Dante’s Inferno
Today I woke up terrified. It is the last day of questions in the Senate Trial of Donald John Trump and it appears as though Senate Republicans are about to kick the United States as we know it off a cliff. In surrendering their responsibility as a check and balance of a blatantly corrupt Executive they have ultimately given Trump Carte Blanche to behave as he wishes and use the power of the Oval Office in his own interest rather than that of the nation.
These GOP enablers — Senators like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul — are motivated by fear of a presidential tweet (and whatever Kompramat hangs over their heads) and are setting a precedent that will allow the White House to run amok.
“We will bury you.” – Nikita Khrushchev
Vladimir Putin is skillfully executing Kruschev’s chilling statement made decades ago in the height of the Cold War. In Donald John Trump he found an accomplice so riddled with a combination of ego, ignorance, and circumstance that the Russian Kleptocrat can probably scarcely believe the success of his attack on Democracy. Contrary to what the Republican Congress would have you believe, in 2016 we were indeed attacked as the Mueller report clearly shows.
The GOP loudly decries that the Mueller report fully exonerates Trump, and it’s only the apathy and short attention span of the American people that allow this lie to take root. The report clearly illustrates that the Trump campaign was aided by Russian GRE disinformation efforts and that the President welcomed it. “Russia, if you’re listening.” Mueller’s report states that but only for Federal rules they did not charge Donald Trump with a crime and that, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General knee-capped the report with his preemptive press-conference acquittal and with the benefit of a news-cycle-on-crack the lies of the Republican party declaring the report a Trump victory took hold. Perception is reality, but it is not the truth.
Existential Dread
What is to become of the nation? American law is based on precedent, and if the Senate now holds Donald Trump unaccountable by blocking witnesses he will no doubt use it as a springboard to do whatever he wants. If anyone in the nation believes that he will act in anyone’s interest but his own, they are not paying attention. There isn’t a public-spirited bone in his body, even the ones that developed convenient spurs.
The thin veneer of civilization
There is an undercurrent of truth that Senate Republicans are seeking to explain away, namely that Donald Trump is inherently corrupt and guilty of everything that has been levied at him in the Impeachment trial. The argument by Alan Dershowitz that Donald Trump believes it’s in the public’s best interest that he be reelected, therefore he can do whatever he wants to get reelected, is exactly the kind of semantic and logical pretzeling that makes people hate lawyers. There is no concern for America or the citizens in that farcical argument, but it is enough for Collins, Murkowski, and whomever else is looking for a semantic excuse to be a coward.
What is to become?
My biggest heartache is for my daughter and the other young people of the nation. My fearful imagination conjures up such a future of conglomeration of wealth and power that the ordinary citizen loses the opportunities that are currently available. It’s difficult enough as it is with systemic obstacles to success and gaining station, especially for women and diverse populations.
The Republicans, currently inebriated on the Trump Koolaid, are disinterested in deficits or national debt which is typically their bailiwick. The moment a Democratic president is elected–assuming elections are still a thing– they will immediately shift back to deficit hawks and proclaim that social programs are the sole culprit to the problem, not the lack of revenue due to Trumpian tax cuts for the wealthy or the spending on Quixotic projects like a wall in the middle of the desert. At this point, the most vulnerable will suffer and I fear greatly for our Republic.
#ImpeachmentTrial #DonaldTrump #Armageddon #Hellscape #GOP #Senate
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