Ivanka Trump Slammed The Impeachment Trial After The Final Vote
The Senate impeachment trial came to close on Wednesday, Feb. 5, when the Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit President Donald Trump on both of the impeachment charges against him. Shortly after the Senate voted to keep President Trump in office, the president's eldest daughter took to Twitter to celebrate his acquittal. Ivanka Trump's reaction to the impeachment vote in the Senate slammed the entire process as "ill-conceived," and called on the country to "move forward."
Trump's tweet came not long after the Senate voted almost entirely along party lines to acquit the president on both of the impeachment charges against him — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate's vote followed weeks of heated debate, during which the chamber's GOP majority declined to hear additional witness testimony. Like many Republicans, Trump was critical of the impeachment process in her tweet, which came out about half an hour after the vote, and she applauded her father's acquittal.
"This factional fever and incoherent, ill-conceived process has finally ended and the President has rightfully been acquitted," Trump tweeted. "POTUS has accomplished so much and is just getting started," Trump added. "The best is yet to come!" The president's daughter concluded her tweet with an American flag emoji.
This is not the first time that Trump has defended her father over impeachment. Back in November 2019, following public hearings in the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry, Trump tweeted a quote about "a decline of public morals" that she mistakenly attributed to the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville. “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office," Trump tweeted at the time. As many Twitter users subsequently pointed out, it was not de Tocqueville who said this, but John Innes Clark Hare, in his 1889 book "American Constitutional Law."
Trump was also critical of the impeachment process in a December 2019 interview with CBS News' Face the Nation. In that interview, Trump suggested that this was "the first purely partisan impeachment." She also claimed that Americans' public support for impeachment had decreased, rather than increased, over time. An ongoing poll from FiveThirtyEight disproved Trump's claim, however. At the time of Trump's CBS News interview, FiveThirtyEight reported that approximately 47% of Americans were in favor of impeachment, up from an estimated 45% in October 2019.
Although Trump has routinely criticized the impeachment process, she has kept her more specific opinions about witness subpoenas to herself. In January 2020, Trump joined her father at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where she voiced her frustration about the then-ongoing impeachment trial. But according to The New York Times, Trump was vague when she was asked about whether the Senate should hear witness testimony.
“I have an opinion, but it would be one voice in many,” Trump said, “so I’ve largely deferred to the legal team.”
She may not have been explicit about witness subpoenas, but Trump has made it clear for months that she shares the president's frustration with the impeachment process, and her latest tweet merely solidified that sentiment.
