Does it not seem like there’s some sort of karmic bombshell under construction right now, ongoing, increasing in pressure and also wildly urgent?
By which I mean a palpable, simmering coil of pressurized, roiling energy that will, eventually if not sooner, explode like a thousand furious suns and whipsaw the nation into some sort of new and mandatory understanding, in turns painful and raw and necessary and purgative, an explosion largely wrought of the myriad acidic hells that Trump and his sputtering army of hatefear hath brought, continue to bring and will never stop bringing?
And this roiling detonation will serve, in glorious part, to take out vast swaths of his billionaire dumb-guy regime and also kneecap the bulk of the Republican Party, AKA the most dangerous force of bile and darkness the modern USA has ever known? Does it not seem?
Or maybe that’s just the tequila talking. Maybe it’s just more wishful liberal thinking, given how I can’t help but take in the stories that grumpily defy the impeachment narrative we all so desperately long for, reports and analysis from various informed angles that declare, in no uncertain terms, that the impeachment fantasy will never actually happen – certainly not with this bloodily amoral GOP congress and probably not even with a more balanced, “normal” one – and neither will forced resignation, or some sort of GOP “awakening to the truth” of Trump’s overt vileness, or any other longed-for forms of annihilation of this current idio-fascist onslaught, anytime soon.
And hence, the absolute best we can hope for is a reasonably dramatic Democratic congressional swing in 2018, which will serve only to slow Trump’s warpath of misery for a couple more years, just a little, right up until, should we survive long enough and should the Russians, SCOTUS (read: gerrymandering laws favoring the GOP) and corrosive fake news sites not all collude, once again, to rig a major American election, we vote out one of the worst and most destructive leaders the developed world has ever known.
And then? Who knows.
It’s difficult to know who to believe, who to disagree with, who to partially hope is somewhat maybe correct. Where, exactly, to place your hope for the future? Will the coming anti-Trump backlash actually serve to save the republic? Is he really galvanizing a whole new generation of progressive activists, including millions of infuriated women? Or are the Dems just too hobbled and disjointed, too lacking in the GOP’s cutthroat, kill-your-mother savagery to actually do what it takes to win back control? What view can be counted on as reliable and sound?
Certainly not history, which has been upended, disgraced, written and rewritten and slapped around like a suckered Trump voter, and now just throws up its hands (or maybe just throw up) every single day in stupefied disbelief.
Certainly not our once-beloved system of checks and balances, which has proven far more unstable and hackable than anyone imagined. As pointed out pretty much everywhere, American democracy was designed with withstand a moron president like Trump. It was never designed to handle a GOP-led congress so shockingly accommodating of his moronism, of his obvious collusion with a murderous enemy, a party so willing to stab basic democratic values in the throat for the sake of numb, temporary power.
It is beyond difficult to imagine surviving four full years of Trumpism, both in terms of the basic functions of democracy, and of the survival of the American spirit itself. Not to mention the countless thousands who will die if the GOP manages to cram through Trumpcare, and to say nothing of what horrors he’s capable of with North Korea, or Putin, or when a real crisis happens.
But what if we never really fully connect the dots in the Russia mega-scandal? What if, no matter how good Mueller’s team is, those investigating the biggest scandal in American history will never be able to pull together a solid, clear, irrefutable body of evidence that damns the Orange Goblin once and for all? Not because there isn’t one, but rather, because there’s just way too much, as it’s all so scattered and erratic, so reality-TV stupid that to imprison Trump for it would be like imprisoning a pile of old, chemical-soaked rags for stinking up the house and burning down the empire?
Me, I’m all about the wildcard. I love the impeachment/imprisonment fantasy as much as anyone (and verily, it really could happen, just not very quickly), but given the explosive, corrosive, tawdry, punch-you-in-the-face-and-run-away nature of the man himself, I’m more of a mind that Trump’s downfall won’t come by way of any of the normal investigative channels. Not solely, anyway.
It’s going to something sidelong and nasty, something like the pussy-grabbing comment multiplied by a thousand, doused in gasoline and set on fire on Mitch McConnell’s front porch.
It’s going to be grotesque beyond anything known previously. Maybe it really will be the pee tape – though at this point, even that seems inadequate to take him down; they’ll just argue it was a stunt, it wasn’t technically illegal and really, who cares if the president is a scumbag pervert racist? We already know that; that’s why his base adores him.
Maybe it will be Russian mafia, maybe a video of the president groping a girl at the Miss Teen America pageant, back when. Maybe someone on his cabinet will “accidentally” fall to his death from a 20-story hotel room after a meeting with a Russian “dignitary.” Maybe the dignitary and the teenage girl are the same person. Whoa. Why not? This is reality-TV presidency, after all. Gaudy, trailer-park melodrama for the sake of ratings is everything.
Meanwhile, the bomb keeps gaining pressure, the seams straining, the metal aching to give way. The center, really and true, cannot hold.
