“Donald Trump Incited Violence to Maintain Power, and People Died”: The Democrats Arguing the Case Against Trump Will Bring Their Own Experience to Bear

It was shortly after 2 p.m. on January 6, when he had just finished rebuking Republicans’ rejection of Joe Biden’s election victory in key states, that Congressman Joe Neguse knew something was wrong. Engaged in presenting his argument on the House floor, the Colorado congressman had missed the frantic text messages from friends and family and the videos of rioters descending on the Capitol populating social media. Then he saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, followed shortly after by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, escorted out of the chamber by Capitol Police. At first, like many of his colleagues, Neguse thought it might be a precaution; Pelosi was high in the order of succession. As Jim McGovern, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, picked up the gavel and continued the proceedings, “I assumed that we would continue with our work,” Neguse recalled. The notion that rioters would make it inside the Capitol was unfathomable.

Then, the announcements began—at first from the Sergeant at Arms and later a Capitol Police officer. Lawmakers realized that the Capitol had been breached, as hundreds of Donald Trump supporters forced their way into the building. McGovern gaveled out the proceedings. “Sit down,” rang through the chamber. They were told to put on gas masks that had been stashed under their seats and prepare to shelter in place. As sounds of banging and breaking glass bounced through the chamber, the House chaplain offered a prayer. And Neguse, along with the other eight lawmakers whom Pelosi would later name as House managers to guide the Senate through Trump’s second impeachment trial, became a witness to the case against the president. 

“It was a very intense day, but I don’t think I fully appreciated just how dangerous it had gotten that day until several days later,” Joaquin Castro, another impeachment manager, said. “It’s been a process of really learning everything that went on that day and just how close we came to not just mayhem…but even more carnage.” 

On Tuesday, a little over one year after his acquittal in the Ukraine impeachment, Trump will once again face trial in the Senate. Led by Congressman Jamie Raskin, the impeachment managers—who are, in addition to Neguse and Castro: Diana DeGette, Eric Swalwell, David Cicilline, Madeleine Dean, Ted Lieu, and Stacey Plaskett—will argue that former president Trump was “singularly responsible” for the siege on the Capitol, which resulted in five deaths, and two officers who responded to the riots have since taken their lives. “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a joint session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be,” the managers wrote in an 80-page trial brief filed earlier this week. 

Whereas Trump’s first impeachment and subsequent Senate trial were a bit convoluted, rooted in complicated international politics with an endless network of characters, Democrats see a clear-cut case in round two. That it played out on live television and social media for all of America to see only bolsters their confidence. “They did a magnificent job historically laying out the high crimes and misdemeanors of the president in that case,” said Dean, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee and was trapped in the gallery during the riot. “This case is so tragically different. This was an attack incited by the president, by Americans, against Americans; domestic terrorists, incited by a president,” she told me. “It’s absolutely stunning.”

For much of Trump’s first and only term, Speaker Pelosi acted as a bulwark against impeachment, set instead on protecting vulnerable members, who either flipped seats from red to blue or won in districts Trump carried in 2016. She only backed the move after a phone call with Trump, in which, she told me, he admitted “to what he had done.” There was no such hesitancy—from Pelosi or from other moderate Democrats—this time around. Plaskett, representative for the U.S. Virgin Islands and a member of the moderate New Democrats Coalition, was among those reluctant to impeach the first time around; some feared it could work to boost Trump’s popularity, if Americans took it as a partisan exercise. “I don’t think the facts themselves were so on display for [every American] household,” she said. With this impeachment, and its ample video evidence viewed by millions in real time, Democrats want to make sure Trump can never run for office again. 

Plaskett had been putting on her jacket to head down to the House floor to offer her condolences to Raskin, who had tragically buried his son Tommy just the day before and had been her professor in law school, when the proceedings on the House floor were abruptly halted and members were told to lock their doors. She spent much of the night of January 6 locked in her office. Speaking just days after the attack on the Capitol she recalled how her daughter got a text message from a friend asking, “Is your mom at work?” “There was a coup against our government that was so on display and so evident,” she said. “I think it’s so much easier to come to the conclusion that this president had to be impeached—that if we did not, we would be blind to a prima facie case that was on display for all of us.” 

It was so evident to Democrats that Trump’s rhetoric in the lead up to the siege—for weeks before and at his “Stop the Steal” rally earlier that day—amounted to an impeachable offense that a group began drafting articles against the president as the riot ensued and before the Capitol was secure. After Lieu was forced to evacuate the Cannon House office building—“It was not a good sign that I was told to take off my number pin that designates me as Congress,” Lieu said—he sought refuge in Cicilline’s office in the Rayburn building. With a skeleton crew of staff, the two lawmakers began to brainstorm in hushed voices, locked in a room with the shades drawn and the door barricaded as they had been instructed. “Even though the president only had a short time remaining in his term, I thought it was incredibly important that we proceed. It was too dangerous a precedent,” Cicilline told me. “He was a clear and present danger to our country and to our democracy and to the well-being of this country. And so for me, it was so clear that we had to move and we had to move quickly.” At first, their focus was on the 25th Amendment, which would require Trump’s Cabinet to remove him, but ultimately shifted to impeachment. With remote input from Raskin, Pelosi, and House Judiciary staffers, a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and one article of impeachment were underway. 

“It’s very clear that you had a violent mob that attacked the Capitol, hunting for the vice president and speaker Pelosi and legislators, and that attack resulted in multiple deaths and Donald Trump incited that attack,” Lieu told me. “It’s not a complicated story with a lot of characters that the American people have never heard of, or can’t even pronounce their names. It’s a very straightforward narrative that Donald Trump incited violence to maintain power by any means necessary, and people died.” 

But while Democrats do see a difference between the impeachments, DeGette stressed the connective tissue between them. “Donald Trump has flaunted the duties of the president from day one, and while his effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden seems a little more subtle, it’s really part and parcel of his whole approach, which is sort of a mob-type approach: ‘I need to get reelected, so how can I get reelected? Oh, well, I’ll discredit my opponent by having a foreign government investigate. Oh, well, I’ll just have, I’ll just call the secretary of state in Georgia and lean on him to find me some votes,’” DeGette, who was in the House gallery at the time of the attack, said. “Then of course the ultimate was inciting the riot that came up to the Hill to try to prevent the certification…. He operates like a criminal, and this latest was just the final straw.”