Today Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is finally starting in the US Senate. After several weeks of preparations and scheduling, the upper chamber of Congress will formally begin the trial of the former President today amid much controversy surrounding the Republican Party.
Trump stands accused of inciting violence and directly causing the riot on Capitol Hill a month ago, where five people died. The lives of House Representatives and Senators alike were in danger, and even Vice President Mike Pence barely made it out of a potentially life-threatening situation when armed Trump supporters stormed the building. The rioters came from a Trump rally where the former President told them “to fight” for their country, once again refusing to acknowledge his own defeat in the elections.
Some in the Republican Party were so deeply affected by the attack that they could no longer support Trump. As many as ten Republicans in the House voted in support of impeachment. But the story in the Senate is slightly different. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has not specified whether he would support impeachment, but even he was critical of Trump’s actions. Still, many Republicans are likely going to question the constitutionality of impeaching a president no longer in office.
All Senate Democrats and VP Kamala Harris are likely to support impeachment, but they need at least 16 Republicans to also turn on Trump for the trial to be successful. At the moment, this scenario doesn’t seem likely.
In other news, today Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are gaining in value after Elon Musk made good on his recent hints over Twitter that he is interested in Bitcoin by investing $1.5 billion into the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, a report from the World Health Organization seems to have absolved China to a degree regarding the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. A WHO team of investigators entered China a few weeks ago to study how the pandemic began. They found no evidence of Covid-19 having been made in a lab, as some had suspected. Instead, the official stance of the WHO for now is that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal.
