Republicans ran for their lives during the insurrection — but won’t run from Trump

The apparent inability of Republicans to hold Donald Trump accountable was the focus of the latest letter from Washington by New York writer Susan Glasser.

"Afew hours into the presentation of the House managers' case against Donald Trump, for inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Representative Eric Swalwell, of California, played senators an extraordinary new clip of themselves on that awful day. The previously undisclosed security-camera footage was short. There was no sound. It simply showed senators running down a long corridor, to escape from the mob. This was no calm, orderly evacuation. These were members of Congress running for their lives," she wrote. "Swalwell said that he went back and checked to see how close the rioters had come to the senators. The answer was fifty-eight steps. 'We all know that awful day could have been so much worse,' he said."

Glasser explained that "A few minutes later, Swalwell—the son and brother of cops, he noted—played a series of increasingly frantic radio transmissions by members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, as they tried and failed to contain the riot that ultimately injured dozens of officers. 'We lost the line. We've lost the line,' an officer shouts. 'All M.P.D., pull back,' he screams. 'Pull back.'"

The mob wasn't just those who stormed the building, but some of the elected officials who were supposed to be there.

"And that, as always in the Trump era, is what it comes back to: Trump alone never could have wreaked such mayhem on our democracy, on our Capitol. His mob is not just the thugs who attacked cops with flagpoles on January 6th; it also includes some of the elected officials inside the besieged building, the ones in suits who advanced and promoted Trump's election lies, just as they had advanced and promoted so many of his other lies for the previous four years. Of course, they are standing by him now," she explained.

Glasser came to a terrifying conclusion.

"The unprecedented second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is not yet over, though it soon will be, and the outcome is, once again, not much in doubt. A year ago, when Trump faced his first trial, Mitt Romney was the only Senate Republican to vote for his conviction. This time, despite the trial taking place at the actual scene of the crime, Romney was joined by only five other Republicans in voting to allow the trial to proceed. Whether or not those six ultimately vote to convict, the final number of Republicans is sure to be well below the two-thirds majority required for conviction. We lost the line. We lost the line, indeed," Glasser wrote.