A shocking sight: Washington, D.C. is an armed camp

While spending my junior year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in Paris (1972-73), I joined two friends on spring break driving from Paris to Southern France and spent a brief time in Spain. With Franco still in power, there were armed troops everywhere in Spain, including at the border, a sight that was stunning and that stuck with me over the years.
That stark image came back to me on Wednesday, when the images of the House debating the second impeachment of President Trump were interspersed with the scenes outside of the Capitol of thousands of National Guard troops patrolling in front of the building.
If there was ever an image that supported the impeachment of this president --- who knowingly and willfully promoted an insurrection and whose dangerous rhetoric threatened the lives of the vice president and the congressmen who were inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 while they were trying to do their job and certify the 2020 presidential election --- that was it.
Thanks to the mob of thousands of extremists (who wore such vile clothing as “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts), who had threatened the lives of elected officials, Washington, D.C. has become an armed camp.
While that’s stunning, it shouldn’t be a surprise, because that’s what happens when the elected leader of the United States promotes lies and fuels a mob to act by urging them repeatedly to “fight” to stop Congress' job of counting and certifying the election.
But Trump didn’t stop at general swipes at the congressmen; he uttered threatening lines like this, aimed at one Republican who refused to do the president’s illegal bidding to stop the certification process:
“We got to get rid of the weak Congress people, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”
Trump uttered that threat to Wyoming’s Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, as she was trying to head off the move by 140 House Republicans to object to the presidential vote. Her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice president under George W. Bush, heard that threat and called her to alert her. Not long after that call, Liz Cheney heard the mob getting close to the House chamber, the Washington Post reported.
That’s how crazy and quickly the situation got out of control on Jan. 6. Soon the mob had overwhelmed Capitol Police and were roaming the halls looking for officials to hurt, kidnap or kill. They yelled “Hang Pence” and they were looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many others as they shouted vile threat after vile threat.
Trump’s incendiary words – and then calling them “patriots” and saying “we love you” when he made his insincere request for the mob to stand down – is why Liz Cheney became one of 10 Republican House members to join in voting for Trump’s impeachment.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob, and lit the flame of the attack,” Cheney said in her remarks on the House floor during the impeachment debate. “Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president.”
The nine other House Republicans also blamed the insurrection/riot on Trump as they finally took aim on the president, whose poisonous rhetoric had so completely gone way over the line.
As a result, the 232-197 final tally made this second Trump impeachment the most bipartisan of the four in the nation’s history. (Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were the other two. Both were acquitted by the Senate. Richard Nixon, in 1974, had articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee, but Nixon resigned before his impeachment could be voted on by the full House.)
Trump seems unlikely to be convicted in the Senate, because it will be tough to get the required 67 or two-thirds of the senators needed for a conviction, which would rule out Trump being able to ever run for a federal office again. But the 10 House Republicans who signed on to impeachment deserve credit for finally speaking out and doing the right thing.
It’s just too bad that Trump’s other enablers haven’t done the same thing. The longer they wait to distance themselves from Trump and the mob that he created, the longer that Washington, D.C. will remain an armed camp.