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The second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump is underway. told Dave Ross on Seattle’s Morning News that he doubts any new evidence the Democrats could have will be enough to sway the Republicans needed to impeach Trump.

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“We had a good story today about how many of the folks who actually were in the Capitol, who stormed the Capitol, said that Trump incited of them to do it,” Fahrenthold said. “They did it because they thought Trump wanted them to do it. [The new evidence] could be something related to that. I don’t know what else they could show about Trump’s behavior at that rally before the storming, since we all saw it in public.”

“But, yes, I think it’s most likely to be a sense of how the people who actually did this storming felt inspired, incited, encouraged by Trump,” he added.

The Democrats’ argument, he explained, is going to be the incitement.

“The test of incitement is whether people were incited, and certainly people were incited, in this case, to storm the Capitol,” Fahrenthold said. “Whether that’s enough to sway 17 Republicans, I still doubt it.”

“What they have been doing, the Republican Party, since 2015, is pretending like Donald Trump’s words don’t matter,” he added. “… I’m not surprised it’s not changing in this case. [Republicans] keep hoping that if they just wait long enough, Donald Trump will go away without them having to confront him, or confront the people that like him. So I’m not surprised that they’re not holding Trump accountable because that’s been their strategy since the beginning. Who knows? Maybe it’ll work this time.”

That said, Fahrenthold thinks maybe if it was a secret ballot and we didn’t know how people voted, then perhaps Republicans would vote to convict.

“They’ve had a lot of chances to sort of stick a fork in Trump and take this opportunity to formally prevent him from running for office again, and they said no,” he said. “I think a lot of them were going to hide behind the procedural argument that it’s, no matter what Trump did, it’s illegal to or unconstitutional to impeach a former president, and just move on with it.”

“I think they’re hoping that Trump, in his current form, sort of diminished, quieted, off in Florida, that maybe they’ve now finally waited him out, and so they don’t need to try to, like I said, sort of finish him off themselves,” he added.

Business vs politics

For now, impeachment may actually be the least of Trump’s problems.

“He has a number of problems: political, and legal, and business,” Fahrenthold said. “The most important thing, I think, to understand, is that … there’s sort of two sides of Trump, the business side of Trump and the political side of Trump that have coexisted easily. That can’t last forever.”

“… He can’t be the politician that he was and keep the business that he has,” he added. “Those two things just don’t go together. And so he’s going to have to choose, I think pretty soon, does he try to hold on to his business, or does he slash it down to a couple of golf courses and houses and become sort of a full-time politician?”

To stay in business then, Dave asked, Trump would have to rebrand himself?

“Well, at least shut up,” Fahrenthold replied. “I mean, just as an example, I was talking to a realtor in Chicago who’s been trying to sell units, condos, in Trump’s hotel there, and they’re at a terrible low. They’ve dropped huge amounts since just the last couple of years. And the guy said, look, since Trump has been quiet, since he stopped tweeting, since they kicked him off Twitter, the prices have started to go up a little bit. People have a short memory.”

“So if Trump wants to lay low and be a retired investor, he maybe has a chance of holding onto those properties,” Fahrenthold continued. “But if he’s going to go back to being Donald Trump and inciting people and doing all the things he’s been doing, there’s no way he’s going to be able to hang on to those things.”

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Fahrenthold says staying quiet just might be the best thing for Trump.

“If you just heard about him, and maybe he would make a few public appearances every once in a while, but he doesn’t go back to the politics of ‘the election was stolen,’ you know, all the things that made him so caustic and so disliked,” he said. “Now he has that bad reputation, but none of the power he used to keep his enemies at bay. So if he’s going to try to come back and be that politician, he’s going to lose the business allies that he still has.”

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Fahrenthold joins ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross every Tuesday on Seattle’s Morning News. Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.