Before reluctantly flopping back onto the sizzling-hot frying pan of my day job this past week, I enjoyed a blissful week of reflection while clinging to a heavenly chunk of beach on North Carolina’s sparkling Atlantic coast.
In other words, I ruined too many hours of my precious time away thinking about the awful, heart-shrinking disease squeezing the life out of our country right now.
I’ll get right to it: We aren’t coming back from this, America — at least not as anything Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Reagan or Obama would recognize.
See? This is the damage peace, quiet and inhaling cleansing ocean air can do to a guy. While dipping my toes in the water and tongue in a gin or two, I found it’s even worse looking at all this chaos on the outside, from the perceived safety of the fringes.
Essentially, my thinking arrived with salty, 20/20 clarity back at the place where it is quite apparent Trump has never been the real problem. No, he is but a swelling, angry 313-pound, anti-American cyst catalyzed by Republican leadership who gave up looking for a cure two years ago after the firing of Jim Comey.
It should have ended right there.
Trump should have been some dirt-cheap one-off, who Republicans quickly saw was every bit as dangerous and unfit in action as he had proved over a tortuous campaign to be in words. Bare minimum, they could have proved to be the check on his imbalance and thwarted most of his rotten, incendiary impulses.
Instead they went the way of Fred Trump and so many enablers before them, and gave the overgrown baby his way just to shut him up. Thing is, he never shuts up.
They knew what they were getting in Trump, most of all the South Carolinian, two-timing, mega-fraud, Lindsey Graham, who before rolling over and playing dead these past two years, called Trump a “kook” and a “jackass” and typed, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
Hold that thought, Linds …
You see the Grahams of the world know better, yet still support Trump. It is impossible to be a worse human being than that. Graham and his ilk’s (McConnell, Jordan, Romney, Collins, etc.) excuse isn’t fear or bigotry or ignorance, like the screamers who file into those desperate, hate-filled rallies across America’s lily-white fields. No, it’s far, far worse than that, because they actually have no excuse.
Frankly, whether or not he and his rotten party will ever get what they deserve is open for question, which is why we will never come back from this. The GOP mostly stood on the sidelines in 2016 and watched with the rest of us while Trump made a cocky bet on himself, and using their collateral, somehow drew one inside straight after another, and won a helluva jackpot.
Give the dude credit, nobody can bankrupt a casino like he can.
Thanks to Trump, Russia, crushing voter suppression, a pathetically apathetic voting populous, and surgically rigged voting districts, the GOP hauled in a mess of House and Senate races, but mostly, and ultimately the courts.
No matter that once again millions more Democrats voted than Republicans in 2016, because McConnell’s GOP had gerrymandered the game so deftly and completely that even something like Trump had a chance to win no matter what.
The Democrats played their hand with more urgency and purpose last November, and it should have been a game-changer. In any other time in American history their resounding victories in the Midterms would have sent a clear message and forced the incumbent to the Left to listen to the true heartbeat of America. But not this one. No, this one governs only for himself and the adulation of the Lost.
Hell, the first thing he did after losing was shut down the government in record-breaking fashion. While the majority of the country voted to change the game, Trump responded by breaking all their toys. When Nancy Pelosi flatly said, “no” he whined and whined like a baby.
Of course he came out of it all looking like a damn fool, but who cares? It was somebody else’s fault. It is always somebody else’s fault with this bottom-feeder, who tells us he receives “beautiful” love letters from murderous dictators around the globe. Well, of course he does. What’s not to love about a lying thug who defends Nazis?
Then the Mueller Report came out, and the Attorney General who he purchased for seemingly nothing, told disgraceful lies for him and might have even saved his presidency for now. After finally seeing large portions of this report it is clear Trump obstructed justice and a bipartisan group of former federal prosecutors agree.
But facts don’t matter to Trump. Worse, they don’t matter to his subservient GOP lackeys.
So now Trump will be impeached. Some say he wants to be impeached. I’m not so sure about this, but as long as he has Lindsey’s shoulder to cry on he’ll make it through each day with the aid of his nuclear-powered binky.
Of course, he should be impeached. Pelosi knows this and I think has known it all along.
She’s using the term “self-impeachment” these days which sounds a little too cute but is most likely politically brilliant, because if I have learned nothing else about this American hero over the past two decades or so, she has generally already landed where she wants everybody else to slowly end up.
She knows Trump better than himself. Nothing like a mother’s instinct.
I wonder if she thinks we will be able to come back from this?
