Trump used acquittal speech to deliver swift retribution on Mitt Romney

This was a newly emboldened president, one who challenges the religion and godliness of people purely because of their disloyalty to his administration, writes Holly Baxter

(AP)

When Mitt Romney, the Republican Senator for Utah, announced that he would be voting “guilty” to the first article in the impeachment trial, we knew – and he knew – there would be consequences.

It seemed, in the few hours before casting his vote, that Mr Romney held out some hope he might be joined by a couple of other rebelling senators from his own party, but it wasn’t to be. He went down in history on Wednesday night as the only member of the Senate to ever have voted against a president from his own party. It’s a lonely place to be, but even more so under this White House administration.

Retribution was swift and ruthless. It was only minutes after his father had been acquitted that Donald Trump Jr started tweeting about kicking Mr Romney out of the party, referring to him as “forever bitter”. His father, who spent the earlier part of Thursday morning holding up newspapers for the camera with front-page headlines reading “TRUMP ACQUITTED”, had already used the social media site to joke about being president for ever after the judgment was announced. His post-acquittal speech at midday on Thursday was expected to be as vitriolic as it was celebratory.

The speech began late, at 12.25pm, with the swelling notes of Hail to the Chief announcing the arrival along a red carpet of the 45th President of the United States. He was wearing the same miniature American flag pin that he wore during Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, and he struck many of the same notes. “Everybody wanted to come today,” he began, while gesturing at the 100 or so filled seats in the room. Half an hour or so later, he even claimed that “every one” of the members of the winning team at the Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, “want to be here”.

It was a classic Trumpian effort – lots of talk about the businesses and sports teams he owned throughout the years, claims about being a “genius”, a walk-on bit part for both Ivanka and Melania, who he said had been put through a “phoney, rotten deal” by “very sick people”. As at the State of the Union, he asked people to stand; but this time, rather than military heroes or people who had benefited from his policies, these were loyal members of his administration who had stuck by him during the impeachment trial. Mitch McConnell, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, Mike Lee and Josh Hawley all got a mention. Lee provided the president with one of his favourite narratives: the one of the principled, unruly politician who likes to rebel but ultimately decides he’s going to “do what’s right” and stick by Mr Trump. “He’s difficult,” the president said to laughs, before detailing how the senator supposedly finds problems with every single bill put forward (“It’s always 99 saying yes and one saying no, and I say: ‘Don’t tell me who the one is’”) but stayed loyal when push came to shove.

Of course, this was all carefully calculated to hurt Mr Romney; it helps that Mr Lee is a senator in Utah, Mr Romney’s own state. It seems that Mr Trump was particularly stung by Mr Romney’s explanation for his “guilty” vote: he spoke publicly about how he was guided by his faith, and how he took an oath under God very seriously.

Mr Trump, who is depending heavily on the evangelical vote in the November election, went on the offensive against people who he would rather not be thought of as proper Christians. This included Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who ripped up the president’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night and who said in a press conference an hour before Mr Trump’s Thursday speech that she prays “hard” for him “because he’s so off track… and I do sincerely”.

“Some… use religion as a crutch,” said Mr Trump, returning first to Mr Romney (though without initially mentioning him by name): “He’s a failed presidential candidate and things happen when you fail so badly to be president.” Later, he circled back to Ms Pelosi, saying: “Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. She didn’t pray for me. She may pray but she prays for the opposite. I doubt she prays at all.” Trump Jr, back on Twitter, wrote: “Likelihood of Nancy Pelosi praying for Trump is about the same as Satan running round quoting Scriptures.” (We can try to contain the irony of the fact that silver-tongued Satan is indeed mentioned in the bible as familiar with scripture and prone to quoting it in dishonest contexts.)

This was a newly emboldened Mr Trump, one who challenges the religion and godliness of people purely because of their disloyalty to his administration. He also forgot himself once or twice, rambled a little about his business ventures and said of the Mueller investigation that “it was all bull****”. A president is not expected to swear onstage in a country this concerned with bad language, and there were some gasps in the New York bureau when he used the word so casually. Similarly, there were genuine expressions of surprise when he said that “if this [impeachment trial] had happened to Obama, many people would have been in jail for many, many years”.

The rest of his time Mr Trump dedicated to long accolades for his loyal Republicans in a performance of deliberate exclusion crafted, no doubt, for Mr Romney. He promised more rallies and a successful re-election campaign, and made a couple of veiled threats about what might happen to people who didn’t stand by him for the following four years if he won again. He throw in a couple of allegations about “corrupt” Hunter Biden for good measure.

“That was not a State of the Union – that was the state of his mind,” Ms Pelosi had said previously. We got another, similar insight into the mind of the president on Thursday. Now that he’s achieved “total acquittal”, he will be using the impeachment process as a stick with which to beat whichever Democrat he faces later in the year. But with his approval rating currently at around 44 per cent, it’s far from guaranteed that that strategy will succeed.