A Nation Starving for Justice

 

“Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

In some ways the fall of Trump is like a Greek tragedy. The con man and his crime family flew too near the sun, and now their black wings are melting and their talons and teeth are disintegrating. 

Serves Trump right. Let it continue. What I’m watching for now is accountability from the politicians. It starts with removing Trump. I’m a lifelong, active Democrat, but I’m not a fan of Nancy Pelosi. She’s obviously very smart -- whip smart, and pretty formidable as a personality -- but I think she’s too much of a centrist and too often on the side of corporate power and enormous, immoral military expenditures. I don’t trust her to lead a legislative charge to reform the criminal justice system, end mass incarceration, make meaningful investments to confront the coming climate crisis, or begin a transition to Medicare for All. 

Today, as words and images and headlines about the insurrection of January 6, 2021 zipped around my brain, I thought back to the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. It was a little more than a year ago when Pelosi and her team drafted the articles of impeachment. Will Pelosi go narrow and shallow or wide and deep? Will she go big or small? I asked these questions on this blog. Pelosi and the Democrats, their eyes looking forward to the 2020 general election, went small, restricting their articles to the crimes identified in the Mueller Report. If our political machinery functioned with any measure of accountability, or justice, those narrow articles would still have been sufficient to take Trump down. They didn’t because Trump by then had cowed the GOP, taken it over, and pissed all over it to mark it as his; they didn’t work because the GOP is deeply cynical and obsessed with holding the intoxicating power of minority rule. Mitch McConnel, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, the detestable Josh Hawley, and so many more, put fealty to Trump (and their own ambition) ahead of fealty to the Constitution and the good of the nation. There’s no getting around that. Too little too late Betsy DeVos. Same goes for you Elaine Chao. You’re no champions of justice, and you do not even have the honor to go down with your captain. Don’t start making sense now Bill Barr. Have the heavy scales fallen from your eyes? Please. You’re marked like former Nazis were in the years after World War II. Don’t tell me you didn’t know, because you did, you noted the political winds and the opportunity for personal gain and made your choice. 

The point I was staggering towards was that had Pelosi gone big, brought the kitchen sink, the corrupt GOP would still have acquitted him, but it would have placed all of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors in the book, on the record. That might have been a cause worth fighting for. In any case, regardless of how few days remain in Trump’s disastrous and traitorous term, the Democrats must make the GOP go on the record, face again a choice: support Trump or the country. 

Ironically, the destroyer of the Republican Party isn’t even a Republican, not in the Party of Lincoln sense. Trump used the Republican Party like an inflatable sex toy, and he fucked it sideways and upside down, and thrice on Sundays. I despised George W. Bush with incredible intensity. I thought he was the nadir. W earns no pass from me. But say what you will about Bush, he was a decent man at heart, dumb but not crazy, and he respected most of our basic institutions enough not to deliberately destroy them. 

You can’t run a moderate and just government with lackeys and grifters in every key position. Expertise matters. Facts matter. Language matters a lot -- look what Trump’s words incited on January 6. Look at the seeds his words spread over the last four years, seeds of  hate and distrust, cruelty and revenge, incompetence and greed. 

Trump is for Trump and only Trump. So many of us told you this from the very beginning of this terrible era. I predicted serious damage. Look around. Covid-19 has us on the mat because there has been NO federal leadership. You can’t fight a pandemic with 50 different approaches. The president cannot delegate responsibility for fighting a pandemic to the individual states to sort out. Pandemic’s don’t work that way. You can’t defeat a pandemic when you deliberately pit states and regions against one another for needed resources, favoring those groups you like and starving those you don’t. That’s not simply unjust, it’s cruel and stupid. A pandemic is like a war. A reasonable level of command and control is necessary. People have to make sacrifices, be inconvenienced, for the good of the whole.

We knew how this was going to turn out from the beginning. Trump’s future was written in his past. The man was a serial failure, a reverse-Midas; look at the records of his bankruptcies, at his history of cheating the society of his fair share of taxes, his failed marriages, his racism and misogyny, stupidity and cruelty. It was all there, only the consequences of his failure are many times worse. The more power a man like Trump gets, the more he craves. There is no end. I imagine it’s like a heroin  addiction. 

How many days did it take Mitch McConnell to ram Amy Comey Barrett down America’s throat? I think it was 8. Do not tell me that Donald J. Trump cannot be impeached in the time remaining. He can, and must be. We need to construct strong guardrails of precedent right now, at this moment of crisis. The entire American experiment in self-government turns on belief in the rule of law justly applied to all, the high as well as the low; on the peaceful transfer of power after democratic elections; and on two things that have become rare this century: moderation and justice. America is a nation starving for justice, for a sense of essential fairness. We fight among ourselves while the economic screws are applied by billionaires, hedge funds richer than some countries, Citibank and Bank of America, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ATT and Verizon. One reason MAGA nation is so angry is that they have lived through decades where the elites commit massive crimes, drag us into endless foreign conflicts, cheat the system, rip people off, and walk away with no consequences and no accountability. 

Democrats must bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately, and they must drag those Republicans who are no longer afraid of Trump with them. This is a guardrail that must be set in stone. For there to be any hope of reconciliation, there must be justice.