Purely as a matter of political self-interest, congressional Republicans had some good reasons to abandon Donald Trump as the de facto leader of their party.
Trump is unpopular with most Americans, and he has been for his entire political career. He was able to win the presidency in 2016 only with help from some unusual factors — including an unpopular opponent intervention from both Russia and the F.B.I director and razor-thin wins in three swing states.
Today, Trump is a defeated one-term president who never cracked 47 percent of the vote, and political parties are usually happy to move on from presidents who lose re-election.
That would have been true even before Trump’s reaction to his defeat. He became the first president in U.S. history to try to overturn a result election, and he incited a crowd of supporters that violently attacked Congress while it was meeting to certify the results. (here is the latest about what he knew during the riot.) On the Senate floor this weekend, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack and accused him of “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
Partly because of the riot, Trump left office with just a 30% approval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight. Multiple recent polls showed that a majority of Americans thought that the Senate should convict him and disqualify him from holding future office.
So why didn’t Senate Republicans do so?