Trump’s lawyers dismiss impeachment as ‘constitutional cancel culture’ with final vote expected as early as Saturday

Donald Trump’s team of Philadelphia lawyers stepped to the fore of his impeachment trial Friday, delivering a short but incendiary defense that dismissed the proceedings as “constitutional cancel culture” and sought to rewrite his role in the deadly Capitol insurrection.

Confident they have enough Republican votes to secure the former president’s acquittal, with a vote likely on Saturday, attorneys Bruce L. Castor Jr. and Michael T. van der Veen channeled their client’s own combative style. They leaned on partisan grievance to accuse Democrats of advancing a “preposterous and monstrous lie.”

“This trial is about far more than President Trump,” Castor said. “It is about silencing the speech the majority does not agree with. It is about canceling 75 million Trump voters and criminalizing political viewpoints.” (Trump received 74.2 million votes).

They largely ignored the argument Democrats put forth over the previous two days that Trump’s words, false claims of a stolen election, and efforts to convince swing state officials to overturn the results over months were what whipped his supporters into a violent frenzy with deadly consequences.

Instead, they boiled the incitement charge down solely to remarks Trump delivered at the Washington rally that preceded the Jan. 6 attack. When he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” they asserted, his words fell well short of incitement. They maintained he was only using the type of First Amendment-protected, pugnacious rhetoric that has been common in American politics for centuries.

To underscore that point, the lawyers showed video clip after clip — divorced from context and set to ominous music — of Democrats, including the senators in the room and Hillary Clinton, using the word “fight” in speeches and TV appearances.

“This is not what-about-ism,” van der Veen said. “I’m showing you this to make the point that all political speech must be protected.”

» READ MORE: Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen once sued Trump, billed his firm as a bulwark against Trump election interference

The videos of Democrats, which were repeated several times throughout the roughly three-hour presentation, drew dismissive laughs from Democratic senators. ”Show me anytime that … our supporters pulled someone out of the crowd, beat the living crap out of them, and then we said, ‘That’s great. Good for you. You’re a patriot,’ ” Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) said.

Many of the examples, Coons said, came from Democrats talking about fighting for policies. Trump was urging supporters to fight against a lawful election result.

It was just one way Trump’s defense in his second Senate impeachment trial mirrored his style throughout four years in office. His lawyers accused Democrats of stoking hatred and urged them to “cool temperatures” after a term in which the former president reveled in raising them. They accused Democrats of trying to “disenfranchise” Trump voters, after the president spent months trying to throw out election results in Pennsylvania and other states.

Still, the defense presentation — which took up only three of its allotted 16 hours — appeared to accomplish its two main objectives. It gave Republican senators room to justify a vote to acquit and delivered a more forceful showing than the widely panned opening Tuesday that reportedly had Trump looking to sideline Castor.

“They are putting on a good defense today,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) said.

“I’m glad the president’s lawyers pointed out the gross hypocrisy,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said. “If there’s incitement involved here, it started four years ago.”

Senators in both parties anticipated a vote Saturday, with only a handful of Republicans likely to vote to convict. That would end the most rapid presidential impeachment in American history, and potentially close the book, for now, on Trump’s tumultuous years in office — though some Democrats still held out hope for a censure resolution to impose some punishment for his actions.

That GOP praise for the defense was a stark reversal from the perplexed reaction many senators offered Tuesday, when Castor, the former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney, delivered a rambling, 50-minute monologue complete with recitations of Greek history, reminiscences about his time as a suburban prosecutor, and compliments for the Democratic House impeachment managers’ case.

Tensions among Trump, his political advisers, and his defense attorneys — which also include area lawyers William J. Brennan, and Julianne Batemen — have been fraught since then, according to sources close to the team, and had stoked speculation he might bench Castor for the remainder of the trial.

He delivered a more focused, though not entirely gaffe-free performance Friday. At one point, he mistakenly referred to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger — who Trump tried to persuade to overturn the vote in his state — as Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Castor argued that when Trump urged the top Georgia elections official to “find” just enough votes for him to win, he wasn’t trying to get him to manipulate the vote, but rather was instructing him to investigate possible fraud — a nod to the former president’s false conspiracy theory that fed his supporters’ rage.

As for the Capitol attack, Castor played videos of Trump repeatedly declaring himself the president of “law and order” and argued that since there is evidence some rioters planned their attack in advance, they could not have been inspired by Trump’s words Jan. 6. He noted that Trump had urged the crowd to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

“We know that the president would never have wanted such a riot to occur, because his long-standing hatred for violent protesters and his love for law and order is on display, worn on his sleeve, every single day that he served in the White House,” Castor said.

Castor’s focus on that one line from Trump’s rally ignored the point raised by Democrats earlier in the proceedings: that in the nearly 11,000-word speech, Trump used words like “fight” or “fighting” roughly 20 times.

Stacey Plaskett, the Democratic delegate representing the Virgin Islands and one of the House impeachment managers, stressed that Trump had spent not just one day, but months fueling anger among his supporters — leading to those advance plans — and called them to Washington “on a specific day, at a specific time for a specific purpose.” Details in the indictments of numerous Capitol attackers have supported that.

Democrats also pointed to Trump’s long history of cheering violence or threats from his supporters, including supportive tweets after a group surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas, and his jokes at a campaign rally over a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Castor’s remarks weren’t the only time the defense team resorted Friday to selectively responding to the case of House impeachment managers — or to downright falsehoods. At one point, van der Veen pointed to a Trump tweet calling for his supporters to “stay peaceful,” and asserted it was the first message Trump sent out once the insurrection had begun.

But Trump actually tweeted a video montage of the rally and then, in another post, angrily blamed Vice President Mike Pence for resisting his calls to block certification of the election — even as the Capitol was being overrun.

Van der Veen also falsely claimed that the first person charged for their role in the attack was the leader of antifa, a loosely affiliated group of far-left activists. That claim has circulated in right-wing circles, but there is no evidence to support it, and the Justice Department hasn’t made that allegation.

And under questioning from senators later Friday, van der Veen’s posture grew surly. He bristled as Democrats asked if his client knew about the imminent danger Pence faced at the Capitol while Trump was attacking him on Twitter.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) asked if the defense team acknowledged that Trump lost in a free and fair election, he snapped back: “It’s irrelevant!”

It was a striking turn for van der Veen, an attorney who just three months ago sued Trump over changes at the U.S. Postal Service and argued there was no evidence to support Trump’s false claims of fraud in mail voting. In marketing emails, he billed his firm as a bulwark against GOP voter suppression efforts, claiming in one: “Donald Trump doesn’t want you to be able to vote.”

Under questioning Friday, he bemoaned that the trial had “been the most miserable experience I’ve had here down in Washington, D.C.”

Jamie Raskin, the lead House impeachment manager, shot back: “I guess for that we’re sorry. But, man, you should have been here on Jan. 6.”