House impeachment managers wrapped up their arguments against former President Donald Trump Thursday afternoon. The Democrats highlighted recent marches on state capitols and warned that Trump could do something like this again if he is not banned from holding elected office.
Lead manager Jamie Raskin spent a lot of time discussing Trump’s attacks on officials in Michigan in response to their coronavirus restrictions. He displayed several tweets from the former President lashing out at the state’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer. He asserted that Trump’s “Liberate Michigan” tweet from last spring was a green light for violence, and reminded us of the foiled attempt to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. Raskin also said that the storming of the Michigan Capitol by right-wing protesters was a “state level dress rehearsal” for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “It was a preview of the coming insurrection,” he said.
Manager Ted Lieu of California made the case for why the former President should be barred from holding federal office ever again. He said that he is afraid that Trump will run again in four years and lose “because he can do this again,” referring to the violence at the Capitol.
The former President’s defense team is now set to begin their arguments on Friday. Like the House managers, the defense has been given 16 hours to present their case, but it is widely expected that they will be finished making their arguments on Friday afternoon. Manager Joe Neguse had strong words for the President’s defense team on Thursday, as they plan to argue that their client’s actions and words are “protected by the First Amendment.”
A conviction remains as unlikely as it did before the trial began. It seems increasingly unlikely that Senate Democrats will be able to get 17 Republican Senators to convict the former President. In fact, it seems that some Republican Senators have lost interest in the trial altogether. Journalists and sketch artists who were in the Senate chamber counted as many as 15 empty desks on the Republican side of the chamber at one point in the afternoon. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) could be seen with his feet on his desk while the House managers were speaking, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was spotted in a room next to the chamber. More sketches from inside the chamber on Day 3 of the trial can be found here.
The trial will resume on Friday at 12:00PM ET.
On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Biden held a bipartisan meeting with some of those same Senators who were locked in the Senate chamber for the impeachment trial, just a few hours before Day 3 of the trial began. The meeting was held to discuss infrastructure, but the President did say that he watched some news coverage of his predecessor’s impeachment trial (he said earlier this week that he will not be watching the trial in its entirety). He told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday that he believes “some minds may have been changed” after looking at the evidence that House managers presented.
That wasn’t the only piece of news from the Biden Administration on Thursday. The President announced that the federal government has purchased another 200 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, and promised that there will be enough doses to vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of July. But he acknowledged that his administration still has some work to do in order to reach that goal.