Good morning. The impeachment trial gets off to a rough start for Donald Trump. |
 | | The impeachment managers walking from the House to the Senate yesterday.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times |
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During the long debate over Donald Trump’s first impeachment, the share of Americans who favored removing him from office never rose above 50 percent. It hovered in a tight range around 47 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. |
Trump’s second impeachment is different: Most Americans believe the Senate should convict Trump and disqualify him from holding office again, according to multiple polls. |
In our deeply polarized country, even a narrow majority of public opinion is significant. It indicates that a meaningful number of people have crossed over to the other side of a debate. In the CBS poll, for example, 21 percent of Republican voters said they believed Trump had encouraged violence during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. (A new Times video lays out the many lies he told about the election, feeding the crowd’s anger.) |
Yesterday was the opening day of the Senate’s impeachment trial, and the weakness of Trump’s case was on display. |
Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat leading the prosecution, opened with a video montage showing both the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s words during that day. (You can watch it here.) Raskin later delivered an impassioned argument recalling his own experience that day. |
“All around me, people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones to say goodbye,” Raskin said. “Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America. We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people.” |
Raskin and other Democratic managers also said that Trump’s lawyers were creating a dangerous precedent by arguing the trial was invalid because Trump was no longer in office. If that were true, the end of every president’s time in office would turn into a “January exception” when he would be immune from consequences for his actions. |
 | | David Schoen, a lawyer for Trump, addressed the Senate, holding a handbook on the U.S. Constitution.Senate Television |
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Trump’s lawyers condemned the attack on the Capitol but said Democrats were pursuing impeachment out of partisan vengeance. And they argued that making a former president stand trial would establish the precedent for any former official to be punished at the whim of the party in power. “This is nothing less than the political weaponization of the impeachment process,” David Schoen, one of the former president’s lawyers, said. |
But the performance of Trump’s lawyers received mostly dreadful reviews. |
Trump himself was furious while watching the proceedings from Palm Beach, Fla., my colleague Maggie Haberman reported. And several of Trump’s Senate allies — including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham — criticized his lawyers’ case as ineffective. |
Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, called the prosecutors’ case focused, organized and compelling. “President Trump’s team were disorganized,” Cassidy added. “They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand, and when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments.” |
Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, noted that the Trump team’s strategy had changed from his last impeachment. “I haven’t heard either of the president’s lawyers say he did nothing wrong,” Carl wrote. “This is a process argument and the Trump team wants to stay away from what happened on Jan. 6 as much as possible.” |
A conviction seems unlikely, largely because many Republican senators fear upsetting the majority of Republican voters who still support Trump. Only six Republican senators voted yesterday with Democrats to proceed with the trial. The remaining agreed with Trump’s lawyers that the Senate could not try a former president. Cassidy was the only senator to change his mind since a similar vote last month. |
Still, the first day did not go well for Trump’s team. Most Americans believe that he incited a violent mob to attack Congress and that he should never hold office again. His lawyers didn’t do much to change that perception yesterday. |
 | | Peter Ben Embarek, head of an international team of experts from the World Health Organization.Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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- After a visit to Wuhan, China, a W.H.O. official said it was “very unlikely” that the coronavirus had accidentally leaked from a laboratory. Some scientists worry that the agency has been too eager to accept Beijing’s narrative.
- The F.D.A. approved a Covid-19 therapy by the drug maker Eli Lilly, giving doctors another option for patients who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill.
- People with dementia have been twice as likely to get the virus, and much more likely to be hospitalized, than people the same age without dementia, a study found.
- Employees of the software giant Salesforce will work remotely at least part-time after the pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reports, a sign of the virus’s lasting impact on corporate life.
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 | | Protesters and security forces facing off in Yangon, Myanmar, on Tuesday. |
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- Myanmar’s military has instituted a curfew and warned of crackdowns, but hundreds of thousands of people are still protesting last week’s coup.
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Lives Lived: Even by the anything-goes standards of the late-1960s underground comics boom, S. Clay Wilson was extreme. On first encountering Wilson’s taboo-breaking, humorously depraved drawings, his fellow cartoonist R. Crumb recalled feeling that “suddenly my own work seemed insipid.” Wilson died at 79. |
Why stars are flocking to podcasting |
The latest celebrity to start a podcast? Paris Hilton, the media sensation from the early 2000s who helped shape today’s culture of reality TV and social media influencers. “I really believe that voice and audio is the next frontier,” Hilton told The Times. |
She is part of a boom in celebrity-hosted podcasts that have started during the pandemic. On “Literally! With Rob Lowe,” the actor chats with his famous friends. On “Dirty Diana,” a show Demi Moore helped create and stars in, actors read scripted erotic stories. And the actress Jamie Lee Curtis produced and starred in “Letters From Camp,” a show aimed at kids. |
It may seem surprising that stars like Hilton and Lowe are choosing a medium where a big part of their brand — their look — is irrelevant, but podcasts offer some big advantages to celebrities. Many are on a pandemic-induced break from filming, as one agent told Vanity Fair, and podcasting is “a Covid-safe medium.” |
Podcasts also require a relatively small time commitment and allow for fast turnarounds. “We record it and then poof, pow, surprise! It’s in your earholes the next day,” the actor Adam DeVine, a co-host of “This Is Important,” told Vanity Fair. |
 | | David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. |
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In “Halfway Home,” Reuben Jonathan Miller uses research and personal experience to write about incarceration and its lasting effects. Read the review. |
“I’m here live. I’m not a cat”: This viral video became an instant classic. |
Every day over the next eight weeks, The Morning will include a bonus game from the team that creates Spelling Bee and the Crossword. Our first game, which will run until Feb. 19, is called the Daily Aha. |
You’ll find the answer in the P.S. section below. Enjoy! |
Take the three missing letters that go in the first set of dashes, reverse them and put them in the second set to name something to drink. What is it? S __ __ __ __ __ L __. |
The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were kitchen, kitchenette and thicken. Here is today’s puzzle — or you can play online. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
P.S. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of an incapacitated president, was ratified 54 years ago today. The Times covered it on the front page. |
P.P.S. The Daily Aha answer is SKIM MILK. |
Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about what it will take to reopen schools. The latest “Popcast” remembers musicians lost to the virus. |
Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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