On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial kicked off in the Senate. How’s he feeling about the whole thing? Strangely, for a person who’s been charged with inciting an insurrection that left five people dead: pretty good!
According to Politico, the ex-president and his lawyers believe that rather than coming away from the proceedings with a black mark on him for sending a fascist mob to the Capitol to burn down democracy in his name, Trump is going to emerge from this whole thing not only unscathed but with his “influence over the Republican Party all but cemented,“ a turn of events even his staunchest allies can’t believe. “He’s Teflon, right. It’s been a month since the Capitol riot and I would say, for the most part, the GOP has coalesced back behind him,” a former Trump campaign official told reporters Meridith McGraw and Gabby Orr. In fact, aides think that far from it being a historic embarrassment to become the first president ever to be impeached twice, the process has “proved beneficial” to Trump by “exposing disloyalty within the party’s ranks and igniting grassroots backlash against Republicans who have attempted to nudge the GOP base” away from him. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, for example, faced censure last week from state party officials for comparing Trump’s brand of politics to “a civic cancer for the nation,” while Representative Liz Cheney came under fire for having the audacity to vote to impeach Trump. (According to Axios, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went so far as to demand Cheney apologize for her disloyalty, which she declined.) And while the trial will no doubt show the ex-president’s role in an attempted coup against the U.S. government—and the fact that he relished the violence that took place on January 6—Trump apparently looks forward to uncovering more “turncoats” over the next couple weeks.