Half of Americans believe the Senate should condemn former President Trump
Donald TrumpBiden reverses Trump’s last-minute attempt to freeze 0.4 billion programs Trump announces new legal impeachment team after reported matches Republicans struggle to unify toward the next election cycle MORE to incite an insurrection, according to a Marist survey released on Monday.
With Trump’s Senate impeachment trial approaching, 50 percent of Americans believe the Senate should find the now ex-president guilty for his role in stoking the January 6 US Capitol riot that left five people, including a Capitol cop, dead.
Forty-one percent of respondents said that Trump should be acquitted, according to the Marist survey.
Trump’s impeachment trial – the second in just over a year – is set to begin on February 8, weeks after the House voted to impeach him after the riot.
The impeachment case focuses on Trump’s rhetoric before and during the invasion of the Capitol by a crowd of his supporters, who sought to interrupt Congress’ certification of Electoral College results by showing President Biden as the winner.
At one point before the turmoil broke out, Trump urged his supporters in a speech to “go down to the Capitol” and insisted that they “will never take our country back weakly. Even while his supporters invaded the Capitol, the former president sometimes he seemed to tolerate his behavior, calling the protesters “great patriots” in an excluded tweet.
The episode sparked bipartisan outrage, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle blaming the insurrection directly on Trump.
Still, there is a stark party split when it comes to whether the Senate should condemn him.
Ninety percent of Democrats said Trump should be found guilty of inciting insurrection, while only 5% believe he should be acquitted, according to the Marist poll.
On the other hand, 90 percent of Republicans want to see Trump acquitted at the trial. Only 5% of respondents said he should be convicted.
The independents, however, are a little more divided. A plurality of those interviewed – 49 percent – believe that Trump should be convicted at his Senate trial, while 39 percent wish to see the ex-president exonerated.
To be sure, it seems highly unlikely that enough senators will vote to condemn Trump. At least 67 senators would need to vote to declare the former president guilty. Even if each of the 50 Democrats in the House voted to condemn him, at least 17 Republican members would have to join them.
This is a difficult task. In the clearest indication that Trump is unlikely to be convicted of inciting insurrection, everyone except five Senate Republicans voted last week to dismiss the case against the former president, saying that trying a president who is no longer in office would be unconstitutional .
The Marist survey interviewed 1,313 American adults from January 24 to 27. It has a margin of sampling error of 3.3 percentage points.