Stop being angry with Democrats for not calling witnesses

Nothing is going to turn Republicans against Trump

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I lived in post-war Germany in the mid-1950’s as a boy.  My father was stationed first outside of Stuttgart and then in Oberammergau, the Bavarian village where the local citizens famously put on the Passion Play every 10 years.

I can tell you from personal experience that even 10 years after the end of the war, when you could drive down bombed out streets of German cities that were still lined with rubble, the German people loved Adolph Hitler.  He had led them into a war that destroyed their country.  I mean, leveled whole parts of it:  factories, farmland, cities, towns, villages, roads, railroads, airports, churches, houses, apartment buildings…the country was in ruins.  They had yet to finish rebuilding in 1955 when we arrived in Germany.

But they still loved Adolph Hitler.  American occupation forces had made sure that it was illegal to display his likeness or symbols of his rein like Nazi flags, Swastikas, copies of Mein Kampf, Nazi war regalia, anything at all that celebrated him.  Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal to this day.  But you could feel him everywhere.  You could see him in the faces of Germans who passed you on the street.  You could feel him in their determined non-resistance resistance.  Everything they did said, you may have beat us, but you will never change us.

German kids who were my age, born just after the war, were being raised the way American kids in the South were raised after they lost the Civil War.  They clung to the almighty “lost cause” in Germany the way Southerners clung to it in states like Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi and Virginia.  Even though it was illegal to display Nazi symbols in Germany, and it was legal in this country to display the Confederate flag, to march in local parades wearing Confederate uniforms, to celebrate the Confederacy at high schools and colleges with proms and fraternity parties and school assemblies, both Germany and the deep South were infected with the same political virus:  worship of the monstrous leaders who left them broken and defeated and the hellish ideologies that drove them.

I’m telling you all of this to make a simple point:  nothing is going to change the lost cause myth that is being built up around Donald Trump.  Nothing is going to change Republican support of him.  Nothing is going to change their love of him, because that’s what’s going on with them.  They love Donald Trump in the same way the German people loved Adolph Hitler.  If Trump were to die tomorrow, Trumpism wouldn’t die with him.  The Republican Party has been transformed forever into the party of Trumpism, the worship of his anti-democratic ideal that only white people matter, that only white people’s votes should count, that only white people are deserving of jobs, that only white people should be eligible for help from the government, that only white people count, that they are what America is about to the exclusion of everyone else.

That’s what you saw on January 6th at the Capitol.  You saw a mob of Trumpists.  They carried his flags, and the flags they believe stand for him like the Confederate flag and the “Don’t tread on me” Gadsden flag.  They wore the hats that symbolize him, MAGA hats.  They wore the clothing they think he admires, like red white and blue outfits and camouflage pants and jackets and military-style “combat” gear like bulletproof vests and “tactical” helmets and gloves. 

They went to the Capitol because he told them to.  They did at the Capitol what he had been telling them to do for months.  They attempted to “stop the steal” by stopping the certification of Biden’s victory. They did anything they thought was necessary to carry out what they believed were his orders. They assaulted and killed police officers.  They hunted for the people Trump had schooled them to hate, like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, and they shouted threats to kill them.  They destroyed and desecrated the House and Senate chambers.  They disrespected the symbols of our Union with Trumpian symbols like Confederate flags and Trump flags. 

And what you saw all last week in the United States Senate was part and parcel of the same thing.  The Republican members of the senate who are Trumpists voted according to Trump’s will not to hold the impeachment trial.  That they said it was unconstitutional was beside the point.  It was against the will of their leader, Donald Trump.  They met with and conspired with his defense team to help him win acquittal.  And in the end, 43 of them voted, as even Mitch McConnell admitted against all the evidence, to acquit him, because that is what Donald Trump wanted them to do.

The House managers could have shown a video of Trump leading his mob through the police barricades and into the Capitol building, and McConnell and the rest of his worshipers would have voted to acquit him of leading an insurrection.  That’s why it’s ridiculous to be angry with the Democrats’ prosecution team for not calling witnesses.  That trial in the senate was as good an example as any of Trump’s own boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote. 

The Republican Party and its members are Trump’s people in the same way the German people were Hitler’s people.  They are preternaturally disposed to want to follow an authoritarian leader like Trump, to follow his orders, to do quite literally anything he tells them to do.  In Germany before and during the war, that included rounding up Jews and others deemed undesirable by Hitler and putting them in camps and killing them.  Ordinary Germans were the guards at these camps. Ordinary Germans ran the gas chambers.  Ordinary Germans fired up the ovens.  Ordinary Germans pulled the triggers of the rifles that killed thousands and pushed them into mass graves.  Ordinary Germans drove the bulldozers that covered the bodies with ordinary German dirt.

They did all of it because that is what Adolph Hitler wanted them to do.  There was nothing extraordinary about it.  They saw it as their duty as citizens, as followers of Der Fuhrer.  They ran the camps and did the killing under his orders, under his flags.

So did the ordinary citizens you saw attacking the Capitol and committing acts of violence and murder on January 6.  They did it because it was what Donald Trump wanted them to do.  There was nothing extraordinary about it. 

That is why you saw Trumpian Republicans in the senate yawning and chatting and reading file folders full of documents while the videos of the attack on the Capitol were showing.  There was nothing extraordinary about what they saw.  They were watching their fellow citizens do what Donald Trump had told them to do.  That is why even though those videos were actual, factual evidence of crimes committed at Trump’s urging, in effect under his orders, they did not have any effect on the votes of the 43 Republicans who acquitted him.  Those videos were the functional equivalent of all the evidence of the Holocaust which is ignored by Holocaust deniers.  There are photographs of everything in the camps, from the starving inmates to the gas chambers to the ovens to the graves.  There are 16 millimeter motion pictures of starving victims being shot and falling into open graves.  There are films of ordinary German guards and camp supervisors doing this. 

And yet in the face of such evidence, there are people who deny what their eyes can see and their ears can hear.  Just as you saw Republican senators denying the evidence of crimes and violence they saw and denying Trump’s part in it and then standing up in the Senate and calling out loudly their votes of “not guilty.”

These people, these Republicans, these fellow citizens of ours, love Donald Trump.  Impeaching him not once but twice didn’t stop them from loving him.  Presenting copious evidence of his guilt in two trials didn’t stop them from loving him.  Presenting witnesses wouldn’t have stopped them from loving him.  None of what he has done over the last four years, including standing by mutely while more than 400,000 of our fellow citizens died of COVID, including inciting insurrection against our constitutional government, will stop them from voting for candidates he supports in the 2022 midterm elections, and nothing will stop them from voting for him again if he runs for president in 2024.

We had to defeat the German army and practically level their country with bombs and artillery and cause the death of Adolph Hitler and then we had to try his enablers and find them guilty and put them to death in order to bring Germany to its senses, and even now many Germans still worship Hitler and his lost cause.

This is what we face today, folks:  Another Hitler and another lost cause in the person of Donald Trump and the Trumpism of the Republican Party.  More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War we have yet to contend with either its causes or its results.  We are still infected with the disease of white supremacy, and now we have one of our two political parties pretty much devoted to its lost cause and the man who stands for it, Donald Trump.

Even if Donald Trump does omething as extreme as step up and declare outright his support for slavery, and if he runs for president, it’s a very real possibility that he will get 74 million votes again, or even more, and if he wins, and he is impeached a third time for anything at all, including leading another insurrection and this time he shoots someone in the Rotunda of the Capitol, he’ll still get 43 Republican votes to acquit.

This country is infected with the prion disease of Trump and Trumpism, and it will be long after he is gone.  We will continue to be a republic only if, in the immortal words of Ben Franklin, we can keep it.  As we learned last week, it won’t be easy.