Peeking Over the Ramparts

I warned you.

I warned you in November, after the Democrats took the House of Representatives and der Sturmtrumper could no longer hide behind a solid GOP wall that would gladly overlook his crimes, his corruption, and his dictatorial urges as long as they got their judges and their tax breaks.  I warned you that it would get ugly, that it would get worse, that the future of the republic was in jeopardy, that the hard part had just begun.

And all those things have come true.

Der Sturmtrumper has been twisting feverishly in the wind for the last week, spitting bile and random accusations in all directions, ever since the impeachment inquiry became real.  He’s raged.  He’s thrown half his administration under the bus.  He’s held the most bizarrely pathetic open-air pity party in federal history.  He has, in violation of federal law, demanded the identity of the whistle-blower whose complaints he has explicitly confirmed as accurate, and his minions have set up a $50,000 bounty on the whistleblower’s head because nothing about that screams dictatorship or nutjobs at all.  He’s called for civil war.

Imagine – a sitting US president calling for civil war because the US Congress is starting to exercise its Constitutionally mandated oversight.  Who’da thought it?  Well, besides anyone who has paid attention to this sorry and lawless excuse for an administration since before it was inaugurated, I mean.  Who?

The Founding Fathers, that’s who.  Der Sturmtrumper is the sum total of everything they feared when they set up the republic in 1787.  The demagogue and would-be tyrant.  The guy riling up the mob and tearing down the Constitution.  The thing they fought the Revolution to create, built the Constitution to thwart, and created the Electoral College to avoid when the mob got out of hand.  They knew it was coming.  They just didn't know when.

Bearing in mind that my success rate as a fortune teller is pretty much zero, this is how I'm going to guess it will go.

There will be an investigation – a lengthy and excruciatingly public investigation, one hopes, though in the last 48 hours there have been new revelations of impeachable offenses roughly every 45 minutes or so, so perhaps that won’t be necessary.

There will be a vote on impeachment.  Given that our Criminal In Chief has already confessed and seems proud of it, there is only one way for that to go.

There will probably be a trial.  Let me clarify – the Constitution mandates that there be a trial, but then the Constitution also mandates that a sitting president shall get a vote on his nominee for the Supreme Court, and Moscow Mitch – the single most corrupt man in Washington DC, up to and including der Sturmtrumper – didn’t care about that either.  It’s entirely possible he will just refuse and then it will be up to the GOP Senators to decide if they care about the country more than their party.

I know where my money is.

But let’s just say that, perhaps by mistake, Moscow Mitch lets a trial happen.  Der Sturmtrumper will either be convicted, as the evidence and confessions demand, or his party will declare the republic to be at an end and all hail our absolute GOP overlords.

It's rather late in the game either way.

Der Sturmtrumper has already done incalculable damage to the standing of the US in the world.  He has already – perhaps fatally – undermined American political institutions and social norms.  He has shaped and encouraged a large body of Americans who think that Fascism is perfectly fine as long as they’re the ones doing the marching and the killing.  He has run roughshod over laws, morals, Constitutional restraints, human decency, and any claim this country ever had to have actual values.  It will take decades for the US to recover from this administration even if everyone involved in it slinks away quietly in chains.

There is nothing so dangerous as a cornered rat, however.  The odds of anything happening quietly with this administration or its supporters are effectively nil.  They're just a hairsbreadth away from a coup and you can see the idea gaining traction with them.  They're cornered, their ship is sinking, and they're ready to blow the whole thing up rather than see justice being served.

Hold onto your hats, folks.  We could end up miles from here.