Unbearable
I woke up multiple times in the middle of the night thinking about Trump’s actions, McMaster’s selling the United States down the river, and the Republican senators and house members’ and Fox news’ dismissal of the gravity of Trump’s actions as a nothingburger simply because he is the president. The collective refusal on the right to own up to, much less address, the threat that this president is to our national security has for me gone past revulsion, anger, and horror. Those feelings remain, but I’m also at a place of real fear now.
You know I’ve been calling out their partisanship for many months. You know it is what I have come to expect. At the same time, to watch in real time as person by person, each member of this once-proud party slimes themselves and chooses Donald Trump over the United States is unbearable. To watch an entire “news” network promulgate unremitting lies, pooh-pooh and even aggressively defend the most shocking and despicable and democracy-assaulting actions of the person who is supposed to be the leader of the free world, and to do so with the most flagrant and unapologetic hypocrisy is unbearable — yet more unbearable still is their willingness to shrug in the face of conduct that endangers us all, because their partisanship runs so deep that it has completely overwhelmed and eradicated any previously shared common notion of patriotism or nationhood. (Look at Fox’s lead story today. It isn’t Trump.)
To see how many people appear not actually believe in democracy, but who instead are willing to accept the escalating breakdown of constitutional government as long as they are on the winning side of that breakdown, is unbearable.
To know that the people who were elected and who took an oath of office to defend and uphold the United States Constitution will turn a blind eye rather than ensure that a president who openly violates it daily is held to even a minimum standard of ethics or knowledge, is unbearable. To watch their collective abdication of their Constitutional duties, their continued near-uniform support for a person whose instability and ignorance and corruption and dangerousness are manifest to the entire world, and the combination of which has now been repeatedly revealed to be a significant, ongoing, and ineradicable threat to the nation itself, is utterly unbearable.
Not only are we at enhanced risk from this man’s actions. Not only do we live in a deeply divided nation in which the president of the United States sees the majority of Americans as his personal enemies, and who is supported and enabled in that blinkered, anti-democratic, and dangerous mentality by the rightwing media that loves him. On top of that, we have been completely betrayed by the Republican men and women in a coequal branch of government who refuse to do their duty to check this man’s abuses and protect us, our country, and our Constitution. And it is all unbearable, simply unbearable, to witness.
