Here’s what happened when a GOP senator was cornered on voting to acquit Trump for Jan. 6

04 April 2024

A month after the January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol, 43 Republican senators voted to acquit former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. If even just 10 of those Republicans sided with seven of their GOP colleagues and all 50 Democrats, Trump would have been ousted from office — and potentially barred from running again.

One of those 43 Republicans was Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), an establishment Republican who previously served in the George W. Bush administration. Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg recently shared his experience about what happened when he confronted Portman during the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2022.

That interview took place the same day Cassidy Hutchinson — a senior aide to former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. One of the more harrowing details Hutchinson shared with the committee while under oath was that Trump was nonchalant about the fact that many of the insurrectionists storming the Capitol building had weapons.

"I don’t f---ing care that they have weapons," Hutchinson recalled the former president saying. "They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f---ing [metal detectors] away."

Goldberg recalled he was watching Hutchinson's testimony the same day he was due to interview Portman about what he noted was a far more safe topic of infrastructure spending. Even though the event organizers encouraged him to not divert from that topic while interviewing Portman in front of roughly 2,000 attendees, Goldberg wrote that he "did believe it to be my professional responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly, about his current views of Donald Trump."

While Goldberg gave Portman credit for denouncing Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape that emerged in 2016 in which the GOP nominee made crude remarks suggesting he routinely groped women without their consent, he nonetheless endorsed Trump's candidacy in 2020 and ultimately voted to acquit him the week after the January 6 insurrection. Goldberg also noted that Portman wasn't the main offender among the Senate Republican Caucus, believing that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the GOP leader, could have pressured enough of his fellow Republicans to convict if he chose.

"I wanted to ask [Portman] if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his decision," Goldberg recalled. "I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation, in a position to influence his colleagues."

When the two were onstage, Goldberg put aside the topic of infrastructure spending and simply asked Portman, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?”

"Portman immediately expressed his unhappiness with what he took to be an outré question," Goldberg wrote, recalling that Portman initially complained that Goldberg hadn’t told him beforehand that he would ask a question about Trump.

"American journalists generally do not warn government officials of their questions ahead of time," Goldberg wrote. Portman then reportedly reminded Goldberg about his harsh words condemning Trump for his role in the insurrection. And while Goldberg credited Portman for his speech on the floor of the US Senate, and while the former Ohio senator insisted "that's who I am," Goldberg disagreed.

"This is not who he is. Portman showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent, antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election," Goldberg wrote. He recalled that Portman insisted that convicting a former president in an impeachment trial would have violated norms, and would have "further politicized the impeachment process." Portman suggested that Republicans may seek to impeach and convict former President Barack Obama in the future had the same been done with Trump.

"It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make: Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out of spite," Goldberg noted. "I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him."

Click here to read Goldberg's full essay in The Atlantic (subscription required).

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