What Defines Republicans? Hypocrisy.

A sickening moment in the United States of America

It is a moment of glaring contradictions in America, as a stolen Supreme Court abolishes a woman’s right to control her own body on the grounds that it must preserve life at all costs, and in the very next breath strikes down even the mildest infringements on the guns that are slaughtering Americans every single day of every week. 

It’s obscene, a mockery of justice. Deregulate guns, regulate women.

Tell it to the orphaned toddler who lost both his parents in the July 4th mass shooting, after his parents were murdered by a disturbed young White rapper who recently had dozens of knives and swords confiscated by police, said he was going to “kill everyone,” and yet was still able to legally purchase several semiautomatic rifles. Explain how you’re pro-life to the 20 children trapped inside the school in Uvalde, massacred as the cops sat frozen outside.

Tragically, it’s just another brutal few weeks in modern America. 

The hypocrisy is mind-numbing, and endless, almost as if it’s the entire point, like when Amy Coney Barrett gave a gloating speech at the McConnell center arguing that the Supreme Court’s not composed of “a bunch of partisan hacks,” as she put it. 

Come again?

It would be farcical if it wasn’t so tragic.

It’s also exhausting. Even as the January 6 hearings titillate the nation, it feels as though America’s basest, vilest, most corrupt political actors have notched something of an enduring victory in shaping the United States in their cracked image. They dominate an activist Supreme Court that will shape American jurisprudence for a generation, and they look set to retake one or both houses of congress in the midterm elections. 

The United States of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon.

The United States of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell.

The reflection in the mirror is brutal. What’s staring back at us is a broken and disfigured nation, riddled with poisonous lies, barely able to function. It’s a moment fraught with danger, and utterly lacking in heroes. 

Who can save us from ourselves? Nobody, it seems.

The Republican Party is vicious and utterly radicalized, a cult dedicated to spreading lies, and seeding disinformation designed to derail our democracy. Since the insurrection, there’s been nothing to suggest these malignant symptoms are getting anything but worse, as Donald Trump publicly toys with announcing his third bid for the presidency, to shield himself from the criminal investigations piling up around him. 

Indeed, Lindsey Graham encouraged him to do exactly that, the living embodiment of the GOP’s moral decay, a grotesque caricature of everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s loyal groupie, always anxious to serve his master, the country be damned.

It’s both unbelievable, and totally expected: the president who launched a violent coup from within to overturn a lost election will likely be the presumptive Republican nominee again, said to be unstoppable in a primary. It tells you all about the broken state of the party, about the way the GOP has embraced political violence, and turned decisively away from democracy, and toward its destruction.

It tells you why we ended up here in the first place as a nation, near death, barely breathing; America won’t survive another Trump candidacy. 

That much seems clear enough, at least.

A worn out country

I’m tired, worn down, depleted. It has something to do with the stench of the bullshit, and the sense that there’s nothing to be done to save us, or our country, from the people trying to destroy it.

It’s an ugly and contaminated feeling. 

I do not recommend it: indifference, disgust, and ennui.

Indeed, hope is scarce in America. Do the criminals always win, possessing the innate advantage of believing in literally nothing at all, holding nothing sacred but their own lust for power? They can do anything, say anything.

Perhaps. 

Naively, I still believe good can triumph if good people fight back. 

Speaking of fighting back, a slate of new subpoenas came down from an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation targeting Donald Trump and seven members of his inner circle. These included all the usual suspects, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Lindsey Graham. It’s a truly odious bunch of traitors, each one worse than the next, all supremely deserving of indictments for seditious conspiracy. 

But where are the indictments? There have been so many investigations, and so few indictments. Meanwhile, we learned today that Donald Trump was wielding his I.R.S. like a weapon, auditing both Andrew McCabe and James Comey, two of his bitterest political enemies. 

How predictable. 

It sounds like just another routine abuse of power in the Trump White House, utterly unsurprising. Of course they were being audited. The federal government was Donald Trump’s personal plaything.

The question is this: if President Trump pressured the DOJ and the I.R.S. to investigate and prosecute people for nothing beyond crossing him politically, will President Biden pressure the DOJ to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for the many actual crimes he committed? 

Namely, seditious conspiracy?

It’s a fair question, and one that’s gaining urgency every day.

Personally, I see federal prosecutors in an entirely new light. 

On one hand, they’re perhaps the only possible salvation for what ails America, namely Donald Trump and the criminals assembled around him in the GOP. On the other hand, they seem to be missing in action, feckless, too terrified to act decisively.

It’s frustrating. 

Why has no one been indicted for witness tampering yet? Better still, why has none of the political leadership been indicted for organizing a coup? These are existential questions for the United States, for the survival of our democracy. 

They require answers.

Merrick Garland’s quaint notions about keeping himself out of politics are, to put it charitably, misplaced. Donald Trump has manipulated his way out of every problem he’s ever had, and now he seems to be outmaneuvering the Department of Justice, which is limping embarrassingly behind the 1/6 Select Committee’s investigation like a lame sidekick, demanding documents, doing nothing.

Where is the urgency in the Biden administration? Surely, he has advisers who have made it abundantly clear, in no uncertain terms, that if Donald Trump runs for president again, this country will implode. 

It isn’t that hard to grasp.

It’s obvious. How have we ended up at a place where he’s going to run for president again? This shouldn’t even be a remote possibility, but the GOP has worked quite hard to rehabilitate him with its lies, and propaganda, and the DOJ simply hasn’t done its job.

Meanwhile, the 1/6 Select Committee, led by a courageous Liz Cheney, has come to an agreement with Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, who was present the day of the insurrection, and who witnessed several key moments in Trump’s campaign to subvert American democracy.

In the wake of Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony, Cipollone has emerged as a crucial eyewitness to the events surrounding Trump’s failed coup d’etat. Still, I wouldn’t count on him burying his boss too deeply. 

After all, Trump still runs the show in the Republican Party.

In any case, Cipollone isn’t appearing live in person, but testifying in a recorded interview, juicy snippets of which will surely emerge in future hearings. Cipollone will probably try to be careful, and do his best to protect himself and his former boss from the most damaging revelations.

Still, if he’s even slightly cooperative with the Committee, we’ll learn a few new things, sure to be ugly as sin. After all, Donald Trump’s White House was steeped in criminality, because the president himself was an unreconstructed crook, as Richard Nixon might’ve put it.

A political gangster in the White House, enabled by the party of family values.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the Republican Party has damaged this country, and impossible to tell how much more damage they’ll do before it’s over. 

It certainly won’t be pretty.