The Capitol riot drew unprecedented condemnation from almost every quarter. Restraints on the Trumpian agenda beg why they haven’t been enacted before. Why not before his election? Why not after he fired the FBI Director investigating him? Why not after Charlottesville? To act so late permitted five years of misconduct. Neglect suited nobody but the politicians. They got the best of both worlds, complying until to do so was no longer in their interest.
Many seemed genuinely convinced, but only once the threat had arrived to their lives: not to children gunned down in public schools; nor Black people choked on the streets; nor trans women of colour beaten blue; nor undocumented Hispanic immigrants caged and left to suffer. Take the attention paid to people dying, the concern for loss, even the loss of domestic terrorists and white supremacists. Compare that with indifference to and victim blaming of Black lives taken too soon.
What next? American media obsesses over civil war, secession, and other spectres of their past. No explanation is presented for how civil discontent, shootings or even terrorism would turn into competing civil governments with independent militaries. Still, that perception has spread like a second virus. That places a serious strain for people to worry about day-to-day, particularly after incidents like this. The stakes of actions like protests and votes are heightened. Everything political you do is now a move to avert war, or to overcome the nefarious militarism of the opposing side.
Life goes on, but that state of being has an effect on mental health, on big choices - like whether you even want to remain in the country - and on split-second decision-making. Think of commanders of powers like law enforcement. Think of boots on the ground, military and civilian, with ever-prevalent firearms and other weaponry. Keeping a nation in a constant state of readiness for civil war fuels low-level instability, even if escalation never occurs. This leads me back to where we began: “things didn’t get even worse” is not a great place to be, and the States has been there for too long.
Nothing’s stopping Trump 2024: Return to Worse. Polls suggest Republicans evenly split between supporting and opposing the rioters. Even if a majority of Republicans ruling out voting for Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, he’d still hold the most obvious route to winning with his faithful behind him. In 2016, other candidates lacking clear distinctions split the vote; Trump won with under 45%. That could happen again. Trumpism has normalised. Failing that, there’s always third-party bids.
If Trump gets to the general election, particularly if he remains the Republican nominee, anybody who wants him beat badly will rally behind the Democratic candidate. In that case, consider any voters who can’t tolerate Democrats’ support for reproductive rights, carbon emissions reduction, restricting firearm ownership and so forth. What’s to stop them holding their noses and voting for Trump? Too many did it in 2016. They’re “supposed to” have learnt the error of their ways by now, but Trump turned out five million more votes in 2020 than the last time around. Partisanship, and a bad year for Democrats like an economic recession, could get him over the line.
Besides Trump, his enablers these past four years must be heartened to already have praise heaped upon them. Short memories have forgotten who opposed him in 2016, flipped to his side after his victory, then flopped back again the moment the upside outweighed the consequences - notably, John McCain’s best friend Senator Lindsey Graham, and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. These people should never be trusted with the reins of power for how they stood by and defended Trump. Instead, they, and other hard-right Republicans who happened to object to Trump like Mitt Romney, are being treated as the saviours of democracy.
Pence in particular is being lionized for “doing the right thing”, in a situation in which there was no real choice; nothing he could do would swing the election outcome, and the political fallout for him would obviously be catastrophic. Imagine he was somehow installed as Acting President, or otherwise continues to take a leading, evident role in preserving democracy, like how he directed law enforcement during the putsch. Many Americans will raise their estimation of him, viewing him as presidential. Never mind just how extreme his policies and views are, or how he’s been a polite Trumpist for the past four years. We’ve seen the rehabilitation of Republicans before, in contrast to Trump. George W. Bush is now, apparently, a better president than anybody thought at the time, corpses and chaos in Iraq be damned. The public may well vote in a Trump with decorum, then turn a blind eye when abuses are magnified, just as much cruelty will go ignored the next four years under Biden-Harris.
Ironically, this is all doom and gloom prophecy. Let me conclude like Rogue One. Initiating impeachment processes seems like a fool’s manoeuvre. Trump will be gone in two weeks’ time. If you try to forestall him abusing his powers to pardon himself or send nukes, he will get the news you’re about to impeach him, and promptly do those things in the remaining minutes.
The read I’m getting, however, is that the focus on the process is really to include a clause barring him from running for public office again. With that focus, impeachment could take time and avoid over-politicisation, or a botching of due process that sets a bad, and abusable, precedent. The nigh-insurmountable barrier of Senate Republicans looks more approachable from this angle: Democrats can muster not just anti-Trump Senators like Romney and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, but 2024 hopefuls with a vested interest in keeping Trump out of the race - Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, Tim Scott, and Ben Sasse are a few. That could be the trickle that washes away the mortar upon the floodgates. That could be the worst President in modern history gone now and for all time. Nancy, go get his ass.
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