Season 1 recap. In season 1 of DJT: The Impeachment, we saw Donald John Trump, then President of the United States, impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on two counts: abuse of power, and obstruction of Congress. These counts were a result of Trump's attempts to strong-arm and extort the newly-elected President of Ukraine in an attempt to get Ukraine to investigate Trump's opponent for the 2020 election, Joe Biden. Trump acted with his usual degree of impunity, brazenness, lying, and contempt for normalcy and decency. The entire season 1 of DJT: The Impeachment was a two-thumbs up series of episodes filled with excitement, amazement, brilliant and compelling walk-on cameos by career foreign service staff, incredible acts of logic- and law-defying tricks by the Attorney General of the United States, and bald-face denial by Congressional Republicans. The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump along party lines, with the exception of a single Republican, Senator Romney, voting to convict. The season ended in the post-trial episode in which Trump exacted retribution against those who dared to challenge him, including firing several career employees of the State Department and the Army. Our final glimpse of Trump was his victorious strutting, indicating that yes, he, Donald Trump, could get away with anything.
Season 2. Episode 1 - The Vote. The opening episode of DJT: The Impeachment: Season 2 dropped on election day in November, 2020. In that episode, the director used numerous flash-backs to set the scene of the constant Trump drumbeat of lies about election fraud, preparing his base and sycophants for his looming defeat. We also saw the gross incompetence of Trump and his key staff regarding the coronavirus pandemic, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. The episode ended as a cliff-hanger, with the vote counting continuing in a few key states that Trump needed to win.
Season 2, Episode 2 - The Madman Roars. We saw the agony and anger of Trump as his must-win states fell to his opponent, Joe Biden, who was declared the winner. Trump ranted and raged on social media, television, and to the press, a madman insisting he had actually won by a landslide and that the Biden campaign and Democrats had committed the greatest fraud of all time and cheated him out of his win. The anger of his MAGA hat-wearing base grew to a fever pitch, and Trump went on the road to hold large rallies - in the middle of a pandemic - to promote his great lie and whip up his supporters. The Great Lie was promoted everywhere, including by prominent Republicans. We see Trump lawyers filing court actions more than 60 times to have various states ballots disqualified; all of these efforts failed. The Supreme Court declined to take up Trump's election challenge. Trump is shown making phone calls to various state Republican officials, from governors down, to convince them to change the vote results in his favor. Using social media and other avenues, Trump triples down on the Great Lie that the vote was a fraud, it was stolen, he had won by a landslide, and his supporters needed to "stop the steal" and take back their country. As the episode closes, we see a frustrated and angry Trump planning his last options involving Vice-President Pence and, if all else fails, a massive action in D.C. on January 6.
Season 2, Episode 3 - The Insurrection. Episode 3 was the most chilling episode of the series to date. It opened with Congress preparing to certify the electoral college votes of each state in a joint session, with Vice-President Pence presiding. This action is normally a straight-forward confirmation; however, the tension built in episode 3, with Trump increasingly turning up the volume of his lies about "the great fraud" perpetrated by the Democrats, culminating in Trump's call to his base to come to Washington, D.C. to "Stop the Steal." Thousands of Trump loyalists showed up from every corner of the country. On the morning of January 6, 2021, the Trump machine held a massive rally at which various speakers, a propaganda film, and Trump himself whipped up the crowd to a mob frenzy, demanding that they "be strong, very strong," engage in "combat," "stop the steal" and "save our democracy." The crowd responded by attacking the Capitol Building while Congress was in joint session, breaking through barricades and police lines, breaking into the building, attacking and battling the police, and looking for members of Congress and Vice-President Pence with intentions of capturing them and, based on the video evidence, threatening to kill them. Members of Congress barely escaped. Seven people died, including one policeman beaten to death and two who later committed suicide. More than 140 police officers were badly injured, many for life. Donald Trump watched the insurrection on T.V., ignoring the pleas of those around him, members of Congress, former staff, and family members to do something to stop the violence.
Season 2, Episode 4 - In da House. Within a week of the Capitol insurrection, and one week before the end of his term as President, the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump, for the second time, on a single article: incitement of insurrection. In an unusual defection, 10 Republican members of the House voted for impeachment. House leadership is stymied in their hope to have the Senate conduct the required impeachment trial before January 20, Inauguration Day, while Trump is still in office; however, Mitch McConnell, outgoing Senate majority leader, refuses to put it on the Senate schedule until February. This is a calculated move by the sly McConnell.
Season 2, Episode 5 - The Trial. This episode dropped on February 9, 2021, almost exactly one year ofter the conclusion of DJT - The Impeachment Season 1. The Episode was presented in two parts, both set in the U.S. Senate as the House Impeachment Managers prosecute Donald Trump, and Trump's legal team, hired about a week prior (because previously hired attorneys left or were fired by Trump) defends him. The opening day of the trial is focused on one question: is the impeachment constitutional? The House Impeachment Managers present their case that the trial is appropriate and lawful under the Constitution, and they do a masterful job. The defendant's lawyers, seemingly from the law firm Meandering, Furious and Scolding, LLP, are exactly that as they claim that Trump, now a private citizen, cannot be impeached. The session ends with a role call vote in which all Democratic Senators, and 5 Republicans, vote that the trial is constitutional. On Day 2 of the Senate trial, the Impeachment Managers present hours of evidence showing how Donald Trump, while President, created the Great Lie that the election was a fraud and that he had actually won by a landslide, that the Democrats had stolen the election, and that Congressional Republicans and the Vice-President, and his base of voters, needed to "fight like hell" to save the country and right the huge wrong that put Trump out of office.
The Trump legal team has their day to present the case for their client. They focus on everything but the question of Trump's guilt. Instead the Trump crack legal team (are they on crack?) chastises the House Impeachment Managers for lying, cheating, altering video and tweet evidence, being mean, conducting a "snap impeachment,"being radical socialists, eating babies for brunch (well, maybe not that), ignoring due process, violating the First Amendment of the Constitution, and...well, you have to watch it yourself. A highlight of the episode is a lengthy video, the "Fight Club" video, showing Democrats (mostly women, people of color, and Jews) using the word "fight," meant to imply that there was nothing untoward about Trump telling his people that they had to "fight for their freedom," and "fight to keep their country." No, they claim, he did not mean they should actually fight with anyone, even though many of them were armed and wearing battle gear and shouting for blood.
Part 2 of Episode 1 opens on the final day of the Senate trial, with each side presenting their closing arguments; however, there are a few plot twists and turns. The Impeachment Managers want to depose a witness, a Representative from Washington State who had told the press about a telephone conversation between Trump and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader of the House, in which McCarthy implores Trump to send help, and that VP Sense had just been rushed out of the chamber by the Secret Service - Trump did nothing. The Trump team was incensed, and said that they would depose a hundred witnesses. Confusion ensued, and the Senators caucused to figure it out. In the end, the lead Impeachment Manager read the Washington Representative's statement into the record as evidence, and they moved on to closing statements.
The vote was taken, and the result was that Trump was acquitted by the Republicans on a vote total of 57 guilty to 43 not guilty. A two-thirds majority, 67 votes, is needed to convict someone in a Senate trial. Although Trump was not convicted, he does have the dubious historic honor of being the only U.S. President to be impeached twice, and the only one to have such a bipartisan guilty vote, 7 members of his own party.
The episode, and season 2, closes with a bizarre epilogue. We see Senator Mitch McConnell, majority leader of the Senate when Trump was president, now minority leader as a result of the 2020 election, standing alone at the podium and speaking. There are brief flashbacks of McConnell, the majority leader, refusing to accept the Article of Impeachment from the House of Representatives until after the inauguration of Joe Biden. We see McConnel, now the minority leader, casting his "not guilty" vote only moments before he steps to the podium. And then McConnell begins to speak.
"January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he'd lost an election. Former President Trump's actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty. The House accused the former president of, quote, "incitement." That is a specific term from the criminal law. Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. The issue is not only the president's intemperate language on January 6th. It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged "trial by combat." It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-president. I defended the president's right to bring any complaints to our legal system. The legal system spoke. The Electoral College spoke. As I stood up and said clearly at the time, the election was settled." And he continued in that vein for several minutes.
Then McConnell explained that he had voted for acquittal because he believed the trial was unconstitutional; Trump could not be impeached after leaving office. In other words, McConnell, and very probably many other Republican Senators who voted "not guilty" actually thought Trump was guilty, but acquitted him on a technicality. The Senate voted, on the opening day of the trial, that the trial was constitutional, and this should have settled the matter, but obviously the majority of Republican Senators did not honor that vote, because the constitutional issue gave them an easy out.
DJT - The Impeachment is a brilliant mini-series. In it's two seasons, it provides many chilling lessons about democracy, politics, and authoritarian tendencies of leaders and followers. Luckily, nothing like this has happened in the history of modern democracies, and in fact, much of it stretches the imagination to the point of being unbelievable and unlikely. It is, however, great entertainment.
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