The not-guilty verdict ending the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump was as expected, but it revealed something even more sinister about the Republican party. After the Senate trial ended, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, made a public display of the hypocrisy in the GOP. He prattled on about the former president’s dereliction of duty and his culpability. The attack on the Capitol was “foreseeable” and “a disgraceful dereliction of duty” said McConnell. Yet he voted not guilty, hoping that history gives more weight to his words than his actions. As usual, and to their credit, the House Impeachment Managers conducted themselves honorably and presented a cogent and persuasive rationale for convicting the two-time impeached former president. Trump’s team of ambulance chasers sneered and snarled, played misogynistic and racially charged videos of blacks and women calling for a “fight” to save lives, as equivalence in their ‘what-about-ism’ defense.
Despite the circus-like defense of the former clown dictator, the real freak show was disclosed later. Currently, nearly a half-million Americans have died or are in the throes of sickness and death from Covid-19. The Democratic House Managers, in part, may have shortened the trial and avoided witness testimony, according to reports from PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor, because the Republicans threatened to shut down all Senate business, which would include Covid relief. If Alcindor’s sources are correct, the idea the party most complicit in the deaths of over 400,000 people by refusing to hold the former president accountable, threatened additional lives to protect their insurrectionist leader. Even I was surprised at the callousness of that sort of extortion.
I hope this puts to rest the idea that the Democrats are to find bipartisan agreements with a party that cannot find mutual agreement amongst its ranks. Seven Republicans in the Senate found their courage and straightened their spines to vote in the affirmative of the obvious. Before the invasion of the Capitol building, Mr. Trump delivered a speech reminiscent of Churchill’s 1940 address to Parliament, “…we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…” said Churchill. So as the un-Americans marched and trampled the green fields of the Mall and walked up the streets of Capitol Hill to fight and not “surrender” as Mr. Trump ordered in previous rants, the vast majority of the GOP is ready to reload. Evidence of this is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) issuing an opaque warning to Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) because Beutler dared expose the truth about Mr. Trump’s sociopathic reaction to the near-death experience of her colleagues.
The party of pro-life, law and order, and anti-cancel culture is censuring and threatening colleagues who refuse to condone racism, lies, and death. The party that screams ALL LIVES MATTER at the mention of BLACK LIVES MATTER spit on the ashes of Officer Brian Sicknick. Joining into a bipartisan coalition with a party that eighty-three percent of its members believe the trial of an insurrectionist leader was Constitutionally inappropriate and morally inconsequential is impossible. The GOP needs to rid itself of seditionist, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists who relay messages to each other from the 17th letter of the alphabet. Dealing with a two-party system is already fraught with obstacles, but dealing with an opposition whose fights between its insanity wing and its’ cruelty wing is impossible. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gave away the game when he told us the GOP is not about governing it is about winning. “We can’t do it without him [Trump], Graham said after the trial. “I’m into winning. And if you want to get something off your chest, fine. But I’m into winning.”
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