The Republican Party is ” at [Donald Trump ] and no one else ”, assured on February 5 a new Trumpist muse, Marjorie Taylor Greene, elected in Georgia in November 2020 despite a companionship with the conspirators of the QAnon movement. The Senate vote at the end of the former president’s impeachment trial on February 13 confirms this.
Despite overwhelming charges, the overwhelming majority of elected Republican officials remained alongside the former tenant of Maison Balnche, as in 2020 during his first impeachment. The acquittals follow one another for Donald Trump. However, they are hardly alike. In 2020, only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney (Utah), had voted in favor of his guilt in the Ukrainian scandal. And again, for only one of the two articles of the indictment.
A year later, seven elected Conservatives found Donald Trump guilty “Incitement to insurgency”, the largest ever recorded number of members of the same party as the accused president. Ten Republicans had already defected during the preliminary indictment of the House on January 13, while none had dared to cross this red line in December 2019.
An old fracture
Instead of devoting a Grand Old Party (GOP) gathered around its leader, the acquittal of February 13, on the contrary, highlighted its fracture. And there is little doubt that the division would have been much deeper still had Republican senators been able to speak by secret ballot.
Such a vote within the Conservative group in the House of Representatives showed it on February 3. While the most Trumpist wing asked for the head of the number three of this group, Liz Cheney (Wyoming), a “classic” Republican, for having voted the impeachment of Donald Trump, she was sharply refused by 145 votes against only 61.
This divide is old since it dates back to the hostile “takeover” launched by the former president on the GOP in 2015, during the presidential inauguration primary. Once in charge, Donald Trump thoroughly revised the Republican dogmas on trade or the federal deficit. But he was careful to accompany this revolution with conservative measures such as tax cuts and the appointment of hundreds of judges dedicated to defending religious freedom and firearms, and to fighting abortion.
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