My Birthday Present: Trump’s Impeachment
Today was my birthday and the best present I got was Trump’s impeachment. I know it won’t get passed in the Senate, but he’s been wounded, and that’s a good start toward his losing re-election. The wound has already brought out his true colors – black and blue and mad as hell. The six-page letter is clearly the mark of a wounded bull; he’s losing his cool, losing his mental capabilities (such as they were to begin with, which isn’t saying much).
The situation reminds me quite a lot of Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel, Night at Camp David, whose subtitle reads “What would happen if the President of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?”
What I fear most with Trump is his belief that he’s got the right to do whatever he wants, including giving the finger to the Rule of Law. That he’s superior to the other two equal government bodies, Congress and the Supreme Court. And that he prefers to call dictators his friends. He’s utterly unethical and immoral and I fear when pushed into a corner – or should I say further into a corner – he will retaliate.
We need to keep a sharp eye on him. The Wall Street Journal today quoted Trump saying the impeachment hearings were an “illegal, partisan attempted coup.” An attempted coup? Think about that. A coup is overthrowing a bad government or a bad leader. How can Trump imagine that the House of Representatives is engaged in a coup against the president? It defies logic.
I bring this up because I think we ought to consider that this level of rejection by the House could push Trump to declare himself the supreme poobah and exempt from all moral or legal censure, then appoint himself dictator-in-chief. Again, the lessons of history, this time from the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, in which a U.S. Senator is elected president and turns into a Hitler-like dictator.
The drama with this crude, cruel narcissist is far from over. I find my only relief in the title of Jimmy Cliff’s song, “The Bigger They Come the Harder They Fall.” For falling his is, and continue to fall he will, hoist on his own petard.
