Trump: Going down fighting
Trump is trying desperately to distract America’s attention away from his legal and sexual scandals by throwing bright shiny confetti into the air, but it’s not working.
You have to give the guy credit. He does know how to market things, whether it’s a building, a T.V. program, or himself. But so does Mueller. It’s almost like the two of them are engaged in a prime time ratings game. Trump tries to make news with a tweet—“North Korea has denuclearized”—and Mueller immediately announces indictments. Trump tries to distract with fake announcements of a trade deal, and Mueller announces another investigation. It’s a pas de deux and so far Mueller’s moves are infinitely more compelling.
For the truth is, Donald Trump’s power has been effectively drained. Oh, sure, he’s still got his hold on the white supremacists and xenophobes on the far right. And he still has his fascist media mafia—Fox “News,” Breitbart, Limbaugh, Alex Jones and their ilk—in his back pocket. But the important thing to realize is that those people have now been reduced to little more than a cult, whose influence is waning. What is gathering strength is The Resistance—the backlash to nearly two years of lies, slanders, attacks upon our democracy and an erosion of the rule of decency and law in America.
Some of us were in The Resistance from the start. I joined in early September, 2016, a few months before the election, when I began to worry that Trump really could win. Others took longer to arrive at the same conclusion I did: that it is incumbent upon every rational American to stop a sociopathic, unstable man from dangerously up-ending our country. But no matter how long it took for some people, what matters is that Americans are migrating to The Resistance.
Thank you suburban women! I’m not sure what temporarily deranged you in 2016 when many of you voted from Trump. But there were just enough of you in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan to hand the presidency to Trump by a super-thin margin.
Fortunately, you came to your senses. Was it Trump’s misogyny? His disgusting bullying of women, his sexual predations upon them, his insults of women like Stormy Daniels and Elizabeth Warren? Did you eventually tire of the Tweet storms, the lies, the evasions? Did you get a glimpse behind the curtain of Trump World and see the kleptomaniac-in-chief, with his klepto family, manipulating the presidency to enrich themselves? Was it Donald Jr.’s reprehensible face and personality that turned you off? Whatever the reason/s were, I tell you from the heart that we welcome you to The Resistance. Your children and grandchildren will thank you. You will leave a noble legacy.
But this will be true only if we take back at least the House of Representatives in November, and then get on with the serious business of beginning to undo the damage this president has wrought. Here’s what I think will happen: Mueller will issue his report at some point, in which he will charge Trump with multiple crimes. Whether his report comes before or after the election, I do not know. The House will return to Democratic control, and Nancy Pelosi will again be Speaker. The commotion about her within the Democratic Party—always overblown by the media—will die down, as she quickly seizes order; and then, let the committee hearings begin!
Among the first hearings ought to be an investigation of Devin Nunes and his activities in behalf of the Trump regime. This hearing could be before the House Ethics Committee, whose Code of Individual Conduct Nunes appears to have violated in his role as errand boy for the Trumps. The House Intelligence Committee, of which Nunes is chair, fundamentally abandoned its duty to hold impartial hearings when Nunes decided to take his orders, not from the Constitution, but from Trump. That Committee, under its new Democratic chairman, Adam Schiff (now ranking member), should hold new hearings, bringing in all the witnesses and evidence Nunes would not permit. Trump’s family, in particular, ought to be intensively interrogated, since they appear to have been at the center of all the collusion and obstruction of justice.
I expect that the Right will be upset after Nov. 6; they will undoubtedly accuse the elections of being rigged, a lie that Trump will egg on through tweets and public statements. And, after Jan. 21, 2019, when the new Congress is sworn in and the House immediately announces hearings, I expect the Right to go ballistic. Breitbart’s comments will be filled with a level of vitriol and threat extreme even for them.But there won’t be anything they can do about it. That Mueller Report is really going to be the coup de grace for Trump. Conversations around dinner tables and workplace water coolers will be along these lines:
You know, I voted from Trump, because he spoke what was on his mind, and I really wanted that swamp drained. But I’ve changed my mind. He really is a crook.
Yes, I agree. Even my husband, Harry, has changed his mind. For him, the last straw was the cozying up to Putin.
Yeah, I know. That was disturbing.
Yeah. And his disrespect for McCain. I haven’t voted for a Democrat for years, but I am this year.
Me, too.
Repeat this conversation, hundreds of thousand of times, in districts where Trump won by a few percentage points, and you’re going to have a Blue Wave. And just in time: if we let this clown get away with his crap for much longer, we won’t have a country anymore—not one we recognize as America. John McCain put it well when he said, in his final testament,
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”
I wish Sen. McCain had spoken these words far sooner, and had been far more blunt in his criticism of Trump. It’s fine to blather about bipartisanship, but one runs the risk of creating a false equivalency between the two sides—Republican and Democrat. They are not the same. The Republican Party may once have been morally equal to (if politically different from) the Democratic Party, but that began to dissolve with the rise of the Tea Party; and once Republicans became the party of Trump, they lost all moral legitimacy. Perhaps they can find it again, but probably not for a generation. In the meanwhile, the rest of us have to do all we can to purge this Republican pestilence from our country and return to our normal, liberal and progressive ways.
