Committing sedition and losing power are poised to dent the impunity under which Donald Trump unleashed ever more havoc and hatred across America.

The House Judiciary Committee's impeachment report quotes, at length, the speech that President Donald Trump gave to his devotees on January 6 before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.

"We've got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren't any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them," Trump said.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a "Save America Rally" near the White House just prior to the Capitol riots. Bloomberg.

The siege of the Capitol wasn't a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis.

"The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack," she said in a statement, adding, "There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.".

When a mob incited by the president ransacked the Capitol, killing one policeman and pummelling others, it also tore down a veil.

Suddenly, all but the most fanatical partisans admitted that Trump was exactly who his fiercest critics have always said he was.

Trumpists often whine about being ostracised — Melania Trump being snubbed by Vogue seems a particular sore point — but watching all these institutions reject the president now is a reminder of how many didn't do so earlier.

The siege of the Capitol wasn't a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis.

January 6 wasn't even the first time Trump cheered an armed siege of an American Capitol; he did that last spring when gun-toting anti-lockdown activists stormed the Michigan statehouse.

Later, after news emerged of a plot to kidnap and publicly execute Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump said, "I mean, we'll have to see if it's a problem.

"Donald Trump, ever since his campaign, throughout his four years in office, has done nothing but pander to these people," Daryl Johnson, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.

This is a departure from previous patterns, Johnson said: Right-wing extremist activity usually abates during Republican administrations, when conservatives feel less existentially threatened.

The people at the Capitol who said they were there because the president wanted them to be weren't necessarily delusional.

"The time to stop tyrants and despots is when you first see them breaking from the demands of law," Raskin said.

Trump, he said, "has been indulged and protected for so long by some of his colleagues that he brought us to the brink of hell in the Capitol of the United States".

The very fact that Raskin will lead the prosecution of Trump in the Senate is a sign of the solemnity with which Democrats are approaching it.

Prominent law firms have refused to represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don't want to do so anymore

For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity

Committing sedition and losing power are poised to dent the impunity under which Donald Trump unleashed ever more havoc and hatred across America