Trump keeps searching for the bottom, but every time he gets close to it, a new bottom opens up.
Everybody remembers one of the opening salvos in his attack on integrity back in 2015—the dismissal of former POW John McCain as not being a war hero at all because, as Cadet Bone Spurs stated, Trump liked heroes who didn’t get caught. When that was not a deal-breaker for his supporters, we knew we had entered a new swamp, but it has taken the impeachment hearings to register just how fetid and foul it is. And how large.
Now, however, after gamboling with the gators and the slimy crawly things that inhabit his world, Trump can see his lies and fabrications closing in. His only options? Lies and slander.
The operation is not going well.
In the past week he has denigrated the work of most of the State Department, including a military hero and a 33-year veteran of the foreign service. The latter, Marie Yovanovitch, received the greater wrath, even the threat of physical harm: Donald Trump never could stand women facing up to him. No bully can. Ms. Yovanovitch now knows that, as does a host of others whose genitalia Trump is wont to grab but whose intelligence and integrity present a threat.
Listening to the dedicated State Department employees explain their functions makes most everyday Americans proud, and maybe indicates why we have gone 74 years without a nuclear war despite the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Donald Trump has no understanding of this, and worse, he has no conception of what it is like to uphold the Constitution and the unwritten laws of the land before feathering his own nest. For Trump, Trump comes first.
Donald Trump was elected on the premise that he would shake things up. In Nagasaki some 74 years ago, nearly everything within 1/2 mile of the nuclear explosion was destroyed, including heavy structures. That bomb registered somewhere near five on the Richter scale—today's weapons make such a bomb seem like legal Connecticut fireworks. But even a five is not the kind of shake-up his followers are looking for; still, someone that unprincipled, that undisciplined, and that uninformed is capable of leaving not just his party and his country in shambles, but everything and everyone in his meandering and muddled path.
Unless there’s some deus ex machina ending that closes these impeachment hearings, the House will present the case and the Senate will exonerate, and life in our new autocracy will continue. It will be dangerous—it’s dangerous already—but we may have to put our trust in the remaining patriots who have managed to keep their jobs and maintain some order in the world. Donald Trump has no idea what they’re doing, and that may be their saving grace...and ours.
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