The President, however, would be delighted if there were a trial. What better place to showcase his own partisan witnesses, testify himself with all the bombast, arrogance, and dismissiveness of someone who never wanted the job in the first place, who has done a great job of reforming the office, making it more American than it ever was – loud, outrageous, bourgeois, and costumed by Las Vegas and Hollywood.
Trump made his bones in New York real estate, the toughest, most cutthroat, least genteel side of American capitalism there is, where the threat to sue is morning coffee, suing is a light lunch, and the best seat for a civil trial is ringside. Trials don’t make him nervous, they just get his Irish up.
In fact not only he but the American public will be sorely disappointed if the Senate refuses to try him and therefore be deprived of at least three months of grand guignol, bloody, melodramatic theatre, politics gone wild, circus acts and side shows. This is what we have been waiting for! Up till now Trump has been trimmed and collared. He sits still at cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office with foreign dignitaries. He is properly presidential at official events and ribbon cuttings. He smiles at the camera, waves to the press corps, but hates every minute that he is tethered and corralled, respectful and patient, temperate and considerate. Only in his tweets is he himself – outspoken, deliberately abusive, incendiary, and intemperate – and one can only imagine the real Donald Trump ‘negotiating’ with buyers, owners, and the City of New York.
The Senate is known for its decorum and enforced politeness. Members are required to deal with each other respectfully and considerately, untoward personal attacks are to be discouraged, and every debate to be conducted properly within age-old, approved, rules of behavior. Which is why Trump is itching for a trial. Since the prosecution and the defense in normal, routine civil trials use as much dirt, slime, slights, and unproven allegations as they can to convict or exonerate the accused, then one can only image the scurrilous, smarmy, vindictive, attacks to come in the impeachment trial of the most litigious, aggressive, willful, and fearless President ever to sit in the White House.
The Democrats who have assumed the mantle of righteousness in the affair will at first be on their good behavior. They will proceed carefully and judiciously, convinced that right is on their side, that they are leading a moral cause, and will have to prevail. This decorum will quickly disappear as Trump witnesses, staff, and legal counsel go after every inconsistency, every presumption, and every exaggeration. Trump in a trial would ultimately be victorious because the Left is, has always been, and will always be hamstrung by right behavior. Trump and his like are Machiavellian, admirers of Putin, European nationalists, and Eastern autocrats because he and they know that men in power do not operate according to moral principles, but on probability, calculation, and hard-driven risk-taking.
A Senate trial will not be an elegant bullfight with picadors, clowns, and elegant toreadors respectful of the animal they are destined to kill, playing to a knowledgeable crowd who sees it as an existential sexual moment – male bull, female matador, dancing to the death. It will be a dogfight – two animals biting and drawing blood, jaws clamped on throats, teeth into jugulars, equally matched to the end. Only Trump is a pit bull, and the collies and Labs thrown against him will be no match. There will be a lot of growling, posturing, and bravado, but in the end the Trump dog will, jaws dripping with saliva and opponent’s blood, prance around the courtroom.
It will not be a fair fight; but we don’t want to see John L Lewis and gentlemen’s fisticuffs. We want to see Iñárritu's Amores Perros, brutal, bloody, and final with Donald Trump standing over the dead bodies of his rivals.
Why did we elect Donald Trump? To be Jimmy Carter, a man of rectitude and moral principle? A man with a Mr. Rogers’ sweater and fireside, homey persona? No indeed. We wanted and now expect Genghis Khan and heads on stakes.
Donald Trump fascinates because he combines the most benign and most malignant characteristic aspects of America – showmanship, glitz, glamour, arm candy, and humor; and aggressive, amoral onslaughts for individual wealth and power.
The Democrats have done everything to set the Senate trial up for failure. They have fielded, after all, a group of progressive idealists, neo-Socialists, faux-compassionate, angry environmental-gay-women-Latino/Arab shills to run against Tamburlaine; and while they might have some nasty New York lawyers in their armory, they must project the same righteousness in the courtroom as that expressed by the Twenty Dwarfs. The country has to retain a respect for progressive goodness even when liberals are fighting Satan himself.
The last three years of the Trump presidency have been among the most entertaining in American history. Never before have we seen such hilarious and outrageous behavior. Donald Trump has been the consummate Vegas showman, American sound-and-light show master of ceremonies par excellence; Borscht Belt headliner as crude as Shecky Green, Jackie Mason, or Rodney Dangerfield; as funny as Joan Rivers, Eddie Murphy, and D.L.Hughley. Will any Senate trial defense, scripted by a master of vaudeville and standup comedy, be anything but the best show on television since Milton Berle?
The trial would be interesting if it only pitted political parties against each other, a battle of political principle to resolve Constitutional interpretation. It will be fascinating because it pits Good vs Evil. The progressive Left does indeed believe that Trump is the spawn of the Devil, an unholy man not only determined to undo the Christian goodness promoted by progressives since FDR, but who embodies Satanic evil – a homophobic, misogynist, Fascist nationalist set on returning American culture, on the way to a social Utopia, to the primitive, dog-eat-dog hell that it was.
Not even Milton could have envisaged such a titanic, existential battle between good and evil. Paradise Lost is a children’s fairy tale compared to the coming fight between Satan’s emissary and those of Jesus Christ. Or so American progressives have always conceived of this entire impeachment affair. Theirs is not a movement to remove a President who might have overstepped his Constitutional bounds, but to exorcise a demon.
The Watergate hearings are nothing compared to what this Senate impeachment trial will be. They, by comparison, will be seen as safe, temperate, and judicious. The Trump trial will be more Salem than Beacon Street, more Judge Judy than the Supreme Court, and more pure, unadulterated high-flying chicanery and political absurdity that the nation has ever witnessed.
Let the trial begin!
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