Impeachment was now the official soundtrack of Trump’s exit

On January 21, 2021, Donald Trump’s exit from office already looked less like the end of a presidency than the start of a long constitutional fight over what happened in its final days. The House had voted to impeach him on January 13 for incitement of insurrection after the attack on the Capitol, and the Senate was still preparing the ground for the trial that would follow. The article had not yet been delivered to the Senate on that date, but the political system had already moved into damage-control mode. The question in Washington was no longer whether the riot had happened or whether Trump had helped create the conditions for it. It was how Congress would respond now that the facts were fixed and the former president was out of office. That sequence mattered. The House did not impeach Trump in a vacuum and the Senate was not yet sitting as a court of impeachment on January 21. What existed then was a pending trial, a set of procedural talks, and a country still processing the sight of a mob breaking into the Capitol while lawmakers fled and the electoral count was interrupted. The attack on January 6 was the most serious assault on Congress in decades, and the impeachment article was Congress’s formal answer to it. It charged that Trump had repeatedly pushed false claims about the election, summoned supporters to Washington, and directed them toward the Capitol on the day Congress was meeting to certify the result. The impeachment did not create the crisis. It documented it in the language the Constitution provides. That left Republicans with a problem they could not dodge by changing the subject. Trump had spent years training his party to treat loyalty as a test of survival, and now that habit had become a trap. Defend him, and they risked looking complicit in an attack on the institution they served. Break with him, and they risked angering a base that still saw him as the center of the party. Try to stay above it, and they looked like they were ducking the plain meaning of the events in front of them. The result was a familiar Washington scramble: some lawmakers reached for procedural language, some reached for distance, and some reached for silence. None of it changed the underlying fact that the party Trump built was being forced to decide what kind of institution it wanted to be after he was gone from the White House. The broader point was not mysterious. Trump’s final stretch in office had pushed the country into territory where ordinary political spin no longer fit the facts. The House had already acted. The Senate was getting ready to act. And the first days after the inauguration showed that the consequences of January 6 would not be limited to criminal investigations, security reviews, or another round of campaign arguments. They were going to run through Congress itself. Whether the Senate would convict Trump was still unknown on January 21. What was already clear was that his departure from office would be shadowed by impeachment, and that the country was entering a reckoning over how much damage a defeated president could do on the way out.