But now his lawyer has. On the floor of the US Senate.
Bruce Castor Jr.’s performance at the outset of Trump’s second impeachment trial will likely be remembered more for his aimless rambling than anything else. But Castor’s Tuesday monologue was also noteworthy for something he said while attempting to get to a rare point.
Castor argued that the real reason Trump was impeached again is that his opponents in the House Democratic majority do not want to see him run in the 2024 election. (If two-thirds of senators present vote to convict Trump, a simple majority of senators could then decide to ban Trump from holding future office.) Castor said the decision on who serves as the next president should be left up to the American people.
And Castor said: “The people are smart enough … to pick a new administration if they don’t like the old one. And they just did.” Then, soon after, Castor added that this is commonplace: “The people get tired of an administration they don’t want. And they know how to change it. And they just did.”
Castor’s assertion about what the people “just did” is obvious to anyone who is willing to acknowledge reality. Except Trump has tried hard to create an alternative reality.
Though Joe Biden trounced Trump in the Electoral College and earned over seven million more votes, fair and square, Trump has declared again and again that the people actually reelected him in a “landslide” and that fraud and theft cheated him out of his rightful victory. (He repeated this nonsense even in the video he tweeted out during the Capitol insurrection.)
While Trump eventually admitted, in his waning days in office, that a new administration would be taking over, he never conceded that voters had truly chosen someone else over him — much less that voters had done so because they did not “want” or “like” the Trump administration.
Trump’s lawyers’ pre-trial statements were filled with Trump-style false claims and distortions. But Castor just meandered his way into truthfully blowing up one of his client’s favorite lies.