when he lanched his campaign in 2015 by cursing our Mexican neighbors as racists. We knew then what he was. He was voted in anyway, though not by popular vote but by the Electoral College, which should be deleted from the election process.

“I think he should leave,” said Murkowski, his former supporter. “. . . He’s either been golfing or been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus.  . . .  He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing.”

Administration officials and members of Congress are worried about Trump’s state of mind and what problems he still can cause, The Daily Beast reported. As well they should be; he’s been acting unhinged since he lost the election, if not before that.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her Democratic colleagues in a letter that she had spoken to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, about keeping an “unstable president” away from the nuclear codes.

“The situation of this unhinged President could not be more dangerous,” she wrote. Good move, Madam Speaker.

A very cautious President-elect Joe Biden told a news conference Friday that “it’s very important to get him out of office.” He withheld an opinion on whether Trump should be impeached, saying that’s “a judgment for the Congress to make.” Ah, boundaries. Haven’t seen those from high up in years.

He said it was a “good thing” Trump decided not to attend his inauguration Jan. 20. It sure is. His presence only would be a me-first disruption, one more thing an unsettled country certainly doesn’t need.

Social media is not taking any more chances with Trump and cut off his two major megaphones to the public, Facebook and, his apparent favorite, Twitter. That’ll get him fuming again.

Twitter announced it permanently suspended the president’s account “due to the risk of further incitement for violence.” Great move. It should have happened four years ago.

Despite concerns by Trump’s allies and even his critics that impeachment only would further divide an already polarized country, that risk must be taken to ensure the president understands he finally must be accountable for his actions.

The invasion of the Capitol, a totem of American democracy, by violent barbarian insurrectionists fired up by Trump to march on Congress was no minor dismissible  event. The last time the domed, grayish building fronted by columns was seized was by British troops during the war of 1812.

One rioter was dressed like a barbarian, wearing a horned furry brown Viking headdress and carrying a spear, a known presence at Trump rallies.

Another, an obvious anti-Semite, wore a black T-shirt with white letters, CAMP AUSCHWITZ. WORK MAKES FREEDOM — from the sign in German atop the iron gated entrance to the concentration camp, Arbeit Mach Frei, or Work Makes Free. He should be charged with a hate crime.

These are the types of “very fine people” Trump encourages and honors, as if he were a warlord, not the president of a mighty world power once respected globally.

“We love you,” he said during his brief video Wednesday telling the rioters to “go home. You’re very special.” Yet he’d never share a soda with them.

House Democrats want Trump’s rapid impeachment and have drawn up two drafts, one of which has 131 co-sponsors entitled “Incitement of Insurrection,” according to The Washington Post. It charges him with having “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government.”

“He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power and imperiled a coordinate branch of government,” it says. “He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

The “coordinate branch” refers to Congress, the legislative branch, which was invaded by the executive branch, the president.

The irony in all of this debasement of democracy, this unbridled violence that police could not control as rioters swarmed around the Capitol grounds and busted into the building, is that their cause promoted by Trump was and is based on nothing but the president’s lies. It’s all false, like him.

There were no rigged elections, there was no blatant fraud and the president did not win a “landslide” election. He lost by seven million votes. Biden won, period, full stop.

At least the Parisians who stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789 to get at its store of weapons had a legitimate cause: freedom from the tyranny of King Louis XVI. The Trumpists had nothing to back up what they were doing, rebels without a cause.

Those Parisians, wrote journalist and historian François Mignet at the time, were “intoxicated with liberty and enthusiasm.” Not our barbarians.

Some Capitol rioters may have been intoxicated as well, with marijuana. They reportedly set up a “pot room” in the building, stoned with idiocy and criminal intent in a sacred, magnificent Greek-style monument to American freedom where democracy is practiced.

That others, including Trump, would destroy.

Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in the Middle East and was foreign editor of United Press International, served as the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.