WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Monday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes:
• Context is everything. Without context, where something fits, its importance can’t be measured and felt, before, during, after. The trial now begins of Donald J. Trump and the “after” will be inscribed in history books forever. And what will it amount to? A futile act of revenge by one political party? Is Trump to emerge, not with a badge of shame but of acquittal and vindication?
• Let’s imagine the viewpoint of what many might assume to be a typical Republican at this point. Were this to culminate in a secret ballot, like that in the Republican conference on Liz Cheney, it might well go for conviction. She got 145 Republican votes to keep her No. 3 job in the Republican conference despite calling for Trump’s impeachment, with only 65 voting against her. She hasn’t backed down since. “The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” That secret vote suggests most Republicans in the House actually acknowledge to themselves that Jan. 6 was a freaking nightmare. Killer clowns and Trump watching it all on TV and doing nothing. Run for your life Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi.
• It’s not going to be a secret vote. It’s going to be a very public vote and a vote for conviction could well jeopardize a future in the Senate. Throw a Senate seat away, for what? After all that went into getting here? Statewide races that test you to your core. Few can imagine how hard that is. There’s so much to do and to do it, you have to be in the Capitol.
• And Democrats? Took the Senate. Believe it or not. And the White House. Everything. Thanks to Trump. He had endless opportunities to wipe out Democratic opposition. That wasn’t going to be the path for a presidency born of birtherism and sustained by divisiveness. Thank God he didn’t want to be a conventional president. Yet now he’s learned some things. What danger does he pose post presidency? To Democrats, to the country? What danger is posed by someone more cunning, more charismatic, more ambitious and more unscrupulous sometime in the future who will know such a “trial” conviction is impossible once out of office?
• Said the defense Monday, “This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people.” Said the prosecution, ““The House did not impeach President Trump because he expressed an unpopular political opinion. It impeached him because he willfully incited violent insurrection against the government.”
• A “trial” in which every juror may have already decided ahead of time. Not whether what happened can be forgiven. Not whether one verdict or the other is right for the country. No, the decision has already been made on how to vote. So what’s the point? After all, Trump’s handling of the pandemic, his call to “free” states from mitigation orders, everything that led up to the neighborhood dry cleaner counting five of her customers as dead victims, that wasn’t held against him in any meaningful way. So why this?
• For those senators with a sense of history, for those who are mainly calculating politicians striving to survive, or for those who are retiring and have nothing to lose, for those who have hopes to contribute to a better future, for those who have resigned themselves to what they see as the real world of winning and losing, of raising all that money, weighing the privilege and the power, for all those different people – or for those individual senators who have all those traits within them – the contexts are different. The damnable present is sharp and very tangible. The future can switch channels on a dime. Who knows what happens next week, let alone the next decade/ Only a fool would make the wrong decision. So this week and maybe next week will see “wrong” defined in different ways.
• Maybe, though, the context that really counts for the next few days is smaller in scope, is not that of the callused veteran. Maybe the proper context is as seen and realized by the inquisitive sixth grader. It might not make a lot of sense, why people are watching the TV and their handheld screens and seeing all those old men an a few women look so serious as they listen and listen. And maybe somehow it begins to make more sense and memories are made that will be recalled as the years go by. Does that inquisitive sixth-grader grow up in a world where Donald J. Trump stages a comeback, is remembered as another Nixon or fades away, his believers morphing into a another kind of crowd? Does the sixth grader grow up to be a Trump?
• Platitudes aren’t stale for a sixth grader. A sixth grader has no idea the Live Aid concert in 1985 was maybe when Western civilization reached the peak of its generous unanimity. A sixth grader doesn’t know about the Vietnam War, the Iraq war or various genocides around the world’s recesses and cul de sacs, much about Civil or “uncivil” wars. Meatless Mondays in World War II? The sacrifices made to preserve America? For a sixth grader it’s still mostly heroes, heroines and villains, simple black and white, right and wrong. A sixth grader is just learning and assumes all those adults know everything, know what’s best.
• What’s best? Is this “trial” – really a non-legal exposition that is on a different plane than a courtroom exercise – what’s best? Is what the senators will do what’s best? Can they tell what’s best? Of course they can. They have learned so well the truth, that what they know and what they do are of often two different worlds, two dimensions. The adults’ world has cleaved, fractured. A sixth grader has yet to see that future. Watch it unfold this week, etching its record in stone. Watch carefully.
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Contact this writer: denny@macenews.com.
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