EX-PRESIDENT Donald Trump has welcomed his impeachment acquittal on the charge of ‘inciting insurrection’, saying, his political movement ‘to Make America Great Again’ has only just begun. He was completely unrepentant, and has defeated the second bid to impeach him.
He called the trial ‘yet another phase of the greatest witch-hunt in the history of our nation’. If he had been convicted, the Senate could have voted to bar him from running for office ever again. After the vote, the senior Republican in Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell, who voted to impeach Trump said Trump had been ‘responsible’ for the assault on the Capitol and called it a ‘disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty’.
However, he voted against conviction, saying it was unconstitutional now that Trump was no longer president. McConnell was said to be instrumental in delaying Trump’s trial until after he left office, on 20 January.
In their closing statements, the Democratic House of Representatives lawmakers appointed to push the process through the Senate, warned that it would be dangerous to acquit Trump.
‘The stakes could not be higher because the cold, hard truth is that what happened on 6th January can happen again,’ Representative Joe Neguse said. None of this worked. Trump is now still eligible to run for president again in 2024, if he so chooses. Democratic President Biden reacted to the acquittal by calling on all Americans to defend democracy.
However, there can be no arguing with the facts that Trump got the second highest vote for any presidential election, and that many Americans supported the assault on the Capitol, and applauded the way that the police and the National Guard remained at ease, and were not mobilised to stop the well-publicised armed march on the Capitol to stop the power being handed over to the Democratic Party.
The reality is that the ‘American Dream’ has been shattered. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, 488,364 have been killed by the coronavirus, and large numbers of workers have lost their homes and are sleeping on the streets. Trump’s policy of ‘America First’ and an end to the USA ‘policing the planet’ was supported and is supported by millions of Americans. He has now defeated two impeachment attempts.
US President Joe Biden has called on Americans to defend democracy, saying, ‘democracy is fragile.’
Trump, who was impeached by the House in his final days in office on one charge of ‘incitement of insurrection’ and the siege of the US Capitol, was the first US president to be impeached twice and now is the first president to be twice acquitted.
On Saturday, the Democratic-held Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump for the January 6th violence at the Capitol. He was then acquitted as the impeachment effort failed to gain two thirds of the votes.
President Biden issued a statement on Saturday night, saying the substance of the charge against Trump over the Capitol riot, which left five people dead, was not in dispute, and noted the seven Republicans who voted guilty.
‘Even those opposed to the conviction, like Senate minority leader McConnell, believe Donald Trump was guilty of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” and “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the violence unleashed on the Capitol,’ the president said.
‘This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile. That it must always be defended. That we must be ever vigilant. That violence and extremism has no place in America. And that each of us has a duty and responsibility as Americans, and especially as leaders, to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.’
In fact, Biden has now declared that ‘the US is back’ meaning that the military actions that were a feature of President Obama’s time in office will be brought back.
Biden declares that the US will now be standing up to Russia and China. He says that the US will not roll over for anybody. In fact, the USA under Biden will be cosying up to Israel and Saudi Arabia and stirring up new wars in the Middle East and South East Asia.
The Trump march on the Capitol was the ideal opportunity for the working class organisations to act. The AFL-CIO trade unions should have activated their policy and called a general strike to defeat Trump.
Such an action would not only have shattered Trump, it would have paved the way for the US unions to break with the Democrats and form a Labour Party, to carry forward the struggle for workers’ rights and socialism.
This is in fact the way forward for millions of workers who hate Trump and his out and out big business policies and also have no love for the Democrats who want to wage war on the US working class and the workers of the world.
US capitalism is on the rocks, as are all the major capitalist powers. Their only policy is to prepare for war with Russia and China and to make war on the working class at home. Now is the time for US workers to break with the Democrats and form a Labour Party. Now is the time for the US youth to form a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the battle for the US socialist revolution.
