Trump Must Be Tried And Convicted

We all know that in the next few months, Democrats are going to come under massive pressure from Republicans, large parts of the mainstream press and even a fair number of their fellow Democrats to Just Let The Whole Thing Go, and to Look Forward Not Backward, and otherwise  forget that we just had a President of the United States attempt to keep himself in power through a coup.  This must absolutely not happen, and in fact the current inquiries must be broadened to include far more of the endless treachery which marked his term as President.

To explain this, I want to present a highly abbreviated history of the Republican party.  

Most people know that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President, and that the party emerged to national prominence by being the side that stood against slavery.  Sad to say, that noble purpose did not last long, and by 1880 or so, the Republicans had already transformed into the party of rich people.  Yes, there were exceptions; whatever his failings, Theodore Roosevelt, for example, clearly had progressive views on a number of issues.  That pretty much came to an end with Roosevelt's successor, William Taft, whose attitude toward the Presidency was pretty much to appoint a bunch of rich guys and then let them do whatever they wanted.  

After another brief period of Democratic Presidency, the country was treated to three Republican Presidents in a row, and their Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the richest and greediest people the world has ever known.  By common agreement among themselves, they tipped the whole American economy toward the rich.  The result of this twelve year Republican rule was the Great Depression, and indirectly the reignition of World War.

Well, that was enough for the American people, for a while anyway.  Having had enough of Republicans, they did not elect another real  Republican President for forty years, until Richard Nixon in 1968.

Let me note here that I do not consider Eisenhower to be a true Republican.  As a military officer, Eisenhower always considered it his responsibility to align with no party; both parties courted him to run on their ticket in 1952.  More importantly, he did not rise to prominence within the Republican party, which made sure that nobody became a party leader without a willingness to submit to the rich backers who even then financed the party's ascendancy.

But memory fades, and by 1968 the American people had forgotten the link between Republican economic cant and the great depression, and decided to give the grand Conservative fantasy another try.  And we all knew what the result of that was: Richard Nixon.  Nixon was driven out of office because he attempted to use the power of the Presidency to insure that he would win re-election.  Breaking into the Democratic Party's offices, or the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seem like pretty minor crimes compared to Trump trying to have his own Vice President and opposition leaders murdered in a violent attack on the Capitol, but those were more naive times, I guess.  There were still a handful of Republican Senators that thought that a President should not be allowed to act that way, and that is all it took to save the country.

The nation thought at the time that the Republicans would learn a lesson from the results of coddling the likes of Nixon, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and they did learn a lesson: they learned to never again allow anyone to rise in the party that was not willing to utterly abandon his human decency in order to gain power.  And with this choice, the real descent began: for the last fifty years at least, it has been the intent of the Republican party to replace our current form of government, whatever you choose to call it, with an oligarchic dictatorship which exists to promote nothing but the cravings of a couple thousand rich psychopaths and their families, a goal they pursued by tipping the economic table so far in favor of the rich that these few people were all it took to finance their entire party.  And with that decision, they decided that the rest of us could be damned.

In response to Nixon's treachery, the nation just decided to Look Ahead Not Behind, and let him off the hook for his betrayal of his office and the country.  

Next, we were treated to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, a man who gained the White House through a literally treasonous agreement with the Iranian Mullahs who held Americans hostage, to keep them in captivity in order to hurt the current President, Jimmy Carter, and who then illegally sold 2,000 missiles to our Iranian enemies, in order to finance a terrorist right wing attempt to overthrow a socialist but legally elected government in Central America.  This time the treason, and I mean Constitutionally defined "aid and comfort" treason, could not have been clearer, but once again, the American people were persuaded to just let bygones be bygones, and allowed then Attorney General William Barr (heard that name lately?) to let all of the treasonous conspirators go free.  And in the background, Reagan continued the Republican program of pouring all of our country's wealth into the pockets of the hyper-rich.

And thus we finally come to Donald Trump (I'm just going to skip the idiot Bush II here- we don't have all day, and if I cover every miserable treachery of the Republicans we will be here until doomsday; they commit betrayals faster at this point than we can write them down.)  Here we have a man who openly conspired with a foreign dictator to get into office in the first place, and when confronted with losing his second election, openly if incompetently attempted a violent coup.  And already we are hearing the voices of "tolerance" insist that we need to forgive and forget.

We must face the fact that at least three Republican Presidents in the last half century have conspired to overthrow the will of the American people and destroy whatever vestiges of democracy we have left, regardless of who wants them in office.  Every attempt has been more criminal than the one before, and the last one might very well have succeeded if the President's treachery had not been matched by his stupidity.  And every time, the Republicans have learned lessons from their defeat- not lessons in humanity or the just use of power, but lessons in how to destroy the few shreds of democratic rule that remain.  Next time, we will very likely not be as lucky as we were this time.  Next time, the attempt might come from a very competent criminal like Ted Cruz or Mitch McConnell, and democracy, which hung by its fingernails from a cliff for a few hours on January 6th, may very well not survive.

Well, there had better not be a next time. They almost succeeded this time. It is vital to our survival to see to it that they pay for their crimes this time.