Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step
back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s
parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all,
registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.
There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to
evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade
on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that
springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him,
every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him —
against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political
agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.
We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the
White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than
rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny,
fragile, vindictive pettiness.
The presidency has been hijacked.
Last week, when Donald Trump attacked
two MSNBC hosts, people were aghast. The condemnation came quickly and from
all quarters.
But his words shouldn’t have shocked. His tweet was just
another pebble on a mountain of vulgarities. This act of coarseness was in fact
an act of continuity. Trump was being Trump: the grossest of the gross, a
profanity against propriety.
This latest episode is simply part of a body of work
demonstrating the man’s utter contempt for decency. We all know what it will
add up to: nothing.
Republicans have bound themselves up with Trump. His fate is
their fate. They have surrendered any moral authority to which they once laid
claim — rightly or not. If Trump goes down, they all do.
It’s all quite odd, this moral impotence, this cowering
before the belligerent, would-be king. A madman and his legislative minions are
holding America hostage.
There are no new words to express it; there is no new and
novel way to catalog it. It is what it is and has been from day one: The most
extraordinary and profound electoral mistake America has made in our lifetimes
and possibly ever.
We must say without ceasing, and without growing weary by
the redundancy, that what we are witnessing is not normal and cannot go
unchallenged. We must reaffirm our commitment to resistance. We must always
remember that although individual Americans made the choice to vote
affirmatively for him or actively withhold their support from his opponent,
those decisions were influenced, in ways we cannot calculate, by Russian
interference in our election, designed to privilege Trump.
We must remember that we now have a president exerting power
to which he may only have access because a foreign power hostile to our
interests wanted him installed. We must remember that he has not only praised
that foreign power, he has proven mysteriously averse to condemning it or even
acknowledging its meddling.
We must remember that there are multiple investigations
ongoing about the degree of that interference in our election — including a
criminal investigation — and that those investigations are not
constrained to collusion and are far from fake news. These
investigations are deadly serious, are about protecting the integrity of our
elections and the sovereignty of our country and are about a genuine quest for
truth and desire for justice.
Every action by this administration is an effort to push
forward the appearance of normality, to squelch scrutiny, to diminish the
authority and credibility of the ongoing investigations.
Last week, after a growing list of states publicly refused
to hand over sensitive voter information to Trump’s ironic and quixotic
election integrity commission, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders
blasted the pushback as a “political stunt.”
But in fact the commission itself is the political stunt.
The committee is searching for an illegal voting problem that doesn’t exist.
Trump simply lied when he said that he would have won the popular vote were it
not for millions of illegal votes. And then he established this bogus
commission — using taxpayer money — to search for a truth that doesn’t exist,
to try to prove right a lie that he should never have told.
This commission is classic Trump projection: There is a real
problem with the integrity of our last election because the Russians helped
power his win, but rather than deal with that very real attack on this country,
he is instead tilting at windmills concerning in-person voter fraud.
Last week, CNN
reported:
“The Trump administration has taken no public steps to
punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Multiple senior
administration officials said there are few signs the president is devoting his
time or attention to the ongoing election-related cyber threat from Russia.”
Donald Trump is depending on people’s fatigue. He is banking
on your becoming overwhelmed by his never-ending antics. He is counting on his
capacity to wear down the resistance by sheer force.
We must be adamant that that will never come to pass. Trump
is an abomination, and a cancer on the country, and none of us can rest until
he is no longer holding the reins of power.
__
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me
on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow),
or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.
__
De THE NEW YORK TIMES, 03/07/2017
Fotografía: The presidential limousine at Joint Base Andrews
in Maryland on Saturday. Al Drago for The New York Times
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