The 300-page report from the House Intelligence Committee is out, and it's a comprehensive summary of Benedict Donald's perfidy: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, endangering national security for his own political benefit, just to name a few. Any Presidential scholar would testify that this is pretty stunning stuff.
Americans should be flipping out. However, our country is big, rich and powerful enough that people can afford not to think about, care about or participate in government if they don't feel like it. It's not what the founders envisioned — they said our democracy needed to rest upon an informed, participatory citizenry — but unless our system is in dire peril, the nation's ho-hum approach (with civil servants, activists and political junkies filling in the gaps) has worked pretty okay so far.
Well, welcome to dire peril. It's all there in the impeachment report.
Will voters read it, or at least skim it, and understand? Will they take their concerns about abuse of power with them into the voting booths next year? It's hard to tell. Trump's treason is beyond Watergate, and these are different times from 1974. One thing we can predict, though, is that 2020 will resemble 1920 in a singular way.
One hundred years ago, America had survived the double whammies of World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic. People longed for life to just calm down again. As it turned out, the victorious Presidential candidate in 1920 promised "a return to normalcy." We think that in 2020, Americans will be motivated by similar longings.
They may not know a lot about government or impeachment or the balance of power or corruption. But surely they're sick and tired of Trump and his antics. Today's events at the NATO summit are more fuel for that fire: Benedict Donald is so boorish and offensive that our allies' leaders laugh at him behind his back and, when he finds out, he childishly cancels a presser and leaves early.
Even if you're not a political animal, Trump's behavior seeps down into your consciousness. The ignorance, the insults, the lies, the meandering sentences, the mock-orgasms, the terrible management, the badly fitting tuxedos, the creepy Christmas decorations — it all becomes too much to bear. Americans will certainly go to the polls next November with the words of Elijah Cummings ringing in their ears: "We've got to get back to normal!" We cats PURR.
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