Just a day from now, former President Donald Trump will be again standing trial in the Senate, making him the first President to ever have been impeached twice.
This trial will seek to determine whether or not Trump’s speech before a raucous crowd near the Capitol on January 6th incited the mob to overrun police forces and lay siege to the historic building.
The Democrats aren’t only looking to convict Trump, however: The also wish to try barring him from holding any future offices as well.
A new poll shows just how Americans feel about that.
Compared to public attitudes in the early days of his first impeachment trial, support for the Senate convicting Trump is higher now. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll published in late January 2020, when the first trial was ongoing but before senators had voted, 47% of Americans said the Senate should vote to remove Trump from office and 49% said he should not be removed.
But in this latest poll, 56% of Americans say Trump should be convicted and barred from holding office again, and 43% say he should not be. The new poll was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.
Meanwhile, the attention on Capitol Hill last week focused more on the fate of a new Republican member of Congress who has faced backlash for espousing extremist views and support for the QAnon conspiracy theory in her past. That focus, which followed the deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that Trump is accused of inciting, seems to have taken a toll on the public’s perception of the party. By a 17-point margin, Americans say there are more radical extremists within the GOP than the Democratic Party.
Trump’s legal team is said to be preparing a bit of a wildcard defense, and could be seeking to address the idea that the 2020 election was not a fair and Democratic process – which is the same sentiment that motivated those who infiltrated the Capitol on January 6th.