Richard Cohen, one of the Beltway’s crappier columnists, deposited a steaming turd of a column yesterday entitled “We Would Impeach Trump at Our Peril.” Cohen’s columns are invariably unfunny and obtuse. But this column is worse; it is cowardly. An excerpt:
In a speech last week, Arthur Eisenberg, the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, warned, “There should be no impeachment unless the case for impeachment were overwhelming.” If that were not the case, he went on, “Trump’s supporters would feel that they were deprived of their electoral victory.”
Eisenberg’s caution is well founded. Trump has already prepped his supporters to believe that an influx of illegal immigrants almost stole the election from him. He has labeled uncomfortable truths “fake news” or, in the Orwellian concoction of Kellyanne Conway, “alternative facts.” He would surely lie in his own defense. He almost certainly would tolerate, possibly even stoke, violence…
After she lost the election, Hillary Clinton called for reconciliation. Al Gore did the same after the Supreme Court, in a partisan vote, handed the White House to George W. Bush. I cannot imagine Trump doing the same after being removed from office. He has been a miserable winner. He would be an even worse loser.
I actually don’t disagree with any of the above, nor do I expect Trump to be impeached, though I fervently hope for it. IMO, the most plausible best-case scenario is that Trump limps through his one, chaotic, embarrassing term under a cloud of scandal, accomplishing nothing of note and whittling his party’s unearned stature down to the rump it truly is.
But the unmitigated fucking gall, the sheer goddamned effrontery of a hack like Cohen mewling about what might happen if Trump fails to confess but is impeached anyway, well, I’m out of fucks to give or can’ts to even.
Trump’s supporters would FEEL deprived of their electoral victory? Fuck their goddamned feelings, sideways and with every oxidized garden implement in the rustiest toolshed in the land.
How about the much larger group (by nearly three million) who were LITERALLY deprived of our electoral victory by a lying demagogue, his gang of corrupt GOP toadies, a murderous foreign autocrat, an albino rat cowering in Ecuador’s basement and James Comey’s sanctimony?
And the certainty that Trump would continue to lie, sow division and behave like an unpatriotic asshole is supposed to stay our hand? Fuck that noise too — those traits make his removal all the more urgent.
The thing Cohen fails to comprehend is that this isn’t just about Trump. Yes, Trump is an unhinged demagogue who poses a clear and present danger to the United States and the world, and booting him from office would be the first step in the generational work of restoring our good name as a nation.
But Trumpism as a concept is even more dangerous. It needs to be drawn and quartered, packed in lye, encased in lead, loaded aboard a rocket and fired into the goddamned sun.
Impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment is highly unlikely, even though Trump IS on video confessing to obstruction of justice and behaving like a pinwheel-eyed lunatic who would make Richard M. Nixon blush to wear the R label. But the idea that we should take these remedies off the table to appease the mush-brained ninnies who elevated the fool in the first place? Fuck. That.
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