by David A. Love
Know this: Donald Trump is going down. And when he does, he needs to take the entire Republican Party down with him. With the decision by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel in the investigation of Russian hacking of the election, things are starting to move rather quickly — and not in a good direction for Trump and his people.
This, as Congressman Al Green (D-Texas) fired the first shot across the bow and called for the president’s impeachment on the House floor. All of this is unfolding less than a week after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the president and make the Russia investigation go away.
Comey kept his notes from those meetings, which also included Trump telling the FBI chief to lock up journalists. With control of the narrative slipping from his hands, this is the beginning of the end, finally, for the worst, most incompetent president in U.S. history.
“Look at how I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” President Trump said at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s commencement on Wednesday. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” His statement would have made more sense if Barack Obama — or better yet, Nelson Mandela — had been the one making it.
Now is the time to shut down Trump, and the faux patriotic Republican Party that created him and enabled his corruption, his racism, his destruction of the government and soiling of the nation. It could take years to clean up the mess. The GOP is looking increasingly like a criminal organization that has given free rein to a madman and a gangster and needs to be brought up on RICO charges, or labeled as a hate group and dissolved.
All hell broke loose when, fresh off firing Comey over Russiagate, Trump invited two Russian officials — Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, considered one of Russia’s top spies — to the Oval Office. American reporters were not allowed in the closed-door meeting, but the Russian state press was admitted with photography equipment and tweeted the event.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump supplied the Russian officials with highly classified intel. In what will surely become known as one of the most bizarre episodes in modern political history, Trump looked like a newly inducted Wiseguy, a “made man” meeting with his sponsors.
As House majority leader Kevin McCarthy said last year in a recorded conversation with Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican lawmakers, “I think Putin pays” Trump. “This is an off the record,” Ryan responded. “NO LEAKS…alright?!”
“What’s said in the family stays in the family,” Ryan added.
Whether the Republicans begin to call for his impeachment, they shouldn’t have supported Trump in the first place. Yet they have stood with this man, whether out of fear of reprisal, or because they like his strongman persona, or for the money, or because they want to shove as much of their harsh agenda of tax cuts and social spending cuts as they can before the ship goes down.
Meanwhile, the GOP has become a vessel for toxic white masculinity and racial violence, and all sorts of pathological people and policies. Nazis have occupied the West Wing, and robber barons are grabbing whatever they can. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has her golden opportunity to gut public education, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions fulfills his lifelong dream to revive the war on drugs and lock up all the black folks.
Crazy Sheriff David Clarke, who called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist movement,” is reportedly appointed to a position at the Department of Homeland Security, and an Ivy League white supremacist named Kris Kobach oversees Trump’s voter suppression efforts. This is what the GOP has become. The days of Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Poppy Bush’s Willie Horton ad seem tame and quaint by comparison. Now, under Trump, the Republicans are a pathological organization, a pre-existing condition.
We need to let the party burn down before they take us all down, if we have any hope of building a real democracy, which black people never had in any case. We protest and they call us un-American, but they sell out to Putin the country they claim to love so much and call themselves patriots?
Trump, like the party he leads, is one of greed, depravity and extremism.
As James Baldwin once said, “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” As the investigators dig up the receipts, and the leakers continue to leak, we witness the beginning of the end of the Trump White House and Republican rule. No two-term presidency, no one-term presidency. If he spends a full year in office before he is fired from this reality show, he’ll be lucky — far more fortunate if he avoids wearing an orange jumpsuit for life.
