Trump Says Senate Gave Him ‘Full, Complete’ Acquittal in Trial
Trump Grabs Spotlight Ahead of New Hampshire Democratic Primary
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump bragged about his “full, complete” acquittal in his first rally since the Republican-led Senate cleared him in his impeachment trial, while assailing Democrats and undocumented immigrants and repeating a false claim about his 2016 election.
Trump addressed thousands of supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire the day before Democrats running to challenge his re-election will hold their primary election in the state. The president’s rally was his latest effort to steal the spotlight from his rivals; he held a similar rally in Des Moines, Iowa, before the error-plagued Democratic caucus there last week.
In between the two rallies, the Senate voted to reject two articles of impeachment against Trump the Democratic-led House passed in response to his attempt to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Senate Republicans “voted to reject the outrageous, partisan impeachment hoax, and to issue a full, complete and absolute, total acquittal. And it wasn’t even close,” Trump said. “In the House, we won 196 to 0, and then we got three Democrats. And in the Senate, other than Romney, we got 52 to nothing.”
Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to remove a president of his own party from office. He supported one of the two articles of impeachment.
“The radical left’s pathetic partisan crusade has completely failed and utterly backfired with 18 votes, think of that, 18 votes to spare,” he said. The Senate fell 18 votes shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Trump.
Dover Stop
After the rally, Trump planned to fly to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to witness the return of the remains of two service members killed in Afghanistan. Army Sergeant First Class Javier Gutierrez and Army Sergeant First Class Antonio Rodriguez were killed on Saturday in Nangarhar Province, according to the Pentagon. Both men were 28 years old.
“These visits and the visits to Walter Reed are the toughest thing the president does,” National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told reporters traveling with Trump. “He thinks it’s important to be there for the families.”
NBC News reported that the two soldiers were killed by a person wearing an Afghan uniform during a joint operation with the country’s military.
The solemn visit to the airfield was a contrast to the rally, where Trump reveled in his supporters’ adulation and mocked his political rivals. He has repeatedly jabbed Democrats for the chaotic Iowa caucuses last week that yielded no clear winner. He said Monday he would travel to New Hampshire in order to “shake up the Dems a little bit.”
The rally is part of the Trump campaign’s strategy to try to spook Democrats by showing off its financial and organizational might in key early states, even without Trump facing a serious primary challenge.
“We have the highest poll numbers that we’ve ever had,” Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “Thank you Nancy,” he said, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
At one point the Manchester audience changed “lock her up” about Pelosi, re-purposing a chant Trump’s supporters usually apply to his 2016 opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But a poll published Monday by Quinnipiac University shows that the president has reason to worry about the general election: All of the top Democratic candidates lead him in hypothetical matchups, with Michael Bloomberg beating him the worst at 51% to 42%, and Bernie Sanders defeating him 51% to 43%.
The poll surveyed 1,519 registered voters nationwide and had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
(Bloomberg is the co-founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
False Claim
Trump narrowly lost to Clinton in New Hampshire during his 2016 victory, and on Monday revisited a false conspiracy theory about the election: That Democrats illegally bused voters from more liberal Massachusetts to New Hampshire to swing the vote for Clinton.
“We should’ve won the election but they had buses being shipped up from Massachusets,” Trump falsely told his audience. He pointed out that Republican Chris Sununu is now governor of New Hampshire and said: “Now you get prosecuted if you do what they did.”
He later encouraged his audience to vote for “the weakest” candidate in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary on Tuesday. The state has open primaries, meaning voters can choose to participate in either party’s nominating contest regardless of their registration.
“If you want to vote for a weak candidate tomorrow, go ahead, vote for one,” Trump said. “Pick the weakest candidate, I don’t know who it is.”
Return to ‘The Snake’
Trump recited a poem he popularized during his 2016 election, “The Snake,” which he has re-purposed from its original meaning to apply to immigrants. The poem tells the story of a well-meaning woman who encounters a “half-frozen” snake on her way to work and brings it to her home to revive it, only for the snake to later bite and kill her.
“This is illegal immigration,” Trump said before reciting the poem. It was originally written by civil-rights activist Oscar Brown in the 1960s, according to the Washington Post.
“Got to come in legally and through merit,” Trump said after he had finished.
Trump grabbed front page headlines in the Des Moines Register days before the Iowa caucuses by holding a rally and flooding the state with campaign and administration officials. He has since capitalized on the bungled caucus to argue that Democratic candidates would be incapable of governing the country.
The campaign is using a nearly identical approach in New Hampshire, announcing last week that Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky would be among more than a dozen surrogates deployed to the Granite State before Tuesday’s primary.
“While the Democrats are still shaking off the embarrassment of their Iowa caucuses disaster, Team Trump remains organized and focused, and we intend to move New Hampshire into the win column in November,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.
Trump’s appearance comes at a pivotal moment in the Democratic primary race. The final Boston Globe/Suffolk/WBZ tracking poll showed Senator Bernie Sanders in the lead in New Hampshire with 26% of likely primary voters, followed by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 19% and Senator Amy Klobuchar at 13%. Former Vice President Joe Biden, once the field’s front-runner, and Senator Elizabeth Warren are each polling around 11%.
Trump has seized on the popularity of Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, to argue the entire Democratic field as too far left. Murtaugh said the campaign’s main goal would be to “remind voters of the dangers of the Democrats’ big-government socialist agenda.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jordan Fabian in Washington at jfabian6@bloomberg.net;Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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