As US president, Donald Trump seemed be talking and tweeting 24 hours a day. That has thrown his near total absence from public life over the past three weeks into sharp relief. The Silence of the Tweets.
It also means that when clips of Trump’s rally speeches filled the Senate chamber on day two of his impeachment trial on Wednesday, his voice was jarring and jangling in the ear, like a blowhard from a cruder, coarser time.
His speeches, tweets and phone calls were replayed incessantly as the House impeachment managers put their case against him. Seldom has an accused been so damned by their own words. In his fiery claims of a stolen election, his exhortations to “fight like hell” and his failure to denounce hate groups such as the Proud Boys, Trump proved the star witness in his own prosecution.
The spectacular irony was that a man who thrived on grabbing attention on TV and social media had left a trail of digital clues that ought to lead all the way to conviction. It was the 21st-century equivalent of a Victorian diary in which the master criminal brags about how he did it.
“Trump’s worst problem?” tweeted David Axelrod, former chief campaign strategist for Barack Obama. “Videotape.”
It helped Jamie Raskin and his fellow House impeachment managers build a case that this incitement did not begin on 6 January, the day of the insurrection at the US Capitol, but over months of spinning election lies and cheering on political violence.
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Wearing grey suit, white shirt, deep blue tie, and wielding a blue pen in his right hand, Raskin told the Senate: “He revelled in it and he did nothing to help us as commander-in-chief. Instead he served as the inciter-in-chief, sending tweets that only further incited the rampaging mob. He made statements lauding and sympathising with the insurrectionists.”
Congressman Joe Neguse displayed clips of Trump addressing rallies in October where he said he could only lose the election if it was stolen. “Remember he had that no-lose scenario,” Neguse said. “He told his base that the election was stolen.” Such beliefs fueled the so-called “stop the steal” campaign.
Another impeachment manager, Eric Swalwell, pored over Trump’s tweets, a goldmine for the prosecution. Among the many examples: the then president retweeted Kylie Jane Kremer, founder of a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, who promised that “the cavalry” was coming.
Swalwell told the senators, who sit at 100 wooden desks on a tiered semicircular platform, that there is “overwhelming” evidence: “President Trump’s conduct leading up to January 6 was deliberate, planned and premeditated. This was not one speech, not one tweet. It was dozens in rapid succession with the specific details. He was acting as part of the host committee.”
Swalwell added: “This was never about one speech. He built this mob over many months with repeated messaging until they believed they had been robbed of their vote and they would do anything to stop the certification. He made them believe that their victory was stolen and incited them so he could use them to steal the election for himself.”
The trial heard Trump pressuring Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to overturn his election defeat in the state. Congresswoman Madeleine Dean said: “We must not become numb to this. Trump did this across state after state so often, so loudly, so publicly. All because Trump wanted to remain in power.”
Her colleague Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands noted an incident last October when dozens of trucks covered in Trump campaign regalia “confronted and surrounded” a Biden-Harris campaign bus traveling from San Antonio to Austin in Texas.
“What that video that you just saw does not show is that the bus they tried to run off of the road was filled with young campaign staff, volunteers, supporters, surrogates, people,” she said.
And as the saying goes, there’s always a tweet. Plaskett highlighted that a day later, Trump tweeted a video of the episode with the caption, “I LOVE TEXAS.”
Plaskett also played a clip of Trump at a presidential debate, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” when asked to condemn white supremacists. They heard him “loud and clear”, she said, and even used the slogan on their merchandise. Several members of the Proud Boys have been charged in connection with the riots.
Later, Plaskett presented chilling audio and video evidence, some of it never made public before, that she said displayed the consequences of Trump’s incendiary words. Capitol police and law enforcement could be heard pleading for backup as the mob closed in. An officer could be seen running past Senator Mitt Romney and warning him to turn around, then Romney was seen breaking into a run to safety.
Trump’s political career was always like a child playing with matches. On 6 January, he started a fire. And as Wednesday’s hearing demonstrated, if he ever builds a presidential library and museum, there will be no shortage of multimedia material.
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