President Donald Trump has been impeached in the House of Representatives for a second time, making him the only president to be impeached twice. Trump is charged with “willful incitement of insurrection,” a charge that comes after an attempted insurrection of the Capitol building on January 6, the day electors were supposed to be certified. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric before the riot, falsely claiming the election had been stolen from him, incited the mob to ultimately leave five people dead and several others injured. His impeachment is deserved for a president who attempted to cheat his way into winning an election.
The attack on the Capitol was an assault on Democratic values. It resulted from four years of a president misleading his base and the most extremist element among them to believe in conspiracy theories, only amplified by his loss in November. After that, the attacks on election integrity ultimately led them to the Capitol, where in his speech on the day of the election’s certification by Congress, he stated “...you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.” The most extreme wing of his supporters in that audience took that as a rallying cry to take back the country, and what they perceive has been stolen from them.
In recent weeks, his repeated downplaying of the extremity and his role in the attacks has been painfully on brand for Trump, a president whose actions are often so destructive that the only way to keep them off his conscience are to dismiss them as not his fault. From his immoral child separation policy that ripped immigrant children away from their parents (many of whom have still not been reconnected), to the false equivalency of peaceful protestors and violent white nationalists in Charlottesville, to ultimately, an attempted insurrection. The question remains, why should the Senate charge him? For one, he’s soon to be out of office, so there are questions as to whether he could even be charged under Constitutional law. Is it even necessary?
Of course he should be charged. We cannot let a president with this dangerous of a track record ever run for public office again, because he has already left our ages-old democracy in question. Several senators and millions of voters still stand with him, because his cult of personality has gained too much power, and the lie is too woven into the fabric of his message for his most extreme supporters to untangle themselves. It's not a matter of party, it's about protecting our democracy from domestic threats, be it the mob themselves or the de facto leader.