Ashok Dhillon
Jan 26, 20218 min
On January the 6th, 2021, the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, engineered, helped fund, and actively incited a violent and lethal insurrection on America’s government, which left 5 people dead, and the Capitol Building scaled, stormed, smashed, looted and violated by a mob of Trump supporters numbering in the thousands, while the government was in secession to certify the Electoral College votes for the Presidential election of November 3rd, 2020, which confirmed Joe Biden’s election victory over Trump.
On that day, Trump and his enablers were on TV exhorting his mob of supporters to march on the Capitol and overturn a legal and fair Democratic election, so that he could retain political power through a violent coup. It was the unimaginable happening in America, at Trump’s insistent bidding.
The attempted coup was a flagrant display of sedition that resulted in a violent insurrection, with the mob storming the Capitol, right to the doors of the Chambers, where the American lawmakers were cowering on the floor, whilst the security inside, with guns drawn, threatened to open fire on the raging mob at the doors, even while they hustled the lawmakers to safety into bunkered parts of the building. The entire gamut of treasonous actions taken by Trump, his enablers in the Republican Party, and the raging mob of violent insurrectionists that day were captured extensively on television cameras by a host of News Networks in all their shameful details – if ever proof is needed to forestall the inevitable Republican excuses and denials which will undoubtedly grow as time passes and the shock wears.
For over 4 years Donald Trump had been methodically conditioning his ‘Political Base’ to reject any election results that did not have him winning the election outright. And when he legitimately lost the November 3rd, 2020, Presidential Election, he doubled down on his rejection of the legitimate results and exhorted his violence prone 'Base', to violently oppose the results in the Chambers of the Capitol and force the lawmakers inside to recant the official results, at the threat of physical harm to their lives. Actual physical gallows were erected outside the Capitol as the enraged mob chanted ‘Hang Pence’, as the US Vice President tried to carry out his Constitutional Duties confirming the electoral voting results in favour of Joe Biden; and while the mob raged and stormed the Capitol threatening the Vice President’s and other lawmaker’s very lives, Trump, together with the Trump family, gathered around the TV screens and gloated.
If ever there was a clear and unequivocal cause for the Impeachment of a President, this certainly was it.
In fact, considering that Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party systematically conditioned their base of supporters to reject all truth, and primed them to embrace a steady stream of lies and outrageous conspiracies that were demonstrably false, just an Impeachment of the former President is not enough; they must be diligently pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the Law.
In light of the seriousness of the domestic assault that took place on America that day, and the dangerously corrosive political landscape Trump and the Republicans have permanently burdened the country with, which makes America a ‘House Divided’, and therefore vulnerable to all its enemies, domestic and foreign, just an Impeachment by Congress is not enough. Trump and his party of insurrectionists need to be investigated and punished for what is the most serious domestic terrorist act in modern US history. If this incident along with all the other seditious acts that Trump has precipitated as President is excused away, as most Republicans are already beginning to do, then America’s future is doubtful as a ‘United States’, and a cohesive nation of laws, and demonstrable and fair Democracy.
Just the stigma of a second Impeachment does not faze Trump yet, as he feels quite secure in the knowledge that almost the entire Republican base, and the vast majority of the Republican lawmakers are firmly in his pocket, and therefore no further harm will come to him. Additionally, Trump knows that the vast majority of his supporters in the Republican Party still want him as their President and actually believe in his ‘Big Lie’ that he won the election. Trump knows that if they could somehow force a change of results upon the rest of the Americans who rejected him (the majority), they would. To the length that his mob went to - to force a change in election results, is all the proof he needs of his political invincibility in today’s America. He must be dissuaded of that belief by being held properly accountable for his egregious words and acts - and must be punished appropriately.
Trump’s impeachment just by Congress does not bring the kind of accountability that is required for the seriousness of his and his enablers crimes against the country, which systematic and determinedly undermined the very principles and foundation of American Democracy. In the end this resulted in the unthinkable act of usurping of political power by means of extravagant falsehoods and violent force, and by doing so destroying America’s proud tradition of the ‘peaceful transfer of power’.
If America is to regain its credibility as a country of law-and-order, then Trump and all his enablers should be held to account in every possible way, including active prosecution under the full extent of the law, and their expulsion from all public offices, now, and for the rest of their seditious lives. Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen.
The Republicans are already making excuses and forwarding Constitutional and other arguments against convicting Trump - and the Democrats do not hold the required majority in the Senate to not need the Trump-enslaved Republicans, to convict him.
To the Republicans, the Trump incited insurrection is already a matter of slightly distasteful minor bit of history, and nothing much more. But, for most Republicans lawmakers, Trump’s hold over them is what really matters to them to retain their political careers, and to possibly regain political power across the country through Trump, who holds the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party in his thrall. Also, the chances of conviction and serious punishment of Trump are slim because the Democrats who now control all three branches of government, have proven to be particularly ineffective in swaying public opinion to any effective degree of outrage at Republican wrong doings to make them change their behaviour, let alone make them more afraid of the consequences of public outrage than Trump’s retaliation against them.
It is not only now, but for years the Democrats are unable to hold the Republicans accountable for their decades of undermining American Democracy through systemic right-wing propaganda, lies, conspiracies, gerrymandering, and active voter suppression.
During the 4 years of Trump’s corruption laden Presidency, the Democrats have proven to be particularly impotent in bringing him to behaviour changing account. This impotency has been proven for decades now, as the Republicans, a perennial minority in America, have almost always managed to out-maneuver the Democrats and win and retain control of State and National political power, far more than their numbers would otherwise warrant.
The Republican comfort with ‘whatever-it-takes’ to win, keeps them in political power, and ultimately brought them Trump as their ‘Messianic’ President who liberated them from whatever few constraints they had felt uncomfortable in breaching before him. After Trump becoming the US President, they followed his lead in relentlessly conditioning their Republican base to prep them for the tsunami of lies and falsehoods that was to follow, which makes most of the Republican base a zombie nation willing to swallow any lie, in spite of it being discredited repeatedly. Upon Trump’s election, the Republican base itself also finally felt liberated as he publicly, shamelessly, and fearlessly articulated all their dark thought and desires, and fears of a changing America that was drifting increasingly towards liberalism and progressive ideas regarding minority and human rights, equal civil rights for African-Americans, greater consumer and environment protection, and accountability of corporations - and of Wall Street; that corrupted symbol of twisted 'Capitalism' that lives and thrives on endless government and Federal Reserve largess, and bailouts, while denouncing all public help to ordinary Americans as ‘Socialism’, making it the hypocritical shrine of ‘faux Conservatism’.
This gradual drift had picked up pace significantly with the unthinkable election of the African-American Barack Obama (for the politically ambitious, the extremists, and the majority, the closeted White-Supremacist Republicans). Barack Obama’s election, as President, was a seismic shock to the ‘Conservatives’ in America that included some of the most overt, and the silent White-Supremacists, among whom was the vocal Trump, an unembarrassed and shameless self-promoter with a checkered business life, and a morally bankrupt personal one, but one who was unashamed to attack Barack Obama publicly, and racially, by questioning his American birth, and with it, his right to be a legitimate President of the United States.
Trump’s relentless and groundless attacks against Barack Obama did not jeopardize Obama’s Presidency itself, but it galvanized the racist and the insecure White America and brought them their champion of propaganda, misinformation, lies and open racism, the ‘Great White Hope’ of Republican political power Trump, when it all seemed to be going Black. That White-Supremacist America has embraced Trump since then as their personal Savior, and he did not disappoint them in his all-out assault on the political, racial, and demographic drift of America, and all its 'Progressive values', even if they were enshrined in the Constitution.
The reaction of the Republican political elite and the leaders of the Party, to the election of Barack Obama, was a mixture of horror and revulsion, and manifested itself publicly as unashamed and overt obstruction of his agenda for the 8 full years of his two terms in Office as the President. Mitch McConnell and his gang of ‘good-ole-boys’ were not going to let an uppity African American smart-ass, who was demonstrably more intelligent and capable than them, have his way and be successful in leading America out of the severe financial crisis he had stepped into - inherited from the previous Republican administration’s gross mismanagement and fracturing of the financial system, that threatened to sink the American and the Global financial system.
From the very start the Republican lawmakers thwarted Obama relentlessly and shamelessly at the cost to America’s well-being, rising as it was with Obama at the helm, out of the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. To this day, for the most part, the Republican Party has only had hate and derision for Barack Obama, even though he and his administration saved the American and the Global financial system. Additionally, the Obama administration put the American economy and the financial markets on an almost unbroken path of 8 years of growth and job creation - that the then ungrateful and tasteless Trump inherited, and took shameless and sole credit for.
The Republican Base is deeply rooted in historical insecurities that have hidden behind White-Supremacy, Neo-Nazism, Conservative values, and incredibly, Evangelical Christianity, which has had little bearing to Christ’s teachings, but were more aligned with political and militia militancy, including their worship of the ‘Second Amendment’, even at the cost of untold American lives lost to gun violence.
This Republican base is so sold on Trump because he so represents and so thoroughly completes them, that very, very few Republican Congressmen and Senators dare talk badly about him, or dare condemn him, for his obviously clear seditious activities as President over four years of his single Term, as they fear his outrage and retaliation by means of turning their constituents against them in their own bid for re-elections as lawmakers.
Trump owns the Republican base and through it he owns the Republican lawmakers. Even after January 6th, 2021, a day surely to go down for America as a darker ‘Day of Infamy’ than the day that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor at the start of the Second World War (after all on Dec. 8th, 1941 a foreign power, Japan, attacked a military outpost of America) but on Jan. 6th, 2021 the President of the United States himself incited his American supporters to attack and try and overthrow the Government of the United States, in an open attempt to usurp power from a duly elected incoming President.
So, the ‘Trial for Impeachment’ of Donald J. Trump will take place in the US Senate for the second time, and this time for even more egregious crimes against America than the first time he was Impeached. But, unthinkably, the Republicans in the US Senate will once again find all the reasons to acquit him, and will refuse to convict him, as they fear his hold on their Party and through it on them. More personally, and therefore more importantly, they fear his control on their personal fortunes and careers. The Republican lawmakers have demonstrated over decades, they will do just about anything to win and retain political power at any cost. Even at the cost of America itself. Just ask Putin...