Lindsey Graham has already publicly stated that he wonât read the transcripts of the inquiryâs testimony, that he wonât be a âfair jurorâ, and that âIâve written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of B.S.â and Mitch McConnell is running a campaign ad that baldly states that any impeachment effort will fail with him as the Senate majority leader. So much for being fair and impartial.
The Moscow Mitch Courts; they protect them! We had a coup in this country and it was perpetrated by Wall Street, the billionaire class, the mega-corporations, and their loyal lapdogs, the Republican Party and the Christian-Right over forty years ago which has finally culminated in the election of Trump three years past. Have these reactionaries reached their apex and the only place to go is down? We will see in 2020.
It’s time to drop the posture that Trump’s defenders can be shamed into accepting what has been unearthed, or that they can be shamed into arguing from a baseline of shared democratic values, or into arguing over how to interpret a comprehensive set of shared facts.
Instead, let’s rhetorically treat Trump’s defenders as his criminal accomplices. Not just as “enablers” of Trump’s corruption but as active participants in it.
Once this is accepted, it becomes obvious why they can’t be “won over,” because they are actively engaged in keeping the corruption in question from getting fully uncovered, in the belief that they, too, benefit from it, and that they, too, lose out if it’s exposed.
The notion that Trump’s defenders can be shamed into facing up to what has happened here is all-pervasive. It includes the have-you-no-shame lectures delivered to Republicans who smeared Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for supposed dual loyalties.
It includes the oft-expressed idea that Republicans downplaying the evidence are doing so because they fear Trump’s base, as if they would embrace evidence if only they could, as if the problem is missing “courage” and not a more corrupt form of calculated self-interest…
Trump’s defenders are not “gettable” because they are accomplices in the whole scheme – and [we must] forthrightly describe what’s happening in kind.
