If you’ve followed coverage of Trump’s second inauguration and his every official act since then, it’s like watching a madman torch the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial and Statue of Liberty in one frenzied orgy of destruction.
The dizzying ironies on display, and the damage he’s already done to truth, logic and common decency would delight any neighborhood anarchist.
But nothing has so dispirited me, obliterating any hope I might have for Trump’s redemption, as his perpetuation of his original sin.
Not only did he soil a post-inaugural speech at the Capitol by affirming his claims about a stolen election in 2020; he wound up his first day in office by pardoning or peremptorily absolving 1500 people who had been accused or convicted of criminal activity in connection with the assault on the Capitol, January 6, 2021.
Hitler or Mussolini would have had a giggle at that one. Each knew a thing or two about coddling the worst elements of society. Each granted clemency to murderers and thugs, recruited them into vest-pocket militias and used them to circumvent established authority and enforce the Dear Leader’s own brand of justice against Jews, gypsies, gays and anyone else who displeased him.
Are the Proud Boys destined to be Trump’s Brownshirts?
Why not? According to his hand-picked Justices on the Supreme Court, a sitting president has absolute legal immunity for official acts.
As an evacuee from Pacific Palisades, California, who fled the cyclonic fires with my family on January 7, I take particular offense at Trump’s cavalier treatment of the brave firemen who saved me, and the local and state officials who have done their best to ease the trauma for every survivor.
In his inaugural address Trump delivered a gut punch to these dedicated public servants, many of them Democrats, by insisting that their response to the crisis has only been a “token” one.
Worse, in utter disregard for the ultimate cause of the hurricane-force winds and community-wide infernos – it’s called climate change, in case you’re as myopic as he is — he exhorted worshippers at his inaugural to “drill, baby, drill,” and then, later in the day, with the flick of a pen, he yanked the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, just as he had done in his first term.
No other act so stunningly demonstrates — against the backdrop of the California wildfires — how Trump’s moronic natural impulses compromise what are literally our last best hopes for human survival.
How does anyone with even an ounce of perception forgive that?
The only thing Trump seems to understand behind own screen of ignorance and cynicism is that shock-and-awe messaging, if delivered often enough, will likely deflect or delay any reasoned response from those who still value facts and the Constitutional rule of law. Those of us who like to imagine we are in that category must remember that we only aid and abet his madness if we let despair overwhelm us and blunt our capacity for righteous outrage and lawful pushback.