If you know me, you know what I think about our current
President. If you don’t, you can read about it
here. Or, if you don’t feel
like reading that, I can summarize:
To call our current President a sack of shit does an
injustice to sacks of shit, many of which are upstanding members of our society
that do the important work of fertilizing our crops. To say that his Presidency
has already harmed our nation isn’t enough; his candidacy alone, and the
legitimacy conferred by the media and the political establishment upon its
bigotry and ignorance and fraudulence, would have harmed our country even if he
hadn’t won the Electoral College. He’s reprehensible, toxic human garbage, most
of the major players in his administration are even worse, and every day they’re
in power is part of an accruing disaster for our country and the world. I would
also point out that he’s riotously incompetent, except that his incompetence
may well be the only aspect of his administration that has saved us up to this
point.
This, though mildly expressed, is what I think about our
current President. So please remember that this is the context in which I want
to urge my fellow Trump opponents to knock it off with the petulant disappointment
about the Mueller Report.
While I thought, and still think, that the Special Counsel’s
investigation was essential, from the start I haven’t been comfortable with the
attitude of many Trump opponents toward it; waiting for it like a kid waiting
for Christmas morning, naively convinced that it would be a magic spell that
would make the bad man go away. No matter what the report shows—and at this
writing that still isn’t public—it was never going to lead promptly to the
President’s removal from office.
No matter how compelling the speculations extrapolated from
the indictments and guilty pleas the investigation has already produced, there
were always several possibilities about the final report with regard to the
President. One was that, however improbable it might seem, it would exonerate
him from colluding with a foreign power. Another was that it would show that he
participated in or knew about or covered up sleazy unethical crap, but that this
didn’t rise to the level of criminality. A third was that it would suggest that
yeah, he probably committed crimes, but that the investigation wasn’t able to
prove it to a degree required for prosecution.
What all of these possibilities have in common is that they
wouldn’t bounce this scumbag out of office. That probably wouldn’t happen even
if the report conclusively showed that he did collude, because the Senate is in
Republican control, and there’s nothing to indicate that the Republican
leadership would take action against the President even if, well, you know,
even if he stood in the middle of Fifth
Avenue and shot someone. As things now stand, the
report won’t even embarrass him—whatever’s in it, he’ll just claim it’s a pack
of lies, and his diehard supporters, shamefully, don’t really care if he
colluded with Russia or not.
So there’s always been something unrealistic about the salivating
impatience of the President’s opponents for the report, and there’s also
something unseemly about it. If the report truly shows that the President
didn’t collude, or didn’t knowingly collude, with Russia…well, I hate to sound like a
civics-class Pollyanna, but that’s a good thing, and a relief. If we’re people
of good faith, we shouldn’t want our enemies to be worse than they are.
But if, as seems more probable, the report shows that he’s a
lowlife who cozied up to a vile foreign power for campaign help but didn’t
quite cross the line into criminality, or didn’t do so provably, let’s not
throw a tantrum because this isn’t what we asked Santa for. The report, though
it may turn out to be enormously important, was never going to be a quick easy
solution to the immediate problem of this administration. Most outrageous of
all, and I’ve already heard a little of this, is suddenly impugning the
integrity of Mueller or his team, after casting them, for the last couple of
years, as white knights riding to our rescue. I understand being tired of
having this President and his toadies and cronies and puppeteers pollute the
White House every day with their presence, but this report was never going to
be a silver bullet.
And the thing is…I’m not sure it should be. While I don’t necessarily
doubt that, regardless of what’s in the Mueller Report, the President may be deserving
of impeachment, I’m also not sure that impeachment would be the healthiest way
for us to get rid of him. I have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better for voters
to run his ass out of office on a rail in the next election, along with, almost
more importantly, as many of his revolting enablers as possible.
I’m not sure I’m right about this. For one thing, it means
enduring this administration for, at a minimum, more than another year and a
half. And I see no remote guarantee that my party won’t blow another election,
if dilatory, candy-ass Democrats once again fail to vote for whoever the
nominee is, because he or she somehow fails to conform sufficiently to our
delicate ideological sensibilities, or just because we don’t think he or she is
cool enough.
But overall, I think that focusing on voting him out is the better
way because, first of all, it’s a natural reproach on the part of the
electorate to everything he stands for. If he got thrown out of office, he and
his followers could always whine that it was a cheat, that the “deep state” or
whatever pushed him out, over the wishes of the people. They’ll claim that anyway,
of course, if he loses the election, but it will be far less convincing.
Second of all, we should make voting him out our goal
because, once again, at some level the Mueller Report is moot, for the moment,
no matter what its conclusions. This President was never going to be impeached,
at least not in his first term. Working toward voting him out as soon as
possible is preferable to daydreaming about impeachment, because it means
engaging with the process ourselves, doing the hard work of protecting our
beloved country’s institutions and forwarding the agendas we want. It was the
complacent lack of this commitment, more than anything else, that brought us
our current President, whether he got a boost from Russia or not.
