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The lasting legacy of Donald, apart from inviting Nazis back into power, is that television news is both unwatchable, and must-be-seen. It’s not unlike a 747 crashing into a train carrying train transporting hazardous chemicals. On a ferry. On the Cuyahoga River. Horrible, but entertaining. So, it’s befitting that his second trial is just as gripping as Ivanka the Terrible’s presidency.
I was born in the Reagan Administration. Which is only consequential, because, within my own lifetime, I’ve literally lived long enough to see fact-checking become abandoned by most main-stream platforms. To be fair, it’s not like William “That depends upon what your definition of ‘is’ is” Clinton, or George “Iraq has weapons of mass distraction” Bush helped this, but, at some point in my conscious life, media stopped saying, “This asshole is clearly lying, cut the feed.” I think the massive volume of lies told by those in power combined with viewer competition with the Internet to create a perfect void in which there was no real demand for truth. If Rush Limbaugh gets kicked off of Geocities, he can go straight to MySpace. And, to be fair, fact-checking Clinton would be a job only Penthouse Forum could do. The end result, however, is that we’ve gone from news and analysis to simply news. This is dangerous.
Imagine if I were to give you the Twitter-ready summary of Europe without any context or details. Ready? They got invaded. They invaded other countries. There were famines, plagues, massacres, hunchbacked kings, and rulers that directly inspired Dracula (they eventually rose from the grave and ran for governor of Florida). There were mass exoduses (exodi?), influxes, theft, murder, pillage, and blood-soaked empires. Wasn’t that educational? Yes, but only if your only experience with the continent and its history is from Yelp reviews.
In this complete absence of real, useful information or actual vetting of information sources or candidates slouched Don. By 2016, most news outlets had completely abdicated actual educational content in favor of tabloid headlines. Which means that, for the past four years, the Nazi invasion of America was treated as a series of isolated incidents that happened in a complete vacuum. Donald went to Michigan and gave a speech about how awful brown people are, and, suddenly, there’s a massive spike in hate crimes, an attempt to kidnap the governor, and acts of senseless violence? My God, what an amazing coincidence.
I’m not going to pretend that the Senate suddenly realizing that their lives and livelihoods are on the line and actually doing their job in checking executive power is going to bring America to a state of grace or create accountability for our leadership (no country has ever had any sort of genuine accountability for its leaders, as far as I can tell). It’s not going to beat back climate change or fix systemic inequalities or bring about the real reforms we need. However, as an American, I can not begin to describe to the international audience how incredibly cathartic today’s proceedings in the Senate were. It is beyond-reassuring to hear that, yes, Donald (or his senior advisors) were in direct contact with fringe groups on the Internet (as someone who actually used Netscape Navigator in 1994, I know that all of those message boards connect to real people in the real world, somewhere, so calls to massacre the Palestinians aren’t meaningless words shouted into an empty canyon). They knew, or at least had a damned good idea, of the effects that hate speech disguised as fiery political rhetoric, and they engaged in it, anyway. It’s comforting to be told that, no, we aren’t all brainwashed, Team Trump had a red telephone to David Duke’s rejects (never forget that the Proud Boys are the racist scum that even the Nazi High Command would find too garish and stupid for admission to the party), and he loved dialing it and chatting away with them. After four years of non-stop gas-lighting from an increasingly untethered and openly racist administration, it’s nice to be told that, no, we aren’t crazy, it was a sociopath collectively gas-lighting us.
I think Donald Trump should not only be permanently disqualified from any real form of power, his well-being should be exclusively handled by the vile band of barbarians who invaded the Capitol at his invitation. If he didn’t like the scruffy look of them, he shouldn’t have chatted them up at the conventions, let alone invited them into the halls of power. If they like him so much, they can keep him comfortably housed and fed for the rest of his life (I wouldn’t estimate he has long for this world, based simply on age, cheeseburgter diet, and BMI). Donald Trump is a lamprey in human flesh — a being birthed from the darkest, slimiest primordial lakes, and a direct threat to everything he comes into contact with (seriously; lampreys are an invasive species in multiple ecosystems). It’s nice to see the House Impeachment managers lay out how this species got into the Great Lakes (or Congress, depending on whether you prefer the metaphor or reality), and how it then somehow cannibalized others and fed new recruits a steady stream of false hopes, lies, and promises, in the warped hope that it would lead to life everlasting.
If there is to be any justice, we need to treat Donald and family in the same brutal, medieval fashion that he treated this country. I vote that we brick him up in a tiny, unused closet in a basement in Trump Tower, and check on him in ten years. Until then, no accounts will be written, Donald’s name must be stricken from all records, and his very existence must be viewed as a threat not just to minorities in America, nor America, nor democracy, but to the very basic tenet of self-determination. In the meantime, I’ll be replaying Stacey Plaskett’s amazing lecture on Donald’s connection to radical, racist insurgent groups.
