House impeachment puts Trump on the record over the Capitol attack

The House handed Donald Trump a second impeachment on Jan. 13, 2021, turning the Capitol attack into a formal charge against a sitting president days before he was due to leave office. The article of impeachment accused him of incitement of insurrection, and the vote made him the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. It passed 232-197, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats. The case rested on a chain of events that started long before the riot itself. For weeks, Trump had pressed false claims that the election had been stolen, then addressed supporters on Jan. 6 while Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s victory. After the speech, a crowd moved to the Capitol, breached security, and halted the count. As of Jan. 14, officials had linked the attack to five deaths, including protesters and a Capitol Police officer whose later cause-of-death findings would continue to be debated. House Democrats framed the impeachment as a constitutional response, not just a political rebuke. Their argument was that Trump had spent months inflaming supporters with a lie about the election and then failed to stop the violence he helped set in motion. The House did not need to prove a criminal case that day; it was making an institutional judgment about conduct it said crossed a line Congress could not ignore. Republicans split over how much to say out loud. Kevin McCarthy said Trump bore responsibility for the attack but opposed impeachment. Liz Cheney voted to impeach him and said he had betrayed his office and oath. Tom Rice, another Republican, also voted yes and said Trump had failed. Others tried to distance themselves from the president without fully backing the House move, a sign that the party was still wrestling with how to respond to a riot that had grown out of his election lies and pressure campaign. The Senate trial was expected after Joe Biden’s inauguration, making this more than a symbolic vote. Trump would leave office, but the impeachment kept the question of accountability alive and forced his party to choose whether it would treat Jan. 6 as a passing rupture or as a line that should never have been crossed in the first place. The House had written its answer into the record: this was not just a protest that got out of hand, but a presidency under formal charge for what happened at the Capitol.