O P I N I O N
After watching the sad and utterly predictable acquittal of former-President Donald J. Trump by the 43 GOP sycophants in the Senate, I needed to step back from the television and take a breath.
I sensed John McCain rolling in his grave.
Like most of you, I watched 13-minute video played by the House impeachment managers, showing the mob of Trump’s supporters—far from an impetuous act and galvanized by words of an unhinged man—storming the Capitol in a bloodlust attempt to overthrow the government.
That’s not hyperbolic. That’s exactly what we all watched with an amalgam of awe and disgust on Jan. 6 when a tide of largely angry white men stormed those hallowed halls waving Confederate and Trump flags, wearing MAGA hats and wolf skins, and then shit on the Capitol with their insolence, bigotry, hate and lunacy.
Meanwhile, the former president, a pathetic and desperate narcissist, clearly incited these poor, hapless and ignorant masses with his incendiary rhetoric, designed to usurp an election that he lost “by a landslide” in a last-ditch attempt to maintain power.
And now I’m sitting here on an otherwise eventless Saturday night scratching my head and wondering how some of the same people who were whisked from the Senate chambers, their own lives in jeopardy, voted to acquit the man whose limited language put their own lives in peril.
I’m not inclined to lay out the disaster that was Donald Trump’s presidency. If you had a fiscal boon due to Trump’s trickle-down policies, and you believe this will never catch up to you … well, neat.
And if you believe that a man who down-played a global pandemic that has upended all of our lives — patently lying to the American people about its severity — that has amounted in more American deaths than almost all U.S. wars combined is still worthy of admiration and accolades…
You need to do your homework. Because none of this should be a partisan debate.
Nor is this about being a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal. This is about being decent human beings who may have ideological differences — imagine how boring our lives would be if we didn’t — who are not only fellow-patriots but people with shared experiences and stakes for each other’s well-beings.
When I watched the aforementioned video that the supposedly impartial jurors in the Senate watched, I was incredulous to how anyone could still claim that Donald J. Trump didn’t incite an insurrection. In a normal jury trial, it would’ve been a slam-dunk.
And I’m loath to say something this divisive, but if you still support Trump, you’re kind of a dick. You’re not a conservative, and you’re not a Republican, and you’re not a patriot (if you support any of what happened that day on the Capitol, you don’t love this country).
You’re a dick.
You support a tyrant, similar to the 43 cowards in the supposedly impartial Senate that acquitted him.
And history will, indeed, be your judge.