By Jeffrey Goldberg
Wednesday, April 03, 2024
In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former
Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee
investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony
was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald
Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president,
when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t
fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the
fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen
protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House.
Hutchinson also testified that Trump became so frantic in
his desire to join the march to the Capitol that at one point he tried to grab
the steering wheel of his SUV. This assertion has subsequently been disputed
by Secret Service agents, but what has not been disputed is an exchange,
reported by Hutchinson, between White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Mark
Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. In this conversation, which took place
as Trump supporters were breaching the Capitol, Cipollone told Meadows, “We
need to do something more—they’re literally calling for [Vice President Mike
Pence] to be fucking hung.” Hutchinson reported that Meadows answered: “You
heard [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything
wrong.”
Hutchinson seemed like a credible witness, and she was
obviously quite brave for testifying. This very young person—she was 25 at the
time of her testimony—went against the interests of her political tribe, and
her own career advancement, to make a stand for truth and for the norms of
democratic behavior. Washington is not overpopulated with such people, and so
the discovery of a new one is always reassuring.
As it happened, I watched the hearing while waiting to
interview then-Senator Rob Portman, a grandee
of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, before an audience of 2,000 or
so at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The session would also feature Mitch Landrieu,
the former mayor of New Orleans, who was serving at the time as President Joe
Biden’s infrastructure coordinator. Portman’s appearance was considered to be a
coup for the festival (for which The Atlantic was once, but was by this
time no longer, a sponsor).
Republican elected officials in the age of Trump don’t
often show up at these sorts of events, and I found out later that the leaders
of the Aspen Institute, the convener of this festival, hoped that I would give
Portman, a two-term senator from Ohio, a stress-free ride. The declared subject
of our discussion was national infrastructure spending, so the chance of
comity-disturbing outbursts was low. But I did believe it to be my professional
responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly,
about his current views of Donald Trump. In 2016, during Trump’s first campaign
for president, Portman withdrew
his support for him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape,
in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. But Portman endorsed
Trump in 2020 and voted to acquit him in the second impeachment trial, and I
wanted to ask him if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in
the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his
decision.
Portman was one of 43
Republican senators who voted against conviction. Sixty-seven votes were
required to convict. If 10 additional Republican senators had joined the 50
Democrats and seven Republicans who voted for conviction, Trump would not today
be the party’s presumptive nominee for president, and the country would not be
one election away from a constitutional crisis and a possibly irreversible slide
into authoritarianism. (Technically, a second vote after conviction would
have been required to ban Trump from holding public office, but presumably this
second vote would have followed naturally from the first.)
It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately
for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail
but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for
president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced
Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s
continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.
But I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike
some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to
constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation,
in a position to influence his colleagues. Some senators in the group of 43 are
true believers, men like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, in the words of Mitt
Romney (as
reported by the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins),
never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. But Portman wasn’t a
know-nothing. He was one of the most accomplished and respected members of the
Senate. He had been a high-ranking official in the White House of George H. W.
Bush, then a hardworking member of the House of Representatives. In George W.
Bush’s administration, he served as the U.S. trade representative and later as
the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was well known for his
cerebral qualities and his mastery of the federal budget. He was also known to
loathe Donald Trump. In other words, Portman knew better.
“I do want to ask you directly,” I said, when we sat
onstage, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you
regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?”
Portman immediately expressed his unhappiness with what
he took to be an outré question. “You have just surprised me,” he said,
complaining that I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would ask him about Trump.
(American journalists generally do not warn government officials of their
questions ahead of time.) He went on to say, “You know that I spoke out in the
strongest possible terms on January 6.”
Indeed he had. This is what Portman
said on the Senate floor once the Capitol had been secured: “I want
the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will
not be intimidated, that we will not be disrupted from our work, that here in
the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob
rule is not going to prevail here.”
Onstage, Portman reminded me of his comments. “On the
night it happened, I took to the Senate floor and gave an impassioned speech
about democracy and the need to protect it. So that’s who I am.”
But this is incorrect. This is not who he is. Portman
showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he
voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent,
antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election.
His argument during impeachment, and later, onstage with
me, was that voting to convict an ex-president would have violated
constitutional norms, and would have further politicized the impeachment
process. “Do you think it would be a good idea for President Obama to be
impeached by the new Republican Congress?” he asked. He went on, “Well, he’s a
former president, and I think he should be out of reach. And Donald Trump was a
former president. If you start that precedent, trust me, Republicans will do the
same thing. They will.”
It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make:
Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they
would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out
of spite.
I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of
bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the
conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him.
Initially, I found his defensive behavior odd. A senator
should not be so flustered by a straightforward question about one of his most
consequential and historic votes. But I surmised, from subsequent conversations
with members of the Republican Senate caucus, that he, like others, felt a
certain degree of shame about his continued excuse-making for the authoritarian
hijacker of his beloved party.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s
leading experts on authoritarianism, wrote
in 2020 that complicity, rather than dissent, is the norm for humans, and
especially for status-and-relevance-seeking politicians. There are many
explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many
Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear
have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”
None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to
escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The
excuses ranged widely. Here are the stirring and angry words of Dan Sullivan,
the junior senator from Alaska, explaining his vote to acquit: “Make no
mistake: I condemn the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol on January
6. I also condemn former President Trump’s poor judgment in calling
a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a
riot. His blatant disregard for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was
fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.”
Sullivan voted to acquit, he said, because he didn’t
think it right to impeach a former president. Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota,
argued that “the January 6 attacks on the Capitol were appalling, and President
Trump’s remarks were reckless.” But Cramer went on to say that, “based on the
evidence presented in the trial, he did not commit an impeachable offense.”
Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, in explaining his vote, “Undoubtedly,
then-President Trump displayed poor leadership in his words and actions. I do
not defend those actions, and my vote should not be read as a defense of those
actions.” He continued, “Just because President Trump did not meet the
definition of inciting insurrection does not mean that I think he behaved
well.”
Now contrast this run of greasy and sad excuse-making
with Mitt Romney’s explanation for his vote to convict: “The president’s
conduct represented an unprecedented violation of his oath of office and of the
public trust. There is a thin line that separates our democratic republic from
an autocracy: It is a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power
that follows it. President Trump attempted to breach that line, again. What he
attempted is what was most feared by the Founders. It is the reason they
invested Congress with the power to impeach. Accordingly, I voted to convict
President Trump.”
On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other
Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s
Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s
Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution
survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be
raised to these seven. As for Rob Portman and his colleagues, they should hope
that they will merely be forgotten.
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