Trump must face a final reckoning
This week’s decision to impeach Donald Trump for yet a second time will strike even some of his most committed foes as overkill.
Whatever harm he’s done to the United States in the most brazen and bizarre presidency in the country’s history — and that damage is as massive as it will prove enduring — the sands in his hourglass are running out. In five days, Trump’s four-year term will end, no matter how much he fumes and fulminates.
Far from anyone having to oust him, he will be gone. Joe Biden will be sworn in as his replacement. The National Guard troops who are even now encamped in Washington D.C. will ensure last week’s assault on the Capitol building is not repeated.
So why, many reasonable minds will ask, did the American House of Representatives vote Wednesday to impeach Trump once again, this time for an alleged “incitement to insurrection?”
Won’t this drive new wedges into America’s fractured political landscape? Won’t it prove pointless? After all, unless Trump’s own party abandons him — which it hasn’t until now — there isn’t enough Republican support in the Senate to convict Trump of anything.
Sorry folks. None of these arguments should spare Trump from the ignominy of another impeachment trial. While he survived the first, for the sake of his bruised and battered country he must face the consequences for all the wrong he has done since November’s presidential election.
It is indisputable Trump lost that vote. But ever since election day, he has spread falsehood after falsehood to cling to power. In the fantasy tale he’s spun, the election was a fraud, the voting system rigged. He and no one else is the rightful president.
It mattered nothing to Trump that about 60 courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected every challenge from his legal teams. Trump then tried to intimidate Georgia’s Republican secretary-of-state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes” to help overturn the election result. When that scheme failed, Trump appealed directly to the grassroots supporters he had misled and misinformed for the previous two months.
Hours before violence engulfed the heart of Washington D.C. last week, Trump appeared before thousands of those supporters and, spouting incendiary rhetoric, told them to march to the Capitol building. Continuing to claim he’d been robbed of the presidency, Trump instructed the deluded mob to “fight like hell” against the election results.
History books will record how hundreds of those followers — some who were armed — later smashed through security barriers and past police to storm the Capitol building and send terrified U.S. lawmakers fleeing before they could approve the election results. Five people died as a result of the mayhem.
So it is not a few words spoken by Trump on a single day that lit the match that set this bonfire raging. This was an inferno he deliberately stoked for months. No president has ever attacked his own country in this way.
To overlook Trump’s betrayal of everything a U.S. president should stand for, to pardon a blatant and concerted attempt to subvert American democracy would be wrong. He must, in whatever way proves possible, be held accountable for his actions so no future president cites Trump’s misdeeds to justify his or her own.
Unless Trump is discredited and repudiated before the American public and his own Republican party, he will continue to pose a living threat to the Constitution, government and security of the nation. Even if the Senate does not ultimately convict Trump, an impeachment trial should prove a final, appropriate and overdue reckoning for Donald Trump. Make America sane again.