Senate Trial has started.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Trump was/is a RINO.... (He was a self defined Democrat first).

I think in time he will simply be seen as an anomaly.

And his folllowers fringe lunatics....

If the definition of  RINO can be spread so thin it can involve someone who not  only led the Republican Party, but also got the whole damn party to triangulate around him to the point where they didn't even create an actual platform in the last election (note: this is the first time since, at the very latest, 1840, that ANY party that won a single electoral vote in the Presidential election didn't bother to make a new platform), and you somehow completely ignore the sea change in racial views in the Democratic Party that happened in the fifty years prior to Trump's election (and how the Republicans managed to pick up the slack almost immediately,) then, yes, maybe Trump is a RINO.

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Trump's lawyers just rested their defense.

Easiest case in history. These guys could have stood before the Senate and said, 'Donald Trump is a walking pile of pig shite. He's unfit for office, he incited an insurrection whose sole purpose was to negate the results of a free, fair, and transparent election. He is guilty of attempting to destroy American democracy - guilty, guilty, guilty. Do your duty and convict him' and these spineless, saggy-kneed, lickspittle sycophants would STILL acquit him.

Boru

It's worse. They basically either did some whataboutism or they basically argued that inciting violence should be protected speech, citing clips of Elizabeth Warren and other politicians about fighting that I'm almost certain were not in the sort of context they were implying, and celebrities making idle remarks about potential violence towards the President (which were A: pretty universally condemned among their audience, B: were not the same direct incitement that Trump et al's speeches at the January 6 rally wound up being, and C: ended up having no real-world effect on anything) and asking "if they can do it, why can't Trump openly ask his followers to storm the Capitol?"

Which precisely proves my point - they could have said literally anything and Trump would have been acquitted.

Check of proof: wait for the vote.

Boru