Washington Post: McConnell would have happily considered finding Trump guilty, were it not for Mitch McConnell
By PHILIP BUMP
You could feel it coming, the unseeable tsunami on its way as you watched the water receding from the bay.
“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking” the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Saturday, shortly after the majority of his Republican caucus voted against convicting the former president in his second impeachment trial. “No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
Boats were left stranded as the sea withdrew. McConnell himself had voted against convicting Trump, so all of his rhetoric about the former president’s culpability was clearly leading to that most political of words: But.