Frederica Freyberg:

We take up the impeachment efforts in the Senate as well as the mounting power struggles there with Michael Wagner, professor of journalism at UW-Madison and expert on American politics and political behavior. Thanks for being here.

Michael Wagner:

It’s my pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

Indications are the U.S. Senate will not vote to convict former President Trump for incitement of insurrection. Can most Republicans in Congress simply put what happened January 6 in the rear view, do you think?

Michael Wagner:

I think that’s their goal and I think that’s their hope. Whether voters continue to have a long memory about the coup attempt, which is what the Cline Center at the University of Illinois is now calling it that happened at the Capitol remains to be seen. So there may be a price to pay with voters, but it does not appear that there are enough Republicans to convict the president in the Senate.

Frederica Freyberg:

How formidable in your mind is Donald Trump politically, even after his supporters violently attacked the Capitol?

Michael Wagner:

Well, he does not seem to have the exact same pull that he had on the party while he was president and the longer he is out of the limelight and especially the longer that he’s off of social media, the harder it is for him to gain the kind of foothold he had when he had the trappings of the White House and the power of social media at the same time. But there are plenty of Republicans who don’t want to cross the president, the former president, especially because they don’t want to upset the core base of supporters that the former president continues to carry with him. So it’s an open question. I would say the Republican Party is in a civil war but there’s certainly in a struggle for their future direction.

Frederica Freyberg:

As to conspiracy theories like the Qanon group that believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump, are they quieted now or just regrouping, do you think?

Michael Wagner:

That’s a great question. Oftentimes when a conspiracy theory group has the thing they said was going to happen fail. Right so they said Donald Trump was going to find a way to stay president and then he didn’t, often you would think, well, that’s got to be the end of the conspiracy. But that’s usually not what happens. Usually the conspirators find a way to reason themselves into believing there’s some other conspiratorial reason for why the thing they predicted didn’t happen and sometimes even redouble their efforts to continue the behaviors they were engaged in before. So they’re regrouping and there’s certainly some disarray, but I wouldn’t say we should be confident that it’s over or anything like that.

Frederica Freyberg:

Alarmingly, the FBI is now warning about the continuing threat of domestic terror groups. Has all of this been bubbling under the surface largely undetected until it just blew into the open?

Michael Wagner:

Well, it’s been bubbling under the surface for a very long time and it’s been exploding over the surface for the last several years in a lot of respects. And so I don’t know that it was surprising that it happened. I think that people might have been caught off guard that it was so easy to storm the Capitol on the day that the House and the Senate were convening to certify the Electoral College votes. And it’s striking how in danger many of our leaders, including the vice president and speaker of the House, were in. That’s all deeply distressing. And these conversations aren’t going to be going away. People will always find a platform on which to have these. Although deplatforming does make it harder for them to organize.

Frederica Freyberg:

How insidious is the continuing belief on the part of some that there was widespread election fraud?

Michael Wagner:

It is an absolute stab in the heart of a democracy to continue to make these false allegations. There was a free and fair election. It’s a decentralized election, which makes it really hard to try to engage in widespread, systematic fraud since so many localities are in charge of how they do the ballot printing and the ballot counting and the ballot reporting. There was a counting. There was a recount. There were more than 60 lawsuits, all of which told us that Joe Biden won the election in a free and fair way. Anybody who can’t say that is not interested in the practice of democracy, but interested in their own power for their own reasons.

Frederica Freyberg:

Just very briefly with less than half a minute left, is President Biden’s call for unity in the midst of all of this naive?

Michael Wagner:

I think it depends on what we mean by unity. We’re certainly not all going to hold hands and sing a song of peace. But if we can realize and come together around simple facts, elections matter, if you lose, what you get to do in a democracy is try again the next time, not complain about the result and pretend that it wasn’t real, then there can be some unity. But there’s not going to be a magical healing across party lines anytime soon.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Michael Wagner, thanks for joining us.

Michael Wagner:

You bet.