In the final days of his presidency, Mr. Trump has been snubbed by foreign allies and banned from social media. Some members of his cabinet fled, and some in his own party helped deal the final blow of a second impeachment. High-profile friends, like the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, are declining national honors to avoid being in his presence. His hometown wants little to do with him.
Mr. Trump arrived in Washington as an insurgent, an unlikely politician who defied the odds to win the White House. He departs isolated and diminished, leaving behind a Capitol transformed into a war zone, a frayed body politic and a fractured Republican Party that has been ousted from power. (Source)
Worst, of course, is the PGA's canceling a tour event at Trump National. I wonder if Jack Nicklaus is still a Trump supporter.
We forget that when Nixon went down, a third of the country still approved of him. That's a lot of people, and the same level of support will be remain for Trump no matter what. If we're lucky, and I'm not sure we will be–but it's possible–there will come a day in the near future when most Trump supporters will be ashamed to admit it in respectable company. It will be like admitting you're a racist or that you're into child pornography. If so, the people who continue to approve of Trump will gradually be made as irrelevant in legitimate political discourse as those who approved of Nixon. I want an America where the Jack Nicklauses of the world, who though maybe in their heart of hearts still admire Trump, will be embarrassed to admit they voted for him.
January 6 was truly an Epiphany. It forced into the sunlight what so many Americans were either too groggy and dull-witted to see or just willfully ignored or used convoluted rationalizations to mitigate, which is that Trump is a monster, that he is the face of what is worst in the American soul, and that he awakened in his supporters what is worst in them.
We have an opportunity now after January 6 to face the fact that this is who we are; it's a part of the American psyche that should have been expiated after the Civil War but wasn't, and so now we are given another opportunity to try. There was no real reckoning after the Civil War, and there needed to be one. Germany managed it after WWII and South Africa did after the fall of apartheid. Will the coming Trump tribunals provide us that opportunity? If we're lucky, maybe. It's unlikely, but it's possible.
As much as I would like to see the orange man in an orange jumpsuit, there's a part of me that would prefer to see Trump fade away into obscurity. I fear that his inevitable legal troubles will make him the center of another O.J. Simpson-like media spectacle, and showman that he is, he'll milk it in every way he can. He'll continue to suck up all the oxygen in the room; he'll continue his over the top gaslighting. So I might be ok with letting him go if he would just agree to leave the country if he can find another that will take him, but we know he won't do that.
And the bottom line is that the country needs this reckoning, not so much for Donald Trump's sake, but for its own sake–so that those Americans who still have some shred of decency and who are still capable of some level of shame can admit to themselves the horror show they brought upon this country. They need to see his crimes laid out in their full scope and in all their specificity. They need to see what a fraud and gangster this guy is and always was. We need at least two thirds of the country to be able to see Trump for who he is. For those who are not capable, let them shrink away into the shadows.
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