Why Impeach Again Now

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We Americans are a self-centered lot. That’s why Trump’s “America First” slogan gained so much traction. That’s why we didn’t enter World War II until attacked at Pearl Harbor. That’s why, after that terrible war, we spent seventy years trying to forge a new world order. We figured we might avoid another terrible war if the world had a decent set of rules that we helped make.

That’s why the Ukrainian count of Trump’s first impeachment went nowhere. If the truth be told, Americans who care about Ukraine and its millennial love-hate relationship with Russia number in the thousands, out of 328 million. And most of them are of Ukrainian descent.

The obstruction-of-justice charge went nowhere for a different reason. It’s a subtle charge that requires an understanding of how delicate and fragile is the rule of law. Americans see our president as the most powerful person in the world. How can anything he does be wrong, unless it involves blood, flames, bold theft or outright murder?

Trump played that crude belief like a cheap fiddle. I won’t say you had to have gone to law school to understand how wrong it is, but surely it helps. The American public simply didn’t care enough about the nuances of prosecutorial independence and the separation of powers to beat down the doors of their Republican senators and demand justice. So Trump got off unscathed—the more so because shame and guilt are foreign to his character.

But this time it’s personal. This wasn’t some foreign country that most Americans couldn’t locate on a globe. This wasn’t an abstract question of ethics or checks and balances. This was our Capitol. Rioters besieged it and trashed it, and Trump led them on.

They say we Americans are religious. But we worship in many ways. As time goes on, we are attending places of worship less and less often. The seat of our government—especially the Capitol—is our common secular temple. You can see the awe and reverence in the faces of tourists who visit our capital every day.

That is what Americans hold sacred: the buildings that house our democracy, the places where it works. Our reverence for them is the closest thing we Americans have to a common religion. Millions of us, of all religions, have suffered and died to save what they represent.

So what happened on January 6 was a desecration. The mob defiled all we hold sacred, no matter what our religion or political party.

And we don’t need words to describe the descecration, let alone subtle abstractions. All we need is to replay the tapes, which aired on every news network.

The same is true of cause and effect. Play the tapes of Trump’s rallies. Magnify his tweet, “Be there, will be wild!” Show the immediate effect on the crowds and on social media. You don’t need to argue cause and effect; they’re there on the clips, in full color.

For five years, those of us who saw through Trump early have been trying to get our friends, neighbors and co-workers to see. There’s something uniquely evil about the man. It’s not just his incessant bragging and self-obsession. It’s not just the ease with which he lies and steps on the bodies of those who’ve lied down for him. It’s not just his failure to recognize any rule or law but his own advantage. It’s not just his talent for insulting and demeaning women and minorities and then demanding (and sometimes getting!) their votes. And it’s certainly not his rawness, inexperience in government and unwillingness to learn or even read his briefing papers.

It’s all of the above, and more. It’s hard to take it all in. It’s especially hard when so many who should know better have spent so much time, effort and ink explaining and rationalizing his every flaw, lie, insult, self-praise and blunder.

But this time there’s no rationalizing. A crude, violent mob ransacked our temple of democracy. Five people died in the process. Our Commander in Chief, in a last-ditch effort to deny his decisive defeat, led them on.

You don’t need a horde of witnesses to testify; you just need to play the tapes. Any person with the slightest appreciation of cause and effect can get it. That’s why the National Association of Manufacturers, the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell and others—all formerly in Trump’s corner—turned on a dime and condemned him.

Our Constitution has only three requirements for the presidency: natural-born citizenship, fourteen years of residency, and having passed one’s thirty-fifth birthday. We don’t have any requirements for health, intelligence, experience, psychological stability or the absence of scientifically-recognized personality disorders. So it’s vital for our voters to be able to recognize an evil man like Trump, and for that recognition to become as widespread as possible.

With so few legal or customary barriers to our highest office, there will be others like him. Some may be smarter, tougher, more disciplined and more restrained. (That wouldn’t be especially hard.) So it’s vital that voters see, understand and recognize what has happened here, while memory of the desecration is fresh enough to forge a common understanding.

Yes, impeachment and conviction could bar Trump from ever running for office again (assuming he’s not already in jail for his crimes). Yes, being the only president ever to have been impeached twice will set him apart as uniquely horrid, as it should. But those aren’t the best reasons to begin the process less than eleven days before the start of a new administration.

This is a unique, highly perishable teachable moment. Like a death or a common tragedy, it begs for ceremony and for closure—a funeral of a sort.

We must have a common, final evaluation of the man who drove us as close as we’ve ever come to the Dark Side. Without that, without some closure, we do not just risk—we invite—a recurrence. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and scores of Republican House members are already rehearsing for the role. The invitation will stand like a open wound upon our national soul, until we bandage it at some unknown future time.

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