The Longer We Delay Impeachment, the Worse This All Gets

I have spent the past three years slogging under the assumption that the entire Trump storyline would culminate in some kind of massive, public cataclysm: nukes going off, assassinations, World War III getting under way, etc. Such potential calamities still loom perilously on the horizon. But in the meantime, the horrors of what is being conducted here in America have come in steady waves: Puerto Rico being left for dead, state-sanctioned human rights abuses at the border, law enforcement officials joining online hate groups, tanks on the National Mall, more mass shootings, the president being openly racist and staging hate rallies, and on and on it goes. I would tell you Trump is gonna get someone killed, but he has already fulfilled that prophecy. The catastrophe is already here, and it is growing.


And yet, there is no urgency. All I got is a formal condemnation of a few tweets, and the House couldn't even pull that off without making an embarrassing spectacle of it. A cursory impeachment proposal from Congressman Al Green was easily voted down by a majority of Democrats. And there's obvious symbolism to be found in Trump getting more hateful and frenzied the night an effort to oust him was tabled indefinitely. I am like millions of other suckers who put all their eggs into Robert Mueller’s basket and hoped his work would initiate President Trump’s downfall (Mueller, ever the polite fellow, seemed to encourage this initiation but erred for subtlety when blunt force was so, so necessary), but that never happened. The men beholden to Trump made certain of it, and complacent leadership from Democrats has only served to further enable the opposition.


Two weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did her now infamous sitdown with perennial vicious circle wannabe Maureen Dowd, in which Dowd called impeachment a “primal pleasure” and Pelosi explained that Trump “practically self-impeaches” in his daily transgressions, but that actually impeaching him (or at least trying to) would play right into his hands. She also told the Washington Post that trying to remove Trump from office is “just not worth it.” Hence, no serious impeachment proposal is in the offing.

---

Meanwhile, the shit keeps rolling downhill. On the surface of things, I suppose you could be prudent and wait for a white knight 2020 Dem to come riding in on horseback to save the country 16 months from now. On the other hand, where is the URGENCY? Why am I sitting here waiting for leaders to do something meaningful only to find out that so many of them are themselves content on hoping for things to magically improve LATER?


---


This is where I remind you that Donald Trump is afraid of stairs. There is no more cowardly a pig in this country, and indulging him in his bravado by not initiating formal action against him only encourages more sniveling pigs to come sidling up to the trough. Fatten them up and they only get harder to move out of the way. Impeachment is only a lost cause if you view it in the most fatalistic terms, and if you’re afraid that doing the right thing right now will somehow make you look irrational and weak. It will not. Now matters. It has to, and a lot of people get this. There is no more long game to play. Setting impeachment in motion is not a careless act, nor is it a suicide mission. Quite the contrary: It is a long overdue step in trying to derail a suicide mission we’ve already all been forced to slowly embark upon.


https://www.gq.com/story/impeachment-and-the-triumph-of-fear