Mick Mulvaney, the former White House chief of staff, said on Sunday that President Trump’s conduct that encouraged a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol should be viewed differently from the behavior that had drawn criticism throughout his presidency.
“You could go down the long litany of things that people complained about with Donald Trump and I could probably defend almost all of them,” Mr. Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday,” describing many of those differences as about policy or style.
“But Wednesday was different,” he continued. “Wednesday was existential. Wednesday is one of those things that struck to the very heart of what it means to be an American, and it was wrong.”
Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, served as Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff for more than 14 months. In March, Mr. Trump replaced him with Mark Meadows, who was then a House member from North Carolina. Mr. Mulvaney became a special envoy for Northern Ireland, a position he resigned from last week after the riot.
When the host of “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace, asked what prompted the resignation, Mr. Mulvaney said, “I think everybody recognizes that what happened on Wednesday is different.”
Mr. Mulvaney implied that the public and the press were not aware of how Mr. Trump acted in private, and the ways that members of his administration were able to redirect the president from some of his destructive impulses.
“We saw the real President Trump who had that ability to pivot when he knew something had gone off the rails,” he said of his time as chief of staff.
He predicted that many Republicans would not view a second impeachment of Mr. Trump the same as they did the first, which ended with the Senate voting to acquit him in February.
“I can assure you, there will be members of both parties who would look at it very very differently than they did last year,” Mr. Mulvaney said.
Another longtime ally of Mr. Trump, Chris Christie, said on Sunday that the president had committed impeachable offenses and that he would vote yes on articles of impeachment if he were in Congress.
“If inciting to insurrection isn’t” impeachable, Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, said on ABC’s “This Week,” “then I don’t really know what is.”
As for whether Mr. Mulvaney would vote to impeach if he were still in the House, he said, “I think it isn’t fair to sit here and say yes or no, but I would take it really, really seriously.”
“I’m not trying to dodge your question, but that’s probably the most serious question you can ask any member of Congress,” he added.
— Maggie Haberman and Chris Cameron The New York Times
Me: But Trump will pardon himself, after the event, so that his pardon excludes him from impeachment and prosecution, from matters at the event, so what then?