Impeaching Donald Trump a second time is unnecessary and risks further dividing the US

In a New Year’s Eve message, Joe Biden urged the United States to “unite, heal and rebuild in 2021”. It has been a familiar message since his victory in November’s election. The need for the polarised country to come together is even more important now following the Donald Trump-inspired insurrection at the Capitol last week.  

Yet the Democratic Party and some Republican politicians have set off on a course that risks widening the divide by impeaching Mr Trump – the first president to be impeached twice.

Ten Republicans in the House of Representatives went against him. Liz Cheney – the third most senior Republican in the lower house and daughter of the former vice president Dick Cheney – voted to impeach a president who, she said, “summoned this mob, assembled this mob and lit the flame of this attack”.

Mr Trump now faces a Senate trial where several Republicans are prepared to break with the president. They include Mitch McConnell, a loyalist who has abruptly ended his marriage of convenience with Mr Trump and who reportedly believes impeachment will “make it easier to purge him from the party”.

The contrast with the first impeachment attempt is marked. It failed last February because only one Republican senator was prepared to vote against him and so he was acquitted.  

The outgoing president has managed to create an unlikely alliance against him – Democrats who want to play to their electoral base by going for the kill and Republicans who worry that failing to exorcise the Trump ghost will wreck the party’s hopes of regaining power in 2024. It is not unrelated news that the Republican Party faces a funding crisis after several large companies vowed not to support the politicians who last week voted to overturn Mr Biden’s victory.  

Impeachment on the grounds of inciting the mob would be a legitimate course if Mr Trump would otherwise remain in the Oval Office for any length of time. But thankfully, he will be gone within a week. What his ardent and still significant band of supporters would view as a show trial could cast a long shadow over the first weeks of the Biden presidency, eclipsing his much-needed strategy for tackling coronavirus in a more effective way than his predecessor.

Completing the process before Mr Biden’s inauguration on 20 January will be difficult and pressing ahead will increase the risk of the event being marred by more violent scenes in Washington.  

Mr Trump has now been handed more ammunition with which to fuel claims of an establishment conspiracy against him, on top of the fantasy of the “stolen” election. He is good at playing the victim; his many critics should not risk making him a martyr.  

But there is another way to call Mr Trump to account for his outrageous behaviour last week and to ensure he is permanently removed from the stage. While a motion of censure is possible, that punishment would not fit the crime. A better course would be for Congress to ban him from holding office again under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, which says that no one should hold office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to the enemies of the constitution. There is surely little doubt about that.