December 9, 2018
Friday’s trio of filings from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Special Counsel’s Office leave no shred of doubt that, at the very least, the Department of Justice believes that Trump is guilty of two felonies directly related to increasing his chances of being elected. At worst, the overwhelming amount of information revealed in the last week, with its dizzying array of redacted filings and a telephone book’s worth of Russian names, leads to the inescapable conclusion that Trump, his family and his company are at the center of a vast criminal enterprise with decades’ long ties to the Russian mob, (Source: “Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back three decades,” by Sean Illing, Vox.com, 12/8/18). Recent events make it crystal clear that the Trumps, and those in their orbit, have zero compunction about lying, grifting or turning a blind eye to murder ( R.I.P. Jamal Khashoggi), in order to line their pockets.
Trump, every single person who serves in his administration, and every Republican who empowers him, is both immoral and amoral. His criminality is so wide in scope and so breathtakingly brazen, that it is hard to come to grips with it. As a result, some mainstream journalists desperately cling to an evaporating “status quo,” attempting to shoehorn a string of traitorous felonies into a shopworn pre-existing narrative. They lazily repeat his lies in clickbait headlines, rather than debunking them in real time, chasing the ad pennies, oblivious to the danger.
Trump’s odious base of credulous racists, are as frightened of multicultural modernity as the Taliban, and will never abandon him, even as they die prematurely from the consequences of a shredded safety net, unchecked environmental toxins and a runaway opioid epidemic that cannot be targeted to hurt only Black and Brown people.
It will fall to us, the clear eyed American majority, to face some sobering facts and act accordingly. For one, impeachment now must be on the table. It is imperative, not because conviction in the Senate is assured — the opposite is true— but because if we allow “political calculations” as articulated by Beltway pundits, to drive our decision making, we are no better than the Republicans who decided that tax cuts and anti-choice judges were an adequate price to pay for selling out our Constitution.
If we say that no one is above the law, we have to mean NO ONE! We cannot countenance the possibility that a vulgar, racist criminal will escape punishment for selling our country to a geopolitical foe whose system of government is antithetical to what we purport to stand for, while scores of Black men languish in prison for crimes related to marijuana.
Make no mistake, the next two years will be a test of our ideals. Do we really venerate our Constitution and the Rule of Law? Are we dedicated to building a society that is the living embodiment of those principles, where every person has an equal say in how we are governed and how we live our own lives, regardless of race, gender, religion, class or ethnicity? Or will we, in the name of “norms” that are no match for determined venality, allow Trump and those who empower him, to rule unchecked, in the vain hope that we can preserve our privilege and material comfort, unbothered by galloping fascism? Will we, in the words of James Weldon Johnson, “sell our birthright for a message of pottage?” Time will tell.