January 2021

What happened at the U.S. Capitol is not surprising. It's sad, disgusting and appalling, but not surprising.

People believe they have been lied to and ignored. They are desperate. They haven't been allowed to work for nine months or more. They haven't been allowed to travel and visit people. And yet, they have their elected officials, who have yet to miss a paycheck, telling them that it was for their own good. How did two weeks to “flatten the curve” turn into nine months of “the cases are increasing!” 

It is often said that journalism is “the first rough draft of history,” and in recent years we've certainly had an abundance of drafts written about Donald Trump.

But we wondered what actual historians would say about events since the last election, so we sent out some inquiries. The response was overwhelming.

Last night a television pundit said something so remarkable, I almost threw the remote at the screen. “The further we get from the events of January 6,” she observed, “the more difficult it becomes to get Republicans senators to vote to convict.”

What?  The comment was made off-handedly, as if everyone should understand why it matters that time has elapsed since Trump incited a riot that attempted to nullify the election and take over the government by force of a coup.

But as absurd as it was, she made a valid point:  Republicans are hoping the passage of time will cancel what Trump did. They just want the whole assault-on-the-Capitol thing to go away. In the case of Mitch McConnell, it’s interrupting his plans to obstruct Biden’s agenda. For sycophants like House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and Freedom Caucus ringleader Jim Jordan, continuing to defend Trump puts a pin in their ambitions to move up in Republican ranks. 

If Donald J. Trump — not a contemplative thinker, not a devoted reader, no friend of scholars — were to consider the class of humankind who would be the least favorable evaluators of his personal conduct and political career, he might very well conjure up a group who respect precedent, revere introspection, salute consistency of thought, worship the truth, and think deeply. 

It is his bad luck that that is the very definition of the academic historians who will write the biographies and accounts of his presidency and his times.

What happened at the Capitol on January 8th was decidedly not a peaceful demonstration gone wrong but a planned assault on democracy by a lame duck President determined to reverse the outcome of an election that he clearly had lost.

This horrifying spectacle occurred despite almost no evidence of fraud or conspiracy from state officials responsible under their state’s laws for determining the accuracy of the vote count on Election Day in November, when Biden won a clear victory with 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 required.

President Trump clearly committed a crime when he told the rioters gathered in his name in Washington that “if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore.... because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

This is a clear incitement to violence which is a criminal act and must be punished if it is ever to act as a deterrent to lawbreaking by the losers in future elections.

In the early months of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee was navigating through unchartered waters as it investigated President Richard M. Nixon and members of his administration for illegal conduct relating to the Watergate break-in and its subsequent cover-up. Nothing like this inquiry had happened since the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.

The members and staff of the committee wanted to know what crimes or assaults against the law previous presidents or their administration had committed in the preceding 185 years. What had Congress done about them? 

Editor’s Note: Jim Cullen holds masters and PhD degrees in American Studies from Brown and the author of over a dozen books. For the following essay, he adapted portions of his new book, Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters (Rutgers University Press), the definitive history of the landmark show.

Donald Trump was impeached again, a week before leaving office, in one of the great travesties of modern politics.

Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.

One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. 

The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second impeachment of December 2019 succeeded, but predictably failed to obtain a Senate conviction. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure. It will likely not result in a Senate conviction, either.

But from now on, House impeachment will be used by the out-party as a periodic club to wound a first-term president. President-elect Biden should beware.

While George W. Bush's connections with industry sometimes led to charges of corrupt practices during his time in the White House, his presidency became swiftly and indelibly associated with efforts, often open, to evade and erode laws protecting the civil liberties of U.S. citizens in an effort to combat terrorism. The administration's response to charges of such misconduct, which has become its enduring legacy for the institution of the presidency, amounted in the end to the crafting of new legal justifications superseding older, and sometimes fundamental, law.  

Surveillance of U.S. Citizens

Gerald R. Ford, Jr., Republican Congressman from Michigan and House Minority Leader, became vice president to Richard M. Nixon under the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment when, in 1973, Spiro T. Agnew resigned the vice presidency after pleading guilty to tax evasion. Upon Nixon's own resignation from the presidency, Ford became President. He thus served as both vice president (selected by Nixon and confirmed in that office by Congress) and president without having been elected to either office — an unprecedented distinction.