The procedure waged against former president Trump, historic not only in the sense of being the first presided over not by a Chief Justice but a partner of Bruce Wayne (and declared foe of thugs), the last sitting of the Watergate Babies Patrick "Pat" Leahy of Vermont - scion of cheese and maple syrup and even the partial-birth abortion ban - but the second trial against the same president during the same term (half-term and year too) and one which has, aggressively if not numerically, transcended the solidity of partisan walls, in spite of expletives of the contrary.
The rage that followed the rage of the mob, predictably aimed at removing the supreme executive magistrate of the republic, with himself having already stripped himself of any auctoritas and dignitas he had left (and very recognisably, the nuclear option) which would have seen articles being drafted even with a Republican majority, or so I believe, the incitement of a charge of the executive against the legislative on the sixth day of this newfangled year, a fortnight before the handover ultimately occurring in quiet solitude and poetry between the aggrieving and cordial parties, with a supposedly ultra-conservative Chief Justice inaugurating an alleged semi-communist mad dog arch-liberal, somehow someone had demanded this. Only the form, and the level of reprimand issued by the elephant leadership against the man they had permitted to ride him, at least through the instituting of open primaries and ballot-stuffing by appalling irresponsible grassroots already signalling their unrivalled hatred, was yet to be determined.
And to be determined, it must also be said, is a question left to resolve. For nobody strongly believes, except those with minds so clouded by dread and desire in the short term, could possibly believe that this impeachment, for the same reasons as before - with the partial exception of 1868, when the GOP did possess a two-thirds majority required to usher in a parliamentary government, and did so, against the best efforts of Senator Ross of Kansas - would fail to meet, and for thus define, a required threshold since nearly two and a half centuries as "high crimes and misdemeanours". What are, once we liberate ourselves from the illusion of political impeachment constituting any sort of legal justice, these "high crimes and misdemeanours"? Well, as any jurist from Ulpian to Tribonian to Malik ibn Anas to Blackstone would have told you, that is a matter left for the judge, once all has been said and deliberated by, or eventually of, the views of the neurons inherent in the infallible legislator. This question, whether read by an originalist with a fetisch for eighteenth-century slavery, or a new-thinking , defining in the moment of a decision ad hoc a liberal ethos itself liberated from the individual selfish mind or intrapersonal desires and trends,
Perhaps no better, or in the words of Lincoln regarding the immorality of slavery, put than if Trump is not guilty of these high crimes, they are yet to be tested by an unknown gargantuan entity of authoritarian audacity and as such, are likely never to be. I do not quite share the latter assertion, for while Trump may be finished - a prediction I merrily make yet again, now both cocksure and with lessons learned - the movement will unmistakably persist, in spite of efforts to suppress, silence or (literally) disarm it. All such efforts are now likely to ramp up, in the trial not just of the coup-minded ex-president, but of the entire Trump movement as well, and anything likely to seek replacing or supplanting it. With a blue house and, by a hair-thin threshold, senate and White House and a relatively sympathetic court (now to be filled by decidedly liberal justices, if almost as likely as replacement for existing ones) such efforts may seem likely to succeed; I am, however, in the face of an equally-divided Democratic party, led by increasingly incompetent and an administration poised to deliver "blue Bush-ism" and sunk into several crises both domestic and international, anything but a constitutional overhaul of Austrian proportions is unlikely to thwart this nascent, failing-while-succeeding Nazi movement.
Ex-president Trump, best referred to with the prefix, is unlikely to be convicted, and while a gentle and conscientious slip into the night may seem appropriate and Nixon-like - he who did have a profound cause for complaint in 1960, but ultimately chose to heed the proverbial better angels of his nature, and anyway prove enough of a patriot not to burn the country in order to win it - but also unlikely. Short of a sudden stroke, or several strokes of further muddling of words and slips of the facts (here the Democratic victor is, again unbelievably, further down the road) he will rise again in 2024, should not constitutional procedure definitely slam his chances against a new-laid brick wall in a stunning bipartisan upset. Asides from principled arguments against this, the reasons of McConnell and others in the red against doing this are, of course, laden not only with a desire for a revanche in 2024, but ultimately of supplanting the leadership of the Trumpist or Bannonite movement while capturing its supporters. If the dethroned president's head in a guillotine was confined to his own health, the reciprocal loyalty from the Republican party would be measured in many pounds of cold steel. But this is not, no longer, in no credible sense their party, no more than it is the party of Lincoln.
And with acquittal in the senate underway, and this dangerous or safekeeping precedent out of reach of a 67-vote majority, what rests in the future? Certain GOP voices have hollered and bawled to loudly they can surely not keep the peace again; a Trump resurgence in the 2024 primaries is sure to be contested, at least on principle, and face a disunited party even with the eclectics of a movement further duped by the great narrative of fraud and stolen ballots, but in the main of cordial adherence and, yes, sympathy, until his hour finally tolls. With this hour not too far away, let us say two presidential contests at the most, I would revert my original 2016 question in favour of this: If the internal struggles and authoritarian rebuke of the 2021 upset will spell the doom of the Democratic party as well, with(hith)erto doth the donkey want to carry us... and - for better or worse, but now seemingly universally endorsed, not the least in the country of my birth - the world?
For the dragon will not, not alone.
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