The enormous, overwhelming, unforgivable futility of it all

This is on you, Republicans. Nobody else.

I’ve been trying to sum up my own reaction to the elegantly presented and meticulously organized mountain of evidence at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump this week, and I’ve finally reached a conclusion.  I’m sad at the futility of it all.

Many of you, like I did, watched the House managers present the evidence that Donald Trump incited a mob of insurgents to attack the Capitol and stop the certification of the election of Joe Biden.  The evidence was overwhelming.  They went back in time and played tapes of every time Trump incited violence at his rallies, beginning in 2015, not long after he began his campaign for the presidency.  They played tapes of all the times Trump previewed the strategy he put to use in November after he had lost the election. They showed him in 2016 predicting that the election would be “rigged” and “stolen” from him, just like he did in 2020 before the election, and just like he did after he had lost the election.  They showed the tape of his speech on the Ellipse when he told the crowd, “Make no mistake, this election was stolen, from you, from me, from the country.  That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.”

The fact that he sent his mob to the Capitol “down Pennsylvania Avenue,” even pointing the way and telling them “I love Pennsylvania Avenue,” ended up being almost beside the point, because he had already whipped them into a frenzy by reminding them why they were so filled with hate and fear:

“Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about.  Our country has been under siege for a long time. Far longer than this four-year period.  If we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country because it's illegal when the votes are illegal when the way they got there is illegal when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information,” he told them, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

“When you catch somebody in a fraud,” Trump told the mob in conclusion, “you're allowed to go by very different rules.”

He whipped up his mob by appealing to their sense of victimhood, by agreeing that their country had been taken from them, just like his election had been stolen from him.  And then he told them that anything they did in retaliation was justified.

The senators sat there and listened, most of them anyway, as the House managers built a tower of evidence of Trump’s guilt, and yet their efforts were so obviously in vain.  I watched in abject amazement as the Democratic managers somehow maintained their dignity in the face of what we have been told was the disrespect and inattention of Republicans who busied themselves reading folders of papers, gazing around, chatting with each other, and leaving the floor of the senate for unauthorized breaks.  I don’t know how they did it.  It would have been beyond my sense of self control to keep myself from breaking decorum and shouting at them to sit down and shut up and listen.

The futility of their effort was palpable.  It was as if they were speaking into the maw of an enormous black hole filled with over 50 years of Republican malfeasance and misfeasance and dereliction of duty and outright hostility to democratic ideals.  I kept thinking, why bother?  They won’t vote to find the son of bitch guilty this time just like they let him off last time. 

What is it about this country that one of its two political parties has been encouraged by its members to resign from democracy itself?  I get it that they know they’re facing a demographic nightmare, that the white people who comprise the party will within a generation be a minority in this country, that their grip on the ownership of land, money, and the means of production they have always enjoyed will slowly be stripped from them by people who will turn themselves into the new owners of a different sort of country altogether. 

That prospect would depress me, too, if I were among the haves who know in their bones that they are about to join the have nots.  But is that enough to turn yourselves and your hopes and your dreams, as well as those of your children and grandchildren, over to a disgusting demagogic worm like Trump?

What is in the end so sad is to sit here every day and watch the Republican Party consign whatever is left of its pride and honor to the ash heap of history.  Because that’s where they’re going.  They will be remembered as a bunch of racist, soulless fascists who allowed themselves to be taken in by a cheap carnival barker who wouldn’t even give them the teddy bear they won when they knocked down America’s pyramid of milk bottles.