When the Senate convicts tRump — as it’s 99.99 percent certain to do — and then bars him from ever again holding public office, the end of our four-year political nightmare will, for all means and purposes, be over. Nonetheless, we’ll still have a ways to go, probably two or more years. Rooting out and bringing to the Bar of Justice the insurrectionists who took over the Capitol Building (along with their enablers) is a task that must be successfully completed no matter how painful and disruptive it is.
Republican senators, many of whom have always privately disliked tRump and what he stands for, will take the scary step of voting to convict since the option of not doing so is even scarier. They know that if the leader of the insurrection isn’t crushed while they now have the opportunity, he’ll maintain control of a significant portion of the GOP base and will be able to dictate policy as well as continuing to threaten any Republican who doesn’t do his bidding. They’d be fools to do anything but convict him by a vote of 100-0.
Once the megalomaniac is no longer able to hold public office he’s of no further use to the far-right; he no longer will be their useful idiot. And just as importantly he won’t have the power to punish any senator who voted to convict him since he’s going to lose control over more than half of his current base within a month of his leaving office.
While some QAnon-types will stubbornly persist in their hero worship to their dying breath, for the most part the ogre will be relegated to the far reaches of the minds of most of his current followers. We already know how fickle the American political public is in its thinking. In time the insurrectionist movement will fall apart with the ogre out of the picture.
But his ascendancy will nonetheless serve as a cautionary tale; a warning to future generations of the dangers of extremism and foolish thinking. Time doesn’t run backwards, no matter how hard a group of demented citizens might wish. We’re not going turn the clock back to a time when white supremacy was allowed to go unchallenged or unquestioned. Those days are over and done.
As I’ve written before, this would-be dictator’s elevation to the highest office in the land might one day be viewed as a blessing — a disguised one at the time for sure, but nonetheless an eye-opening blessing. Absent him winning the presidency in 2016 we might have limped along for I don’t know how many more years completely oblivious to the deep divisions and disunity extant in the country.
But now that we’re aware of just how many of our fellow citizens were (and probably still are) willing to trade their freedoms and liberties for an empty promise to preserve their white privilege — now that it’s out in the open, we might be able to address our national differences and chart a path of shared prosperity and success for all Americans.
However, the 800-pound gorilla sitting stubbornly in our national living room is, as it’s always has been, race. We avoid the subject like Covid-19. We have demonstrated for over 244 years that we’d rather follow our Founding Fathers lead and kick the can of race further down the road for a future generation to deal with, but the clock starting running out on the afternoon of January 6th in our nation’s Capitol.
We now are confronted with the Herculean task of taking on the beast of bigotry and wrestling it to ground. This will by no means be easy, and the extent to which we can rid the country of the “isms” that have been freighting us down for centuries is an open question. If we could somehow get rid of just 50 percent of the racial animus extant in America that would be a great improvement — a huge step forward.
No one is demanding that haters quit hating. That’s expecting too much. They’ll give it up when they finally grow up — or they won’t. And many probably won’t since if they let go of their hatreds … what else will they have left to cling to? So they can keep right on hating, but what law enforcement has to do is assure hateful and bigoted views are not acted on in an organized, violent manner, not without severe consequences.
