Congress has impeached Donald Trump for his incitement of a mob attack on the Capitol

OF ALL THE democratic norms President Donald Trump has broken during four years in the White House, none is as important as the peaceful transition of power. The photos, videos and accounts that have emerged since the ransacking of the Capitol on January 6th include footage of rioters beating a police officer with a flagpole as a crowd chanted “USA” and crushing another officer repeatedly in a door. Yet the violence, which resulted in five deaths, was nearly much worse. Quick-thinking police officers distracted the mob from breaching the debating chambers long enough to whisk every lawmaker to safety. Some of the rioters, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Nancy?”, had violent designs on both the Republican vice-president and the speaker of the House—the first and second in the line of presidential succession.

In the final days of Mr Trump’s administration, Congress will be consumed with working out how to penalise the president. The House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats, quickly drew up an article of impeachment accusing the president of “incitement of insurrection”. It passed on January 13th, one week after the attack on the Capitol. Some Republicans, after encouraging or standing by mute as the president attacked the democratic process for months, have shaken consciences. Ten of them joined all 222 Democrats on the vote.

Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, was one of them, declaring in a statement issued the night before that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution”. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, who objected to certification of Joe Biden’s election victory even after the attack on the Capitol, declined to whip opposition to the measure. Several Democrats say that some of their Republican colleagues confessed privately that they voted no because they were in fear of their lives. Having pledged to end “American carnage” when he was inaugurated, Mr Trump will depart ignominiously: the only president to have been impeached twice. The indelible image of his administration will be that of a mob vandalising Congress in a bid to overturn a fair election.

What happens from here, however, is uncertain. Upon impeachment, charges against the president are tried in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is needed for conviction and removal from office. Yet Mr Trump will be leaving office anyway on January 20th, when Mr Biden is inaugurated. The Senate is adjourned until January 19th. An earlier session might have been called if members had agreed to it unanimously but Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, could not bring that about. Even if he had, completing the trial while Mr Trump is in office would require record-breaking speed, and not give the president much time to defend himself.

This presents a constitutional edge case without precedent: can a president be convicted of impeachable offences after he has left office? Although not legally proscribed, this is also untested. Congress ended the Watergate impeachment inquiry soon after Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, feeling its purpose moot. Some lawyers reckon that continuing the trial once Mr Trump has left office might be unconstitutional.

There are compelling reasons to proceed anyway and let the Supreme Court sort that out. The first would be to establish that presidents may not commit impeachable offences without consequences during their lame-duck periods. The second would be to disbar Mr Trump from holding federal office again, preventing a possible comeback presidential bid in 2024. That would give Republicans an opportunity to rid the party of Trumpism, hopefully stop its worrying flirtations with authoritarianism and allow it to return to being a constitutional, conservative opposition. “To my Republican colleagues who have been saying, we need to come together, we need to heal, we need to be reconciled after last Wednesday, I remind them: There’s a spiritual teaching that there’s no reconciliation without repentance,” says Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware.

Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial, held just one year ago over his pressing the Ukrainian president to find dirt on Mr Biden and his son Hunter, ended in acquittal because of near-unanimous opposition from Senate Republicans (Mitt Romney was the lone aisle-crosser). Their desire to defend the president after the assault on the Capitol will not be so dogged. The odds of a full conviction still seem long: with the newly sworn-in Congress, at least 17 Republicans would need to defect. Yet Mr McConnell, the soon-to-be Senate minority leader, has let it be known that he might be open to impeachment. Where he goes many of his caucus may well follow.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Stitcher | TuneIn

Democrats who want more certain and immediate punishment for Mr Trump, and the historic dishonour of being the first sitting president to be removed from office, have suggested two hastier constitutional routes. The first is the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice-president and a majority of the cabinet to immediately remove Mr Trump from power. This is doomed. When Democrats passed a resolution urging Mr Pence to try that strategy, he refused, writing that “I will not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our nation”.

The other is the resuscitation of a section of the 14th Amendment to the constitution that permanently bars those who violate their oaths of office by engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” from ever holding federal office again. This clause was designed to prohibit the election of Confederate rebels after the civil war, and has been almost entirely ignored since. This is the most untested option for ousting Mr Trump, or from preventing him from running for president again. Nonetheless, some Democrats think it could be used more widely. Cori Bush, a leftish Democratic representative, has introduced a resolution, co-sponsored by 47 other Democrats, citing the same clause, which seeks to censure and possibly expel the Republican congressmen who voted not to certify Mr Biden’s victory.

As for Mr Trump, his steadfast allies in Congress are showing clear signs of insubordination. The Twitter account he used to keep Republican dissenters in line has been muzzled. And the emerging evidence from public-opinion polling suggests that his base is souring on him too. Our latest survey, conducted with YouGov, shows that Mr Trump’s overall approval rating has dropped from 42% to 39% in the span of a single week (and among his supporters in the recent election from a messianic 93% to a mere 83%). One in six of his voters now say that they supported the violent assault on the Capitol, a worrying minority, but much less than the 45% of Republicans who thought it justifiable in the immediate hours after news broke.

Yet there are concerning remnants of the epistemic rot that Mr Trump and his abettors have wrought: 81% of his supporters say that they have little to no faith in the fairness of the presidential election—the Big Lie that instigated the entire fiasco. And a remarkable 74% of Trump voters believe the conspiracy theory that Antifa, a left-wing group, was involved in the Capitol assault. Republicans in Congress may, in the twilight of Mr Trump’s presidency, embark on an exorcism for their party. Other demons may haunt them for longer.■

Dig deeper:
Read our latest coverage of the presidential transition, and then sign up for Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter and podcast on American politics.