The Republican Pretense Is Over. What Now?

Anyone who has been watching the White House, or Congressional Republicans and Trump defenders for the past couple of years, knew it would ultimately come down to this: yeah, he did it, but so what? Or, as Mick Mulvaney tellingly said on live TV, “get over it.” That’s the excuse Lamar Alexander gave yesterday when announcing he won’t support hearing from any witnesses in the “trial” in the Senate. The trial that we all know that the GOP turned into a sham, a twisted joke designed from start to finish to “acquit” a man that they and we all know is guilty.

Republican senators want no witnesses because despite the incoherence of lying for weeks that Trump didn’t do it, that there was no withholding of aid or White House meetings to extort an announcement of bogus investigations into the Bidens in the face of overwhelming evidence that, in fact, there was, they know that live testimony under oath by former national security adviser and staunch Republican John Bolton will be devastating to the notion that Trump did not condition U.S. military aid on an illegal personal favor for Trump, and to the narrative that such conduct doesn’t matter and is not a high crime or misdemeanor. Republicans know Trump did it; they know it was horribly wrong; they know he should be removed from office; they know they would have impeached and removed any Democratic president who ever did something like this.

And they don’t care. They don’t even pretend to care.

And as for Trump’s massive, unprecedented obstruction of justice that makes Nixon look like a cooperator, they don’t care about that either. Nothing matters but staying in power, whatever the cost. If the cost is the evisceration of the separation of powers that is at the heart of our democracy, that’s a price they are willing to pay — and to make us all pay.

With the entire Republican Congress conspiring with Trump to protect him, it is fair to say that the only reasonable conclusion that Donald Trump can now draw is that, as long as Republicans remain in power, he is indeed, as he and his lawyers have insisted, above the law:

• He can illegally extort an ally by withholding military aid and a White House meeting. It’s all okay.
• He can cheat in elections, illegally solicit foreign interference in our elections, falsely smear his opponents, attack and retaliate against and use the Federal Government to exact retribution on critics (as he has done to every single person involved in the Russia investigation; as he has done to CNN, and Jeff Bezos, and NPR) and put their lives in danger.
• He can take illegal campaign finance contributions, both from foreigners and from the National Inquirer, bribing women he slept with while his immigrant wife (who mysteriously was able to stay in this country without any apparent legitimate qualification to earn the visa she was granted) was at home with their newborn son, to keep quiet about the affairs during the 2016 election, and then repeatedly lying about even knowing them on national TV.
• He can substitute his business concerns for U.S. foreign “policy”, pursuing whatever personal business deals he wants at the expense of U.S. national security in order to make money for himself or his f amily— in Turkey, in China, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, etc.
• He can violate the Emoluments Clause on the daily, assisted routinely by apparatchiks like Kelly Anne Conway who violate the Hatch Act with impunity.
• He can illegally take money that Congress has appropriated for specific purposes and divert it to fund activities that Congress has refused to fund because those activities are not in the national interest, falsely declaring a national emergency in a transparently fictional attempt to justify his illegal actions.
• He can personally attack American citizens in the most vile and racist and misogynistic terms, he can defame them and and destroy their lives — from Lisa Page to Andrew McCabe to James Comey to Colonel Alexander Vindman to Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch to Christine Blasey Ford to Kzir Khan. He can turn on every single person who ever worked for him and trash their reputations and defame them the second they utter a word of truth about his corruption or militant ignorance or incompetence (Tillerson, Mattis, Bolton etc).
• He can sexually assault if not rape women, and then lie about even knowing them or call them too ugly for him to attack.
• He can refuse all Congressional oversight, refusing to produce any documents or witnesses, obstructing justice completely.
• He can lie many thousands of times to the American public, about any subject.
• He can ask that official photographs and weather reports be altered to suit his personal ego.
• He can refuse to provide emergency aid for a devastated American territory.
• He can welcome the illegal aid of the United States’ biggest adversary, and grovel like an abject dog at his side, while rejecting and demeaning the work of the U.S. intelligence community, lying to the American public about Russia’s role in the election and refusing to address the grave threat to our democracy that Russian disinformation constitutes. To the contrary, he embraces that disinformation and spreads it like a cancer within our country, actively doing Putin’s dirty work of destroying American’s faith or belief in democracy as a viable system of government.
• He can praise the world’s dictators, and reject NATO, and trash our allies, putting U.S. national security in constant peril, and hand over American influence and interests in the Middle East to Russia while consigning our allies like the Kurds to their deaths, while increasingly praising their tactics, lauding their assaults on their own citizens, admiring their use of violence and suppression of dissent, and attacking a free press.
• He can violate the Geneva Convention and openly advocate for the commission of war crimes, salivating at the prospect of murdering the families of our enemies and torturing people. He can have children kidnapped away from their parents and handed over to Christian “foster” families so that the children can never be reunited with their parents again. He can preside over a system of concentration camps, all as a money-making machine for rich donors who agitated for the expansion of cages and detention centers which they run for profit, with a number of the architects of this abusive system now sitting on their boards for pay, all funded at taxpayer expense.
• He can refuse to disclose his tax returns so that the American people cannot know the full extent of his conflicts of interest.
• He can install hacks into the government, including his preposterous and sublimely unqualified adult children, and he can refuse to accept facts or information because he would rather watch TV and swallow lies that partially quench his unslakable thirst for fawning approval.
• He can verbally attack all his non-supporters as personal enemies and leverage the power of the state against the 60% of the population that does not support him, and he can use his Attorney General to give speeches to attack people for criticizing him and threatening free speech; he can use that AG to undertake politically-motivated investigations to punish critics and suppress dissent.
• He can install cronies throughout the government who serve him, themselves, and Republican donors, rather than the American public or the Constitution.
• He can create a shadow government run by his maniacal, dementia-addled personal lawyer, undercutting U.S. record-keeping laws and stated U.S. foreign policy.
• He can fire U.S. ambassadors for being an impediment to his criminality and corruption.
• He can hold secret meetings with Putin and other dictators, without any record of what was said or promised, but whose contents Putin knows, and he can destroy whatever records or notes of such discussions there are.
• He can embrace white supremacy, legitimizing anti-Semitism and racism by giving press passes to hate sites, retweeting anti-Semitic and racist accounts, and refusing to condemn he violence and hatred in Charlottesville until pressured to do so, and then blaming “both sides.”
• He can stoke and reward division and violence, opening yearning for the ability to imprison and execute his critics.
• He can repeatedly reject and publicly trash bedrock Democratic values, from free and fair elections, to freedom of speech and the press, to freedom of religion, to equality, to international diplomacy and cooperation, and to peace.
• He can disparage American civil servants and elected officials to our adversaries, declassify classified intelligence to show off to that same adversary and put our intelligent sources’ lives (and thus U.S. national security) at risk, refuse to use secure his communications devices, and treat U.S. intelligence as little but a tool to demonstrate his own power, to be flaunted before his country club customers or Russians.

We know this, because this is what Trump has already done for more than three years.

He was only impeached for a tiny fraction of his multiple crimes and Constitutional abuses — a strategic decision that Nancy Pelosi made in consultation with her party. And of course, some of the above is, indeed, “policy”, or reprehensible without being impeachable — abhorrent behavior that makes him unfit for office and a threat to the Republic, but that does not, per se, rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.

But because Republicans will not convict him for the easiest-to-understand of his actual high crimes and misdemeanors, and because Republicans have full-throatedly supported his disembowelment of the Congressional oversight power and his rejection of Congressional subpoena power, now there is no way to constrain any aspect of his administration’s conduct.

Republican electeds who are also the beneficiaries of illegal Russian dark money, either directly or laundered through the NRA, and who want to ensure there is no oversight into their own misconduct, will continue to support a criminal whose conduct is antithetical to a functioning democratic state. Which we no longer are.

We also know that Donald Trump can walk up to me, shoot me in the head, watching my brains spill out onto the sidewalk, on TV, and face no consequences. Republicans would call that an unimpeachable dispute over “policy”, and his cult would cheer, calling me a liberal elitist from a coastal city who is a never Trumper and who therefore got what she deserved; they would salivate for more murders, and tweet that the libs ain’t seen nothin’ yet and that there is more where that came from. Republican electeds would remain silent, or agree that I had it coming, anyway. Or they would bring up Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster, and proceed to smear everything about my reputation, and then go after my husband and children, for good measure.

These are the things we already know.

But what the world and the country now also knows, if there was any lingering hope or doubt before, is that there is literally nothing that Donald Trump could ever do that would be a bridge too far for his party. As Adam Schiff has said repeatedly, if his conduct regarding Ukraine and his wholesale refusal to provide a single document or witness is not impeachable, “nothing is.” And so: nothing is.

As a result, worse — far worse — is yet to come. This we also know.

Donald Trump knows the trial was a sham; it was designed to be. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell openly admitted he was coordinating the entire thing with the White House and pursuing a nakedly political agenda to ensure that Trump would not be convicted.

The sham trial itself has been a grotesque spectacle—no witnesses, no documents, presided over by a Chief Justice who serves as a de facto mantel piece to the avalanche of lies and disinformation dribbling from the pallid lizard lips of the Trump defenders and who, despite his own rightwing propensities, surely must be revolted by the Potemkin nature of the proceedings, by the staggering bad faith of those lawyers who without regard for truth or principle or the fate of the country repeatedly insist that the emperor has clothes and even if he does not, so what? Get over it! It’s nothing, it doesn’t matter, it’s all good. If you’re the Republican president, they’ll let you do it. Oh and Nixon’s abuses of power were not impeachable, either.

The sham trial is evidence of the Republican Party’s complete corruption and total abdication of any semblance of support for democracy. I’ve decided that at bottom it’s actually designed to be a coda to Mick Mulvaney’s “so what”: a symbol of Republican hegemony, crafted to destroy our faith in our government and in our ability to wield the power that we, the people, actually do continue to have if only we will use it. They want us to know that there is no check on Donald Trump. They want us to know that, as I wrote several years ago, the GOP is Trump and Trump is the GOP.

I think we all know that there are still brave people with integrity in this country, and some of them remain in government. We have seen the extraordinary bravery and patriotism of public servants who came forward to testify to the House despite Trump’s orders not to do so, and have watched them be retaliated against by Trump and personally threatened by his supporters, including those personally-implicated water-carriers and co-conspirators like Devin Nunes and Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.

We have seen the Republican Party repeatedly try to deflect from Trump’s crimes by attacking the House Democrats who dared investigate him, or by attacking the supposed bias of the whistleblower, as if any political leanings of the whistleblower could excuse or render untrue the facts of Trump’s underlying crimes and corruption.

We have seen Congressional Republicans lie about the facts and the proceedings and seem them go out of their way to try to harm the whistleblower, as Rand Paul did yesterday in one of the more sickening stunts I have witnessed across a lifetime of bearing witness to sickening stunts from Republicans.

We have seen the Republicans, those hypocrites falsely whining about lack of bipartisanship, defame their former colleague, the former senator and former Vice President of the United States, to protect Donald Trump, and in the process, promoting and amplifying and legitimizing Russia’s disinformation campaign designed to exonerate itself and Trump from Russia’s conspiracy against the United States in 2016. The Republican Party is doing Vladmir Putin’s dirty work because Vladmir Putin’s dirty work is also Donald Trump’s, and that means his dirty work is also the GOP’s.

This is where we are.

Where does this leave us?

I feel the anxiety, the creeping despair, the fear, the exhaustion of battling this regime. It is psychologically debilitating to subjected to an endless barrage of lies, to witness so much corruption, so much cheating, and to know that there is worse to come. I feel the rage and shock and anxiety of the gaslighting from this party — it hits in a way that it almost blinding sometimes. The assault on truth and integrity, and the knowledge of the shamelessness of those who engage in it, are painful and disorienting.

But as I have said before, we have a choice here: We can give up or we can fight. And it would be insane to give up. It would be an act of personal and national nihilism, a form of collective suicide, to give up or give in to these abuses.

The majority of this country despises Trump and the Republican Party — it is run by extremists whose positions are wildly out of sync with the rest of the country, and is hanging on to power through increasingly untenable and anti-democratic means. We outnumber them, and they know it. We have a real chance to flip the Senate: Mark Kelly can beat Martha McSally, who was installed after she lost her election to Krysten Sinema) in Arizona; Sara Gideon can beat Susan Collins in Maine; John Hickenlooper can beat Cory Gardner in Colorado; Democrats can beat Kris Kobach in Kansas; Jaime Harrison is running near-even with Lindsey Graham in South Carolina; Thom Thillis barely won in 2014 in North Carolina and can be beaten by the Democrat; Joni Ernst is extremely vulnerable in Iowa; there are two open Senate seats in Georgia as well as open seats in Texas and Tennessee; Mitch McConnell has only 18% support in KY and maybe Amy McGrath can actually beat him. All we need is to take four seats and we can do this, motivated by the power of our revulsion at what the Republican Party has done and the need to check Donald Trump.

We took back the House and seven goverernorships in 2018, and we can flip the Senate and also kick Trump out of office. In fact, we can kick this entire misbegotten party out of office in rebuke of their assaults on the Constitution, truth, democratic values, and the national interest.

Because of the electoral college, because of extreme gerrymandering, because Republicans have passed laws in dozens of states designed to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting, because Republicans are accepting illegal foreign donations and illegal campaign contributions, because Republicans have a massive war chest funded by the oligarchs who want them in power so that they can take our public lands and pollute our waters and let our infrastructure disintegrate and destroy public education and dismantle Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, because Republican officials have shown that they cannot be trusted to engage in election security measures or even not to tamper with the election results …because of this, our greater numbers, the fact that more than 60% want him out of office, won’t matter without sustained activism.

Winning in November requires not only kicking out Trump but retaking the Senate and holding the House. It requires taking back governships and secretary of state positions and attorney general positions at the state and civil level so that democracy can be restored on the ground. It requires registering people to vote and helping get them to the polls and knocking on doors for candidates and phone banking for them and donating money if you can. It requires talking to people and persuading them to vote blue. It may require standing in long lines on Election Day. It requires coming out in massive numbers like we have never seen before, regardless of how lukewarm we may be about the Democratic nominee for President, and voting the Democratic ticket up and down the ballot. It requires standing up for your country by voting overwhelmingly to remove the Republican scourge from office, even if the alternative is not your ideal candidate. It requires not giving in to despair. It requires believing that your country is worth fighting for, and making whoever is the nominee electable by electing them.

Taking our country back does NOT require a personal savior. It does not require a person whose views are 100% aligned with our own, or even 50%, if the alternative is Donald Trump and the GOP. It does not require perfection, which does not exist.

What it requires is that we fight for our country instead of insisting that there is no hope, democracy is dead, the system is rigged, he won’t leave office, we are doomed. Because this country is ours too, and its ideals and aspirations are worth fighting for. The civil rights leaders were in the minority in this country, literally and in terms of demographics, but they persevered and they prevailed, however imperfectly, and against far greater odds than we face.

And remember that no one has ever won anything by just giving up. Remember that there is honor and integrity in doing what’s right. There is a sense of self-respect and moral clarity that can come from fighting for what we what believe in and know is right, and that feels a hell of a lot better than curling up in a ball and saying what’s the point, it’s all rigged. And by the way: it is not all rigged because the federal government does not administer elections. The state governments do, and since 2016, Democrats have taken back governships in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, and New Mexico. Republicans aren’t overseeing the elections in those states. State-elected Democrats are, and they’ve not about to rig the results for Trump. Focus on facts — and the fact is that Trump is deeply unpopular, and so is his corrupt party.

To summarize: There is no reason, absolutely none, to give up and hand this country over those who are destroying it, without any kind of fight. In fact, to do so would be absurd.

Don’t despair. Get angry; get fired up. Take your anger, take your affront at the lies, the corruption, the vileness, at what these people have done to our country and what they want to do it, take it, along with your anxiety and even your fear: and harness these emotions into action. Dare I say: weaponize them into a tool for positive change. Know that there are more of us than of them — a knowledge, by the way, that the civil rights leaders did not have to help lift them up — and use that to buoy you. Have faith and have hope, secure in the knowledge that if the majority of our fellow Americans who see the truth come together, we can and will wrest our country away from those who have forsaken its values.