THIS SAD EMBARRASSING WRECK OF A MAN
Trump must be
removed. So must his congressional enablers.
By
Columnist covering politics and domestic and foreign affairs
June 1, 2020 at
2:18 p.m. CDT
This unraveling presidency began with the
Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a
photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since
then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding
advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his
Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.
Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies
and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like
members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the
tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents
leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public
discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally
crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must
be removed.
Social causation is difficult to demonstrate,
particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The
person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be
faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be
too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.
What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining
deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an
unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered
nominees with higher
disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose
what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched
him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the
percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.
Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four
more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as
the president predicted, weary from all
the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes,
metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm.
The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic
anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great
exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will
survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of
national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal.
One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the
sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,”
as Eric Trump said the coronavirus
would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators
who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.
In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our
choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than
1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the
nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first
step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their
Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it
sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if
convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying
people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything
as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible
deliberative body.
A political party’s primary function is to bestow its
imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the
Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled
to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving
abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious
objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:
We are the hollow men . . .
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .
Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder
two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the
lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the
worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad,
anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as
decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power
is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.