By Joe Courter
We could see it coming. We knew his history. We could see his behavior and practices going back decades. And we continuously thought that surely people will come to their senses, that something would be just so far over the line that he would be rejected and seen as the greedy con man that he has always been.
We waited to see if the system would work. But no, somehow there has been no popular rising up of resistance, and the system seemed incapable of dealing with this situation.
The list of offensive things done by this man is stunning. Pardon this rehash but we cannot forget:
when he joked about grabbing pussies …
when he claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Ave. and still get elected …
when he lied about the size of his inauguration rally, the size of his popularity …
when he undermined the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Secretary of Defense …
when he said there were fine people in the neo-Nazi Unite The Right Charlottesville violence …
when he buddied up with Putin, Netanyahu, Duterte, Kim Il Jong, Modi, Bolsenaro, etc …
when his naked racism against Mexicans and Muslims was knocked back by the Federal courts …
when he undermined NATO, the UN, his European allies …
when the Mueller Investigation got underway, indicted his associates, concluded, and Mueller himself delivered his findings …
when he bailed out of the climate agreement …
when he bailed out of the Iran agreement …
And now the Ukraine phone call. It could be that Nancy Pelosi was playing for time, giving him enough leeway to do something that would put a rope around his neck.
This latest thing, that final straw heaped up on all the other straws, has some real substance. He was using our tax money as leverage for his own political gain. They hid the phone call in a secret file.
Ironically it was a ginned up false version of the years’ old Biden/Ukraine story that he heard, believed, and then tried to use to get dirt on a potential election foe. For more, see James Risen on the Sept. 27 episode of Democracy Now! at democracynow.org.
So here we are. This will be the story that dominates the news cycle, but leading to what? Will the Republicans keep sticking with him or will they break ranks? Just how devoted to him is his base, and how will they react?
And frankly, just how unhinged is this man?
His tweets and pronouncements are getting increasingly bizarre. Recently he proclaimed, “Nancy Pelosi is no longer Speaker of the House.” By the time you are reading this, things may have gotten even weirder.
I was just out of college during the Watergate hearings, and I avidly watched them. You knew it was going somewhere, but the outcome was not clear. But finally, Nixon — reading the writing on the wall — resigned, his support in Congress was disappearing, and he had cut a pardon deal with Vice President Gerald Ford.
Trump is cut from a different cloth than Nixon, and I don’t see him bowing out gracefully.
Trump has a frighteningly militant base lapping up Fox News and all sorts of toxic social media. They are fed and believe in a whole different worldview. And so does Trump, and it is all about him, and what he calls winning.
And even if he leaves without a fight, we still have organizing to do and elections to win. Everyone now knows elections have consequences, and hopefully we can keep the big picture in mind, be aware of intentional disinformation, and re-establish the primacy of science, of compassion, and get on the road to recovery.