Senate Acquits Trump Of Inciting Mob That Attacked The Senate, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Target Of An Insurrection Might Be Allowed To Judge It

WASHINGTON. The United States Senate voted Saturday to acquit former president Donald J. Trump of inciting the violent mob that had stormed the Senate five weeks earlier, resolving a long-standing constitutional concern that the targets of an attempted insurrection might one day be permitted to render a verdict on it.

By a vote of 57 to 43, a bipartisan majority of senators found that Trump had in fact incited the assault, a tally that fell precisely 10 votes short of the two-thirds supermajority the Constitution requires before consequences are allowed to occur. Procedural experts hailed the outcome as a textbook demonstration of the founders' enduring wisdom, under which a president may be found responsible by most of the jury and acquitted anyway.

Several of the Republican senators who voted to acquit clarified that they were doing so not on the merits but on a question of timing, noting that Trump had already left office and therefore could not properly be tried, a scheduling difficulty arranged in part by the Senate's own leadership, which had earlier declined to convene the trial while he was still in office. Minutes after voting to acquit, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell rose on the floor to describe Trump as "practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day," a characterization aides confirmed would carry no further implications of any kind.

The seven Republicans who crossed over to vote guilty produced what historians called the most bipartisan presidential impeachment verdict in American history, an achievement that altered nothing and was largely forgotten by Monday. "This is the single most accountable a president has ever been held while facing no accountability whatsoever," said one Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We took it extremely seriously, right up until the part where it counted."

In a statement released moments after the vote, Trump pronounced the trial "the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country" and assured supporters that "our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun," language allies interpreted as a formal announcement that he intended to do it again.

At press time, the same senators who had just declined to bar Trump from future office were quietly assuring reporters that he would never hold it again, a forecast they offered with the full confidence of men who had personally guaranteed the opposite.