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Yes, Trump can probably still expect a second acquittal in 2021. But Trump has three main post-presidential goals, and the forthcoming trial will do severe and possibly lethal damage to all three.

Trump’s maximal post-presidential goal is to position himself for a comeback run in 2024

Failing that, Trump would like to demonstrate that—president or not—he remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, a leader surpassing all others.

Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump in his historic second impeachment trial on Friday equated instances of violence and rioting that broke out during last summer's protests for racial justice with the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection by pro-Trump extremists, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy in supporting the earlier demonstrations.

"Did you tone down the rhetoric last summer when all of this was happening? Did you condemn the rioters, or did you stand with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi who said 'people are going to do what they're going to do,' " attorney David Schoen said. In fact, many Democratic leaders, including now-President Biden, condemned the looting and violence that occurred around the protests.

In actuality, there has been no evidence thus far of any significant presence of far-leftwing instigators, and an NPR assessment of arrests of Capitol insurrectionists shows clear ties to the far right.

The impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump largely focused on his actions leading up to the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. But there was a crucial period that day of nearly five hours — between the end of Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and a final tweet telling his followers to remember the day forever — that remains critical to his state of mind.

Mr. Trump’s intent to incite the mob and of his dereliction to stop the violence, even when he knew that the life of Vice President Mike Pence was in danger.

At 2:12 p.m., the same moment that the mob breached the building itself, Mr. Pence — who had defied the president by saying he planned to certify Mr. Biden’s victory — was rushed off the Senate floor. A minute later, the Senate session was recessed. Two minutes after that, at 2:15 p.m., groups of rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”

A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.

But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.

The simple question posed by Donald Trump's second impeachment trial that begins Tuesday is whether a president who loses reelection can get away with a violent coup attempt in a desperate bid to stay in power.

The answer contained in the former commander-in-chief's likely acquittal for inciting a deadly mob assault on the Capitol will echo through generations and may influence the outcome of some unknowable future test of US democracy.

Events of the next week or so will inform the country's capacity to move on from a traumatic presidency that left it as divided as at any time since the Civil War.

even after witnessing the deadly violence firsthand, and being reminded of it again at the scene of the crime, many Republican senators appeared no closer on Wednesday to convicting former President Donald Trump on the charge of "incitement of insurrection."

these Republicans said that the House Democrats did not prove Trump's words led to the violent actions. They compared the January 6 riot to last summer's racial justice protests and criticized how the trial is being handled.

"I think there's more votes for acquittal after today than there was yesterday," the South Carolina Republican said.

Impeachment prosecutors took senators on a wrenching journey inside the horror of the US Capitol insurrection, making a devastating case that Donald Trump had plotted, incited and celebrated a vile crime against the United States.

Surveillance footage depicted then-Vice President Mike Pence being hustled away with rioters calling for him to be hanged only yards away. A police officer screamed in pain, trapped between a door and an invading crowd. In a horrific scene, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt tried to climb through a window smashed by rioters before falling back, shot dead by a Capitol Police officer.

The stunningly powerful presentation painted the most complete narrative yet of the assault on the Congress as it met to certify Joe Biden's election win on January 6.Read MoreTheir explicit and unsettling case made clear that the terror inside the corridors of power was even more frightening than it had first appeared. It's now apparent that only good luck, and the bravery of police, prevented senior members of Congress injured or killed.

Advisers to former President Donald Trump say he still has not expressed remorse for the siege at the US Capitol, which could end up being important for Senate jurors to consider after House impeachment managers on Wednesday released new video of the violent mob's assault on January 6.

One of the new clips show then-Vice President Mike Pence and his family being hustled away by Secret Service as the siege was under way.

Pence, who plans to keep laying low during the impeachment trial, has not quite patched up his relationship with Trump after what happened, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Nothing made that clearer than Wednesday's presentation at former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, where the case against him unfolded more like a true-crime documentary than a staid political trial.

The photos, the videos, the phone calls, the affidavits -- some of which had never been shared publicly before -- were chilling, gut-wrenching, horrifying and at times even nauseating.

From the bloodcurdling calls from Capitol police, begging for backup as an angry, violent mob breached the Capitol, to the stunning footage of Officer Eugene Goodman diverting Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah away from an imminent threat of danger, to video of Vice President Mike Pence being hurriedly evacuated, and affidavits revealing rioters "would have killed Mike Pence if given the chance," it is all unspeakably awful and somehow even worse than we knew.

A group of more than 100 former Republican officials have discussed the possibility of forming a conservative party due to their unhappiness with the direction of the GOP under former President Donald Trump and the likelihood he'll be acquitted at the end of his second impeachment trial, according to Republicans who participated in the conversation.

"Clearly, there are a number of Republicans like myself and other Republican leaders, who want a clean break from President Trump, and we are kind of rallying around some core founding principles like truth and honesty, and democracy, and rule of law," the former Pennsylvania congressman, who is a CNN contributor, told CNN's Chris Cuomo Thursday.

The call came nearly a month after the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, when Trump supporters attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 election, believing the false claim promoted by Trump that it was stolen from him. One week later, the US House voted to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection," with 10 Republicans joining with Democrats.

The first time I realized that Donald Trump took pleasure in violence was back in March 2016. In an interview, I asked him about the brutish rhetoric and violence at his rallies and the way he goaded supporters to hate on journalists and rough up protesters. Even then Mitch McConnell was urging Trump to ratchet down the ferocity.I told Trump that I had not seen this side of him before and that he was going down a very dark path. With his denigrating mockery of rivals and critics, he had already taken politics to a vulgar place, and now it was getting more dangerous.Shouldn’t parents be able to bring children to rallies without worrying about obscenities, sucker punches, brawls and bullying, I wondered?

He brushed off the questions and blithely assessed the savage mood at his rallies: “Frankly, it adds a little excitement.”

A couple weeks later, I pressed him again on his belligerence and divisiveness, and, with utter candor, he explained why he was turning up the heat.“I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1 and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?” he said. “I’ve come this far in life. I’ve had great success. I’ve done it my way.” He added, “You know, there are a lot of people who say, ‘Don’t change.’”

last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.

“I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”

Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.

Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden's attorney general nominee, vowed Monday to keep politics out of the Justice Department and to fully prosecute the "heinous" crimes committed in the attack on the US Capitol in the deadly riot on January 6.

Garland was praised by Republicans and Democrats alike in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, where he faced questions about the politically charged investigations that await him if confirmed to lead the Justice Department

he strongly rebuked the Trump administration's child separation immigration policy, calling it "shameful" and committing to aiding a Senate investigation into the matter.

We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.

What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.”

Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event.

Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a tougher, more resilient species always will win out over its weaker counterparts. But what if he didn’t mean that at all

researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication.

For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.

Yet for precisely this reason, Fox also functions as a kind of security blanket: It persuades Trump that he’s succeeding, which provides an effective reality distortion field against outside criticism.

Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically, due to a pathological refusal to admit earlier error and “overly rosy assessments and data" from Fox News:Another self-imposed hurdle for Trump has been his reliance on a positive feedback loop. Rather than sit for briefings by infectious-disease director Anthony S. Fauci and other medical experts, the president consumes much of his information about the virus from Fox News Channel and other conservative media sources, where his on-air boosters put a positive spin on developments.

When people look back on this surreal election year, I suspect they will see plague as the core actor. If you take a normal, functioning society and then force it to go underground for months, freezing it in place, forcing its members into long and unnatural mutual isolation, suspending the usual ways in which people make a living, ratcheting up financial insecurity … well, that’s a recipe for serious social upheaval.

it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society. 

I wrote about the Flagellants in the essay—a new group of fanatical, radical penitents who challenged and mocked the church authorities during the Black Death, whipping themselves bloody in large crowds across Germany, calling everyone to account for their sins. It’s the same dynamic now: a movement to use a plague to cleanse ourselves of the past and indict the entire community for its iniquity

The embrace of a Scandinavian Jesus is not just foolish but part of a broader historical amnesia. Jesus not only looked like a Middle Eastern Jew; this identity also made him part of an oppressed, dispossessed group. A sense of Jewish powerlessness was the social context for his ministry, and his teaching reflected it.

Jesus offered little advice to the privileged, except to humble themselves and give their wealth away. He had much to say about the inherent value of the poor, the meek and the mourning. This message was one reason he suffered a brutal, unjust, suffocating death at the hands of public authorities.

The Christian message has always been more easily and fully understood by those who lack social privilege — by those who see the face of a nonwhite Jesus.

eaders in Europe marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in recent days. Wreaths were laid, somber speeches intoned, and promises made to “never forget.”

The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us of how much World War II is hard-wired in the West’s political imagination.

But figures like Trump and Johnson, whose political parties presided over years of austerity or maintain an aversion to social spending, aren’t the sort of statesmen who would champion a New Deal or forge the National Health Service.

President Donald Trump began his Wednesday with a Twitter spree defending himself, attacking his critics and suggesting he's done more for black Americans than any president, with the "possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln.

The tweets come as the White House is facing ongoing fallout from the President's response to ongoing protests and the events of Monday evening, where peaceful protesters were forcefully dispersed before curfew so he could participate in a photo opportunity with a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which suffered a fire during protests over the weekend. The move has been widely criticized by clergy.

After a night of largely peaceful protests around the country with some brief clashes near the White House, Trump has tweeted or retweeted 40 times since 5:52 a.m. He said he's "done much more for our Black population" than 2020 rival Joe Biden or "any President in U.S. history, with the possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln, trained his ire at the media, promoted baseless conspiracy theories about his predecessor, called for "LAW AND ORDER!" and congratulated Randy Feenstra, who bested Iowa Rep. Steve King in Tuesday's primary.