Republicans start saying Trump bears responsibility for the riot

The first noticeable shift after the House impeached Donald Trump was not just procedural. It was tonal. In the hours that followed, a few Republicans who had spent years defending him began using clearer language about the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it. That mattered because the argument was no longer only about loyalty or politics. It was about responsibility. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said on January 13 that Trump bore responsibility for the attack on Congress, even as McCarthy opposed impeachment and warned that another trial would deepen the country’s divide. On January 14, Senator Lisa Murkowski said the House had done the right thing and tied Trump’s rhetoric to the violence that had shaken the chamber and interrupted the transfer of power. Representative Tom Rice, who voted for impeachment, said Trump’s failure was not a small one: in Rice’s account, the president had not adequately addressed the nation or shown the kind of leadership the moment demanded after the assault. Those statements did not amount to a full break with Trump across the party. They did, however, mark a real change in how some Republicans were talking in public. McCarthy’s comment showed the party’s central contradiction: he could assign blame without endorsing the remedy. Murkowski and Rice went further, treating the attack as something Trump had helped set in motion and something that demanded a response beyond ritual concern. The differences matter. One was blame without support for impeachment. The others were support for impeachment itself, or a public argument that the attack could not be separated from Trump’s conduct. The practical effect was modest but real. Republican leaders were no longer relying only on vague appeals to unity or calls to move on. Some were saying, plainly, that Trump’s words and actions had consequences. That did not end his influence, and it did not erase the party’s hesitation. But it did put a new record in place, one that connected the riot to the man who had spent years defining the party’s politics and testing the limits of what it would excuse.