You can’t ride with the cops and root for the robbers. And if you become inciter in chief to the insurrection, you can’t expect to be on the payroll as the commander in chief for the Union.”
Jamie Raskin nailed it.
In explaining why Donald Trump is guilty and should be convicted, he left the former president with just one ineffective response.
“Nobody tells me what I can or can’t do.”
The truly tragic thing about all this is that Trump could make that ridiculous statement and there still wouldn’t be 17 Republican senators who would vote to convict him. Too many Republicans are terrified that if they do what is right, voters will punish them and they will lose their seats in the Senate.
There are really only two reasons voters would react this way.
First is stupidity. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but there is simply no possible way intelligent people can believe not only that Trump won the election, but he won by a landslide and had it stolen away.
Yet there are people who believe this. There’s also about 10 percent of the population that believes Elvis Presley is still alive (he’d be 86 years old) and that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Oh, and Democrats drink the blood of babies and perform satanic rituals.
H.L. Mencken was a pretty cynical guy. He wrote in 1922 that the American republic would fall within 100 years and that the reasons would be ignorance and greed. I would purely love to have a conversation with him. I’ll bet the level of ignorance we have reached in the last 99 years would surprise even him.
The greed? Not so much. Cynics tend to believe that people’s capacity for greed is limitless.
The second reason probably isn’t as sad as ignorance, but it’s pretty scary in itself. I think there are a significant number of people in this country who have given up on our system and somehow see Trump as a catalyst for tearing it all down and starting again.
My friend Mick, who last voted for a major party candidate for president in 1984 (yes, it was Reagan), says there are three things wrong with this country. Big government, big business and big labor. I tend to think all three of those come from big population. When I was born in the last month of the 1940s, the population of the United States was 152 million.
Now it’s about 330 million.
It actually could have been worse. In 1964, the last year of the Baby Boom, U.S. population was projected to be 388 million by the year 2000. That it didn’t happen is probably one of the few blessings (sorry for the word) of legalized abortion. Still, there are 178 more people in the U.S. now than there were 70 years ago.
Along with more people, there are fewer good jobs in the lower part of the spectrum. My grandfather was born in 1895 and only got an eighth grade education. He not only had decent blue-collar jobs, he spent about 20 years as a police officer and more than half that time as chief of police in the town where he lived.
Manufacturing jobs in the post-war era meant men with no more than a high school education could work one job and make enough to have a family, buy a home, buy a car every few years and take family vacations. Oh, and these were one income families. Millions of moms were able to stay home and raise their kids.
Things were better than they should have been, because much of the rest of the world was recovering from the devastation of World War II. In the ’70s, when Germany and Japan were ready to manufacture again, we had to compete.
We weren’t very good at it.
David Halberstam’s wonderful book “The Reckoning” compared the Japanese and American auto industries, explaining how Japan thought in terms of growth over decades, while Americans were obsessed with every quarter and what investors would think. The Japanese would accept lower profits in the short run for the purpose of building market share in the long run.
American investors made big money in the short run, but our manufacturing base vanished. To reference H.G. Wells’ vision of the future in “The Time Machine,” we voluntarily became the Eloi.
It might not be stretching the metaphor too far to say that the decline of the working class has a converse relation to the size and quality of our television sets. As Dennis Miller said back in the day when he was funny, “The TV beast ate us whole.”
Without television, there is absolutely no way Trump would ever have become president. Prior to “The Apprentice,” many people saw Trump as a clown, but the show gave him a much better image as a successful, charismatic businessman. There’s no doubt it made him able to run for president without the country laughing at him.
So combine that with the fact that tens of millions of people were having more and more problems financially and you’ve got a pretty large number of voters willing to tear it all down out of, well, revenge.
In different times and different places, that’s where they got Hitlers and Mussolinis.
We got Donald Trump.
By the way, the person who said you can’t ride with the cops and root for the robbers was that dangerous liberal …
Antonin Scalia.