Conservative radio personality Geraldo Rivera has been a vocal supporter of outgoing President Donald Trump for most of his term as President.
Even as the President continued to push the lie that widespread voter fraud orchestrated by Democrats delivered a false victory to President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, Rivera said he'd spoken to Trump and insisted that he would do the "right thing."
This did not come to pass.
On January 6—as a joint session of Congress began to certify Biden's victory—Trump addressed a crowd of his supporters at a "Save America" rally, which he'd spent weeks promoting on his social media accounts. He continued to push his election lies to the crowd and urged them to make their grievances known at the Capitol.
As history will remember, pro-Trump extremists seized the Capitol, defacing history and killing five people.
The House is expected to impeach Trump for a historic second time for inciting an insurrection, with at least five House Republicans announcing they'll vote in favor of it.
The attempted insurrection was where Rivera drew the line, denouncing Trump as a man lost to his own delusions.
Rivera expressed support for Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third ranking House Republican, who announced she would vote to impeach and that the President was directly responsible for the riot.
He also implied that Democrats who "hounded" the President "without mercy" was partly responsible for Trump's derangement—a critique that was widely panned by the internet.
Rivera issued more unequivocal condemnations of Trump and his ilk the day after the initial tweet.
But like members of the Trump administration who resigned in wake of the riots, Rivera's mea culpa was seen as too little, too late.
In addition to a growing number of House Republicans favoring impeachment, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is quietly supporting impeachment in the Senate, though it's unclear whether he'd work with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to reconvene the Senate for a trial before January 19th.
