IN HIS FINAL DAYS, TRUMP CEMENTS HIS APPALLING LEGACY
Donald J. Trump did not order the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday. He did not command the nihilists, anarchists and renegades to mount its steps, scale its walls and flood its corridors on their thoroughly American safari. He didn't have to.
He incited them to “stop the steal.” He gave his division of deplorables the keys to the castle. Perhaps he knew the incompetent or sympathetic Capitol Police had left the porch light on and the front door ajar. Perhaps he just presumed it.
This we know: For several agonizing hours, the president of the United
States encouraged a minor insurrection. His collaborators climbed on statues and hoisted lecterns. They sat in the Speaker's chair. They stole, sacked, giggled, grinned and took selfies, like lunatics running the asylum.
All the while, Trump did not take to Twitter. The commander-in-chief commanded no one, least of all his conscience. Instead, he sat in the Oval Office and watched the mob, hoping for its success.
The intruders were disorganized and leaderless. They weren't the rioters who burned and looted downtown Washington over the murder of Martin Luther King,
Jr. in 1968. Of course, those demonstrators attacked the capital, not the Capitol, seat of a thousand clichés.
Here was the Orange Emperor, who had stood on those same stone steps four years ago and lamented “American carnage.” In his final days, he gave us a final image: Nero, fire and fiddle.
Eventually, reluctantly, he said he loved them and told them to leave. Congress returned to work and duly confirmed his successor. The melodrama will mean legislatively nothing and morally everything.
In the immediate aftermath, we hear the usual remedies for this affliction, all of which have failed so far. It's too late.
Censure? That would repudiate but not remove him.
Impeachment? The House could pass a one-line resolution charging him with violating his oath to “preserve, protect and defend.” But the Senate would have to hold a trial, presided over by the chief justice. And the Democrats would have to persuade 16 or so Republicans to join them. No time.
Invoking the 25th Amendment? That would take the vice-president and the whole cabinet, filled with sycophants like Mike Pompeo and Betsy DeVos, who would not agree.
Resignations? Elaine Chao, secretary of transportation, resigned Thursday. A little late, no? With courage like this, who needs cowardice?
Trump will finish his term. With every day, though, he can wander the White House, like Richard Nixon, raging at all the wrongs visited upon him. Like a drowning man, he will see his presidency pass before his eyes.
He will remember how Congress failed to repeal Obamacare and overrode his veto on the defence bill. He will resent allies turned enemies, such as the perfidious Mitch McConnell, and all those “stupid” governors who “betrayed” him.
He will revisit his perfect failure as a politician: losing the House of Representatives, Senate and White House over the last two years. He will torture himself imagining how Joe Biden will undo everything he did, beginning with a raft of early executive orders on the regulatory regime, followed by legislation raising taxes, tightening gun control and strengthening voting rights.
Power is shifting in America, and Trump and his renegades cannot stop it. That's the story of Trump's election in 2016, his defeat in 2020 and filling the courts with conservatives in between. The Republicans are losing the country, demographically, which is why they have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
He has 12 more days to wreck things. He will pardon his family and himself; award medals of freedom to thugs and reprobates; issue empty executive orders; seek special counsels to pursue his special grudges.
And he'll destroy the evidence of his corruption and criminality in a bonfire in the Rose Garden.
It won't save him. The reckoning is at hand. Whatever his armies of the night, whatever his vain, unhinged collaborators in Congress, it's over for him.
Pardon or not, he won't escape the law, his debt or his legacy. They're coming for him. Finally, Donald J. Trump has a date with infamy — and history.