When Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, he very quickly demonstrated through his temperament and mismanagement style that he kept score entirely based on who kissed or who dissed his ring and his ass. George W. Bush said after 9/11, “You are either for us or against us” in regards to terrorism. Trump and his malignant narcissism transformed this phrase into “You are either for me or against me.” When the world revolves entirely around you, as it does in Trump’s head, your childish insecurities about your own value are the only measure you have.
And so we saw on Day One that any criticism even of his crowd size was something to go on the attack about. Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, looked like his head was about to explode at the mere suggestion that the crowd size may have been smaller than the numbers that Trump made up. (Funny how it’s a matter of size with Trump, especially considering reports from Stormy Daniels.) Many of us knew on Inauguration Day that this entire presidency was going to be a constant sideshow.
If only it were just a sideshow instead of a disaster for our nation. In one early move, he gutted pandemic response teams put into place by President Obama (surely because they were put in place by Obama), and for that matter, he dismantled the entire President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST, founded originally by George H.W. Bush. The Trump regime was the most anti-science in modern history, probably because he was insecure about people thinking he wasn’t the smartest person in the room while he secretly feared he was the dumbest. Only an idiot would look at the early days of COVID and say, “Just stay calm. It will go away.” His actions most certainly made things worse, which is why I’m still baffled by anyone who supports him. His followers are so ridiculously loyal that they believed him about Ivermectin, a horse tranquilizer, over actual scientists. Now more people question science and educated experts more than ever before.
Trump’s chickens are now coming home to roost with the first two of probably four indictments within a year, if, as anticipated, he is indicted in Georgia and by the special counsel looking into the January 6th insurrection. (The Georgia case seems like a slam dunk given the “I just want to find 11,780 votes” recording.) And like clockwork, the GOP lemmings in Congress are lining up to kiss his ass (or really the asses of his followers) by claiming this is a “weaponization of the Justice Department.”
It’s basically the congressional equivalent of “I know you are, but what am I?”
The response fits well with the whataboutism of the party. “What about Hillary?” “What about Joe’s garage?” “What about that squirrel over there?” Anything to deflect and blame the other side in the face of a 37-count indictment including showing off our nation’s most sensitive secrets like they were his own personal souvenir collection and especially ignoring constant calls and subpoenas to return them (which neither Joe Biden nor Mike Pence did). Even the threat of an obstruction of justice charge forced Richard Nixon to resign, but it’s a nothing charge in Nixon’s party nowadays.
Many of us know that Trump’s most loyal followers are impervious to logic, but it bothers me almost as much that they are impervious to irony. “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” a former president once said. That was Trump speaking about Hillary’s emails after numerous investigations that came up with nothing and even a separate investigation on whether decisions in those investigations were politically motivated. But it’s perfectly fine for the Orange One not to understand the word confidential. When he breaks the law, he’s just being harassed.
And now that the indictments have started piling up on Trump as much as his accusations of Democrats weaponizing the Justice Department, the GOP Congress is promising to…weaponize Congress with investigations into Biden. In so many words they’re saying, “I don’t like what you’re doing to me, I think it’s wrong, and so I’m going to do the same exact thing to you.” They don’t even know what these investigations are, but they’re sure going to waste Congress’s time looking for them. Something about COVID mismanagement (from the party whose leader brought you Ivermectin) and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Laptops, email servers—all sorts of things that can house sensitive documents, ya know, like badly designed bathrooms.
The Jim Jordans, Matt Gaetzes, Margery Taylor-Greenes, and their ilk are threatening payback without even acknowledging that Trump did the slightest thing wrong. Their plan is revenge, pure and simple.
And now we see the real disaster of the Trump presidency. We were already a politically divided nation before Trump came to power, and those divisions have been weaponized by Trump and those who kiss his ass. Governing is no longer about building a better country or solving our nation’s problems. It’s about owning the other side, attacking the other side, calling them un-American, and whipping up hate toward people who are different: gay, trans people, Mexicans, Muslims, refugees, etc. They won’t stop until they find all the groups they want their followers to hate, so no minority is safe. In today’s GOP it’s perfectly okay to hate half of America if it means you can win power. So it’s hard not to blame them for the rise in violence against minorities, particularly against the LGBTQ community. The GOP is expert at claiming they’re victims when they victimize minorities all the time. Or didn’t you know it’s white men who are truly oppressed in this nation?
We need to get back to a place where Americans on both sides seek unity over these divisions. A much better president said at a famous moment in our history, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was the first Republican, and I doubt he’d recognize his party any more. Unity is not the goal of today’s GOP. It’s “burn the place down” in the name of lower taxes for corporations and billionaires, and then say, “Look, government doesn’t work.” But we’ve seen that it can work with the right leaders, and dividers, haters, and defenders of the indefensible aren’t leaders. Dividers are bringing down this country, and Trump lit a fire under them that we’ll be working to extinguish for a very long time.
