Well, it isn’t. “F*ck You” hasn’t made the North Koreans play ball. Or the Iranians. Or the Chinese. Or even the Venezuelans. Telling the world what to do has proved a lot harder than Donald Trump imagined, and, frankly, the big guy is getting both frustrated and bored, and even a little worried. It’s “interesting” that the Mighty Donald would be so worried by the “challenge” presented by an aging pretty boy like Joe Biden that he would try to put the arm on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to “investigate” Uncle Joe, but when a little mind tries to think big thoughts it gets tired. Trump’s mind is back in the gutter because that’s where it belongs.
Although I’m definitely a sometime admirer of Nancy Pelosi, I think she’s made the right decisions on impeachment—stiff-arming cries for action in the past on the grounds that, thanks to the Republican grip on the Senate (where 67 votes, not 51, are required for conviction in the first place), impeachment hearings, and even a successful impeachment vote in the House, would amount to nothing more than rancorous wheel-spinning, but recognizing that Donald’s excellent Ukrainian adventure, using his personal attorney to conduct international diplomacy just for starters, not to mention freezing foreign aid, and lying to Congress about it, for partisan ends, was both too gross and too vicious to ignore.
“Everyone” is right in suggesting that Trump is probably happy to be impeached. The only thing he really enjoys is fighting, and he’s extremely good at it, because he has absolutely no shame at all, and his base, which is to say 90% of what can loosely be called “the Republican Party” feel the same way. WashPost columnist and quasi Alan Vanneman bête noire Robert Samuelson once said, in a typically fraudulent approximation of “even handedness” that “the Democrats want to govern badly, while the Republicans don’t want to govern at all.” Some Democratic ideas are bad, as bad as some of Mr. Samuelson’s, but his observation regarding Republicans is sans flaw. They don’t want to govern. They want to whine, and they want “revenge”, revenge for the fact that the world is no longer the way it used to be. They have no idea of how to return to that world, and neither does Donald Trump, which is why he has made absolutely no progress in “making America great again”, but he can supply an unlimited supply of verbal red meat, and for the great majority of the MAGA crowd, that is sustenance enough, for the next six months, at least, and Herr Donald has a hard time seeing past next week.
My own feelings are obviously mixed. Trump clearly was running out of gas—none of the international “coups” that he seemed to feel were in his grasp have materialized, and the economy has been slowly running out of steam, thanks to his own compulsive and mindless belligerence, and some people are even beginning to wonder if running trillion-dollar deficits during a full-employment economy, which isn’t going to last forever, is a good idea—so that, as Pelosi realized, letting Trump melt down of his own accord and stunning incompetence was much the best strategy. But the recent revelations make that impossible. It’s hard to believe that any Republicans in the House or the Senate are going to rediscover their backbones at this point. Without Trump there is no Republican Party. To get into Congress one has to be a bit of an egomaniac, and egomaniacs seldom commit suicide. But the Democrats cannot surrender just because the Republicans refuse to play the game. The Republicans deserve to lose, not to win. And so this grotesque battle must be joined. Let’s hope we’re lucky.
