Exiled Trump Already Fixated on Who’s Blocking a Comeback
On Wednesday, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, and in the afternoon officially began the process of rolling back or undoing a slate of Donald Trump’s policies and directives. But at his private Florida club Mar-a-Lago, the former president was already plotting a possible return to Washington, D.C., and calling around to close allies in part to ask if members of his own party were trying to screw him out of a future comeback.
Once ensconced in his new home base, the twice-impeached former commander in chief began making phone calls to ask questions about a potential Senate impeachment trial and if some Republican lawmakers will vote to bar him from ever again holding the office of the presidency, according to two people with knowledge of the calls. He also inquired about what lawyers would be good to place on a potential legal team to fight back in a Senate proceeding.
The Senate has still not received the article of impeachment that passed a week ago in the House, so no date for a trial has been set, but a trial would determine whether the president is guilty of, per the article of impeachment, “willfully [making] statements to the crowd that encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol” on Jan. 6.