The big elephant in the room: a fable

They hate him, but they’re frightened of his power, so they’re going to let him off and hope he doesn’t return to make their miserable lives even more miserable than they already are.

That’s the big elephant in the room that all the little elephants are thinking about today:  his obvious guilt and how much they hate him for its reflection on them as they squirm in his shadow.  It’s all they’ve thought about since he started knocking them off, one by one in 2016:  Rubio and Cruz and Graham and Bush and Christie and Paul were all flicked away like bothersome fleas by the big elephant in the Republican primaries.  Their hatred and jealousy of him was evident as they cowered under his bullying derision.

It’s all the little elephants thought about since he took office in 2017 and started requiring them to kiss his big fat ass every single day, from the moment they awoke until the moment they closed their eyes.  It’s all they’ve thought about since he lost on November 3 to Joe Biden and began making them nervous with his elephant-in-a-China-shop campaign to overturn the election.  It’s all they’ve thought about since January 6 when in a fit of frustration and anger, the big elephant called out his angry racist followers and pulled the trigger on the weapon he had been oiling and polishing and loading with hate and fear since he took office. 

The little elephants don’t want to admit how frightened they are, so they have sat there waiting to hear from his defense team, hoping that gang of dunces would somehow produce a marginally reasonable excuse for them to exonerate him.  Some of the little elephants have even consulted with the lawyers on the big elephant’s team, whispering in their ears what the rest of the herd thought it needed to hear in order to emerge from the gigantic clusterfuck of the last five years without their integrity lying in shreds.

Now the little elephants in the room have heard the big elephant’s  defense.  They heard that he didn’t say or do anything that every single Democrat in congress hasn’t said or done himself or herself.  The big elephant’s defense answered the House managers’ extensive use of video evidence of the attack on the Capitol with dozens of scenes of Democrats yelling the word “fight” in political campaigns, on the floor of the house and the senate, at party conventions, pretty much anywhere a Democrat has opened his or her mouth over the past four or five years.  They said it wasn’t a case of what-about-ism, but they all knew that it was.  They said if it was okay for Democrats to rally their followers by promising to fight for them, or to ask the followers to fight to win elections, or even to fight to overturn elections, then it was okay for the big elephant to do the same.

This was the watering hole the little elephants had been searching for, and you could almost hear a sucking sound as they drank it in.  The little elephants were also provided with a tiny fig leaf with which to cover their newly-discovered affection for the First Amendment so that once they’ve found the big elephant not guilty and have slunk home, none of his base, which all of them, every single one, hungers to turn magically into their base, will see them naked in their hypocrisy.

What the little elephants did not hear was even a smidgen of a defense of the big elephant’s actions on January 6 once the attack on the Capitol had begun.  His execrable denunciation of his own Vice President for cowardice, by implication calling Mike Pence a traitor, went unmentioned, as did the obvious danger the vice president was in from the rampaging mob.  Also unmentioned were the deaths of three police officers and the injuries done to more than 140 of them by a mob screaming “fight for Trump,” and “hang Mike Pence.”

But what goes unheard need not be contemplated, according to the apparent theories of the big elephant’s defense, as aided and abetted by the likes of senators Cruz, Lee, and Graham, all of whom were crapped on by the big elephant when they ran against him in the 2016 primaries, and all of whom obediently visited with his defense counsels armed with a map of the minefield they would need to negotiate for the little elephants to continue to ignore the big elephant in the room, which was the nakedly obvious guilt of the man they so hated but of whose power they were so jealous.

There was another big elephant in the room in the senate chamber today, and that was the Republican Party at large.  They were guilty of coddling and enabling their fellow big elephant for the last five years.  Like so many of the senators who are sitting in judgment today, the Republican Party looked away as the other big elephant cultivated and watered his base of angry racist yahoos and readied them for the day he would call on them to act in his name.  When that day came on January 6, the Republican Party was still looking anywhere but at the big elephant in the room as he proceeded to stomp all over their House and their Senate, their precious chambers where they fed and watered their individual egos and prepared to take over from the big elephant whom  they wrongly saw as fatally wounded and lying at their feet. 

He wasn’t.  He turned on his herd and sent his jackals after them with teeth gnashing and spittle flying and scared them into submission once again. 

The donkeys in the room were right about this much:  if when this trial is done the little elephants don’t tie down their big elephant and drive a stake in his heart, he will do it all over again, to them, and to us.