Miranda Devine: Here comes the Trump impeachment circus
Thin on evidence, long on derangement, the Democrats will put Donald Trump on trial for the Capitol Hill riot — while staying silent about the street violence of the left, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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The impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the US Senate three weeks after he left the White House is just the latest iteration of Trump Derangement Syndrome in Washington.
So much for the “unity” Joe Biden promised at his inauguration. The Democrats don’t care that Trump is a private citizen playing golf in Florida.
Hating him is what keeps their party together.
Trump’s lawyers wrote in their pre-trial memorandum this week that Democrats in Congress have filed at least nine resolutions over the past four years to impeach him, “each containing charges more outlandish than the next”.
The Washington Post blasted out a headline, “Campaign to impeach President Trump has begun”, just 19 minutes after Trump was inaugurated.
“One might have been excused for thinking that the Democrats’ fevered hatred for Citizen Trump and their “Trump Derangement Syndrome” would have broken by now, seeing as he is no longer the President, and yet for the second time in just over a year the US Senate is preparing to sit as a Court of Impeachment, but this time over a private citizen who is a former President,” the pre-trial memo says.
Impeachment makes no sense, since its role in the Constitution is to remove someone from office.
And Trump is certain to be acquitted, just as he was last year in his first impeachment at the hands of the petty and vindictive 80-year-old House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
That impeachment distracted the administration’s focus at a crucial time when the coronavirus had just started circulating.
The Democrats have all the power in Washington, yet they can’t let go of Trump.
They fear him so much that they need to destroy him along with the 74 million Trump voters they have branded “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists”.
They say Trump must be punished for “inciting” the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, despite the fact he told attendees at his rally that day to protest “peacefully and patriotically”.
Obviously, Trump did a lot wrong after the election, refusing to accept he had lost, and unforgivably loading up his loyal vice president Mike Pence with the blame for certifying Biden’s victory.
But there is zero evidence that he incited anyone to break into the Capitol and cause mayhem, or even thought it possible.
The fact the Capitol was so weakly guarded that day is a direct result of security failures admitted to by the Capitol Police which resulted in the resignation of the chief.
During a closed-door briefing to Congress two weeks ago, acting chief Yogananda Pittman said the department knew there was a “strong potential for violence” but inexplicably declined a request for National Guard troops two days before the riot.
Similarly, cop-hating DC mayor Muriel Bowser rejected an offer of backup troops the day before the riots.
As we now discover from almost 200 charges laid, the storming of the Capitol was planned in advance by a small, organised group and the FBI had warned Capitol Police before the riot, yet they did nothing.
No Republican or conservative defends the rioters, but it was a disgrace that the Capitol was so easily breached, and the theatrics orchestrated by Pelosi this past week have been shamelessly designed to set the stage for the impeachment.
Narcissistic melodrama from Democrats such as congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed she was almost “murdered” that day even though her office was in a separate building, a 10- minute walk from the riot, just add to the insincerity of proceedings.
The barbed wire security wall around Capitol Hill and the thousands of National Guard troops still languishing in Washington also are part of Pelosi’s theatre.
The hypocrisy has been breathtaking.
Take former BLM activist turned Democratic congresswoman Cori Bush, who this week has been endorsing a violent riot in a St Louis prison as “the language of the unheard”.
Just a few weeks ago she stood in the House condemning the Capitol rioters and calling for the impeachment of “the “white supremacist in chief”. Clearly some riots are fine as long as they serve her purposes.
For seven months last year Democrats normalised and encouraged violent BLM-Antifa riots while denigrating police. The result has been catastrophic, on top of the pandemic and left-wing criminal justice reforms aimed at releasing criminals onto the streets.
The onset of the riots was followed by a historic surge in homicides, and an additional 1268 murder victims compared to 2019, according to a new report by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. Most of the victims were black and many were children.
Now we discover from an extraordinary article by Time, that those Antifa riots could be turned on and off like a tap by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who were engaged in a “conspiracy to save the 2020 election” from Trump.
Unions, activists, big business and Big Tech “worked together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Time approves and offers a new definition of the verb to cheat: “They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
Any dirty trick is justified as long as it brings an end to Trump.
Miranda Devine is in New York to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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