These 10 days will last a lifetime

In a Kiwi summer holiday, time is elastic in the best of ways. It’s less than a week since I had no idea what day of the week it was at all, and cared even less.

In that once-a-year, delightfully slothful gap between the public-holiday bookends of Christmas and New Year, perceptions of what can and cannot be reasonably achieved is pliable in the extreme. Will I make it to the beach today as planned, or is the allure of the couch and a book just too strong? Too hard a decision? The couch it is, then.

Across the world, in another time zone and another season, time is also being weighed and scrutinised, not with an eye on the tides or the weather forecast, but on violence, division, and what fresh horrors might be coming next.

The inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden is just 10 days away – little more than a week. Confusingly, that’s both a blink of the eye, and an interminable stretch as the world waits to see how much further the fabric of American democracy can fray.

Wednesday’s attack on the US Capitol by white supremacists/armed thugs/ domestic terrorists/ seditionists/all of the above has left everyone weighing the possibilities – is 10 days too long a time to leave a man who’s told his supporters he will never concede, a man intent on inciting violence, in charge of the third largest military in the world and in possession of the nuclear codes? Is it too short a window to complete, or even launch, a second impeachment action against him?

For 24 hours we could not even gauge the decline of the president’s mind for ourselves – his preferred way of communicating with the wider world had been canned. Suspension of the Trump accounts on Facebook and Twitter would once upon a time have been a blessing (and a way of helping protect the democracy Americans love so very much). Twitter and Facebook have been embarrassingly late to the party with Trump; they could and should have moved to moderate his blatant lies (close to 30,000 of them in his four years in office) so much earlier. Only this week, when the temple of American democracy was attacked as a result of his exhortations, did they shut him down. That may have been the right thing to do in this moment, but it also carries a heavy irony – after Wednesday we might have liked to know what his state of mind was as he paced the White House hallways.

There were clues, if you were looking for them. The appearance of Kayleigh McEnany, 24 hours after the armed insurrection took place, was as good an indication as any of the roiling chaos that surely must have seized the White House. McEnany is the Trump administration’s fourth press secretary, and also the person who told CNN with a completely straight face ‘‘no, I don’t believe the president has lied’’. Often combative, always unflappable, McEnany was almost unrecognisable in the briefing room on Thursday. She read from a statement, saying the attack on the Capitol building was ‘‘appalling and reprehensible’’ and that the entire administration, including the president, ‘‘condemn it .. in the strongest possible terms’’.

This does not match with the president’s own words, one day earlier, via video in a final Twitter message before his account was suspended. Of course it does not. It’s easy to say that phrase – of course. It’s a verbal cue we use when we assume we’re on the same page because there is no other page; what we say when we are talking about self-evident truths. But never mind ‘‘strong terms’’, there was no condemnation by the outgoing president of the rioters at all. Instead, he called them ‘‘special’’ and that he loved them. Adding to the confusion, mere hours after McEnany’s appearance, Trump flipped his script and released another video declaring his beloveds had ‘‘defiled the seat of American democracy’’ and that they did ‘‘not represent our country’’. In reporting this, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out the president has a long history of saying such things and then undermining his own remarks with his next breath.

It is Alice-through-thelooking-glass stuff. There is no ‘‘of course’’ because there is no longer any common ground to agree upon.

Increasingly often now, commentators are acknowledging this has not happened in a rush, nor just in the past four years. There has been a decade at least of Republican conspiracy theories, including birtherism and election fraud scaremongering designed to disenfranchise swathes of voters, that has brought America to this place.

So what can be done in 10 days? Impeachment and conviction, if that can be achieved, would at least prevent Trump from ever running for public office again. But as Congress convened to confirm Biden’s election win on Wednesday, there were 12 Republican senators who were refusing to even acknowledge him as a legitimate presidentelect. They’d need 18 to support Democrats’ wishes, and that does not look possible.

As he left the Senate chamber late on Wednesday night, Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator who voted to convict in the last impeachment proceedings, was asked whether a second impeachment would fly. He did not think so.

‘‘I think we all just have to hold our breath.’’ The whole world is now doing exactly that.

Is it too short a window to complete, or even launch, a second impeachment action against Trump?