Former GOP senator calls Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct impeachable in memoir

Lamar Alexander is using a memoir, not a Senate speech, to say Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6 and to argue that Congress should reclaim its power. The former senator, governor and cabinet member, now 85, places that judgment at the center of “The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump,” which is scheduled to go on sale May 19.

The book is being framed as a behind-the-scenes account of nearly 60 years in politics, and Alexander’s break with Trump carries unusual weight because it comes from one of the party’s most durable insiders. He spent decades in Republican leadership circles and built a career that stretched from Tennessee to Washington, D.C., working with ten presidents. In recent remarks, he called the Jan. 6 attack an “illegal attempted coup” and said urging a mob to charge the Capitol to stop certification of a duly elected president was among the gravest offenses against American democracy.

That condemnation is sharper because Alexander was not a prominent dissenter when it mattered inside the Senate. In February 2020, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, he voted against calling witnesses, a decision that helped end the proceeding without new testimony. The United States Senate then acquitted Trump on Feb. 5, 2020, by 48-52 on Article I and 47-53 on Article II. Alexander’s memoir now reads as a postscript to that episode, but also as a reflection on how little institutional resistance emerged while Trump still commanded the party.

The broader record on Jan. 6 has only deepened that tension. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol released its final report on Dec. 22, 2022, concluding that Trump was the central cause of the attack and that none of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him. Alexander’s insistence that Congress assert its power lands in the shadow of that finding, and in the shadow of a Republican Party still reckoning with how far it went, and how slowly it moved.

For all the memoir’s retrospective force, its larger argument is about the failure of active accountability. Alexander is not alone in criticizing Trump after the fact, but his timing underscores a familiar pattern in modern Republican politics: the clearest condemnations often arrive only after power has shifted, careers have ended, or the costs of speaking up have already passed.