We are about to witness the acquittal of a man as guilty as OJ was of what he was charged with, as guilty as Jeffrey Epstein was when he got that sweetheart “child prostitution” deal from the feds (jobs well done, Al Dershowitz).   We are told by the president’s lawyers and members of the sworn impartial jury that the charges, even if true — OK, let’s say they are true and proven, we’ll stipulate to that, some of their unified party say now —  do not amount to any reason for anyone to go to the extreme partisan step of putting a duly elected American president on trial to establish his guilt or innocence for non-impeachable offenses less than a year before the election he may or may not be actively trying to cheat in (and such a hissy value judgment, that).

Once the Republicans acquit Trump, on charges arising from facts not in dispute, on the tortured grounds they gave (and to be straight, the grounds were always strictly: 51-49, suck it!), there is no longer any basis for impeaching and trying a corrupt-looking American president, no matter how openly corrupt he is.  Even (if he is a Republican with a Republican Senate) if he shoots another American in the face on Fifth Avenue, live on camera (can’t arrest him, can’t indict him, can’t investigate him, as his lawyers already told the Federal court, defending Trump in one of numerous ongoing cases against him, lost and now on appeal by his diehard legal team).   Suck it, libs!  51-49.

Jay Sekulow, Donald Trump’s loyal remaining personal lawyer, was probably the weakest of Trump’s lawyers at the impeachment trial.  To call it a “trial” is a bit of a stretch, when you consider the shamelessly partial jury, and the supine behavior of the presiding “judge” (it’s his first trial, give the good man a break, Widaen!) who is not even enforcing the Senate Impeachment Rules that Senators must remain in the chamber during arguments and may not make public statements during the trial proceedings (Rand Paul promptly went into the hall yesterday to release the whistleblower’s name after Chief Justice John Roberts would not read his question that would have done it on live TV during the impeachment–  contempt of court?   ROTFLMAO!). 

This may be the first public American trial of any kind in history where the judge did nothing to ensure that new evidence would be seen or testimony from previously blocked fact witnesses heard and cross-examined.  It’s worth keeping in mind that this is a trial to decide if the president committed, and continues to commit, a high crime by asserting unprecedented powers not to cooperate with lawful investigations into his personally motivated shakedown of a foreign ally.   Trump had his lawyers’ (on AG Barr’s advice and blessing) make repeated blanket refusals to participate in investigations or to obey legal process of any kind in any investigation of his wrongdoing, up to and including impeachment.

Every American knows that the Checks and Balances power of Congress, particularly vis a vis colorable wrongdoing by the president, is at its peak, and Executive Privilege at its nadir, during an impeachment.  It is established principle that every presumption should be construed toward Congress’s right to uncover the truth, according to the Constitution, especially during an impeachment  — or, if you prefer, its updated restatement:  51,49 suck it, losers.   As they continue to insist (leaving out the actual timeline, of course) the Democrats should have simply waited 15 months for full resolution by the courts on appeal, of all of the controversial evidentiary claims by Trump, losers!   It would have all likely gone in the Democrats favor in the end anyway, LOL!  Too bad all the subpoenas would have expired by then!

Back to loyal Jay Sekulow and his largely incoherent recitation of Trumpian innuendo about a vicious, baseless partisan attack sprinkled with the attendant hollow legalisms.   He did keep saying one indisputably true thing over and over, to underscore the deathly seriousness of the proceedings America is half-watching. “Danger!” he said, then paused, then said it again “danger!” —  a trope he’d repeat throughout his presentation of the impartial Mr. Dershowitz’s constitutional views.   Danger, Will Robinson!   Danger, America, danger!

No truer warning  could be sounded at this moment.  The danger to democracy is being rubbed right into our loser faces, America.   Whatever you think of this messianic figure who is radicalizing the federal judiciary, who hates abortion like the plague, who brought peace to the Middle East, and jobs to all Americans and who is making America greater every day, this precedent-setting non-trial on Trump’s impeachment is the end of democracy’s ability to even have a fair hearing about corruption and abuse of power by the Unitary Executive.  Nobody is above the law, but some, a privileged few (OK, a very privileged VERY few), are simply, and indisputably (by a 51-49 binding vote) beyond its reach.  (Danger.)

Republican senators even thinking about supporting a fair trial in the Senate are now considered traitors within the party of Trump.   It is now a risky, partisan position to support a fair trial.  Think about that for a second — a fair trial is unfair to the accused.   The Republican party’s position is that hearing previously blocked fact witnesses and new evidence at a trial, as at every other impeachment, every other trial that is not a kangaroo court is — OUT OF THE QUESTION!  Republicans supporting anything resembling a fair trial, in favor of even a vote on  a”radical” proposition like hearing new evidence that arrived after the indictment/impeachment or hearing from previously blocked fact witnesses, are continually threatened to stay in line.  Danger.

One powerful Republican who probably didn’t need any threatening was life-tenured “neutral” balls and strikes umpire and corporate hero John Roberts (inventor of the brilliant arbitration clause that squashes class-action– or any other kind of — lawsuits against negligent corporations), the principled “tie goes to the runner” tie-breaking “swing vote” Justice who is quietly “presiding” over the impeachment trial, with his eye on history, as we are told.  This fair-minded legal moralist has positioned himself as the towering, impartial Switzerland of this vicious war between patriots and traitors.  Danger.

The president’s band of loyal legal defenders, the lawyers at his impeachment trial, made a series of arguments against why the impeachment trial should have the minimum for a traditional fair trial — fact witnesses and evidence that the president impeached for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress has been abusively obstructing during a long and seamless campaign of obstruction of justice going back at least to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  He successfully obstructed justice in that investigation, including into his well-documented pattern of obstruction of justice, by the brilliant final stroke of appointing a diabolically capable extremist ideologue AG who auditioned for the job by promising Trump to get him off the hook no matter what.  Now, all of that publicly displayed personal ugliness and disregard for law, norms and rules (things that bind only “losers”) is about to become one more big, fat “Nothing to See Here! LOL!”  Danger.

The president’s lawyers’ fierce, often quite intelligible arguments (some, like Dershowitz’s demented claim that whatever a candidate for public office does, if he honestly believes it is in the public interest, can’t be wrong, were also intelligible, but in a bad way) set the table well enough to give grounds for at least one of the very few “vulnerable” Republican senators who might vote in favor of a fair trial to publicly announce that he will stop supporting calls for anything even mimicking what anyone  might think of as the appearance of due process for the fair administration of justice.  Case proved, he said, but I still don’t care, it duddn’t mean shit.  Danger.

There is no purpose, they said, to have any previously blocked fact witnesses testify, since the president might well have an assertable privilege of some kind that could  be upheld 5-4 in the Supreme Court in a precedent-shattering decision.  A ruling on the president’s claim of absolute immunity to withhold all evidence and testimony in any investigation including impeachment, of course, would require a new precedent, since Nixon and Clinton both lost on similar, far more modest, privilege claims during the lead up to their impeachments.  No matter,  it is merely the president’s legal assertion of a theoretically facially valid privilege that is the question under discussion, not if the court would actually overturn long precedent to decide in Trump’s favor stating, unappealably, that he has no obligation not to interfere in an investigation into him.   Danger.

Why should the House be able to overrule the will of the American voters, the authority of the Supreme Court, the president’s lawyers ask?  (Both of those were answered by the Framers, in the Constitution itself)  Their ultimate argument is their unified insistence that, even if the facts of the case already establish that the president abused his power for personal gain and obstructed the lawful powers of Congress, that it doesn’t matter, those things aren’t impeachable under their brand new Originalist definition of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.  (Pulled, after all, directly from Alan Dershowitz’s completely unbiased, liberal ass.)  Nothing further that could point to the president’s known guilt can be introduced at trial because it would only hurt a great man who will never be removed from office anyway, and it would nullify the decisive votes of those 78,000 Americans in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who voted with surgical precision to put Trump into office by giving him an Electoral College victory.  Even Ken Starr, principle ideological architect of the partisan Clinton impeachment, argued against the horrors of partisan impeachment.    You want a “fair trial”?  Danger.

No reason to hear from even one witness, a man with highly relevant, even dispositive, facts who is suddenly willing to testify (after refusing the same request from the House).  That mad, vindictive liar, out of a personal grudge against the innocent, well-meaning man who fired him, could give sworn testimony harmful to the president’s insistence that he’d done everything perfectly and blamelessly, and in the best interests of America!  The job of a defense attorney is to acquit his client by any means necessary.   A majority of the jury had already publicly announced its commitment to working with the defense to acquit their client no matter what, and everyone knows their “oath” to carefully weigh the evidence and be impartial jurors was a legal requirement that bound them to nothing but the party line, so why drag things out?  If the Schitt don’t flit, you must acquit!   DANGER.

No legal way to restrain an impulsive and corrupt president with a long history of fraud [1], criminality and the aggressive, sometimes absurd, use of expensive, bludgeoning litigation and endless appeals to bully, cow and bankrupt opponents, defrauded customers and creditors, women he molested and everything else?   To paraphrase Trump loyalist former Tea Party insurgent Mick Mulvaney:  get over it, losers. DANGER.

Stay tuned for the actual terrorist arson of the House of Representatives right before the 2020 election, the first arrests in Barr’s criminal investigations into the evil traitors who orchestrated the baseless Mueller witch hunt, the publication of the first official presidential enemies lists, and eventually, silence from this viciously opinionated, f-word bristling blahg.   I’ll send you a postcard from the vacation camp they send me to, don’t worry.   The weather’s great, the food is good and I am being given all the hard, honest work I can handle!

[1]  Trump University: small $25,000,000 settlement in early 2017 to end a frivolous suit, and an agreement, with no admission of guilt, to close down the supposedly fraudulent business.     The dissolution of the Trump Foundation in 2019 for its illegal practices, and the court-ordered payment of $2,000,000 to other charities, but no admission by Trump of anything fraudulent about the foundation that is now legally shuttered.  NOTHING TO SEE HERE, you fucking HATERS!!!  A conspiracy of fucking haters!!!

Looking back after a dramatic change, assuming all records of events have not been destroyed or concealed and the available historical record wiped clean, as when a new regime in ancient Egypt would scrape the faces off tomb walls and erase from history and the afterlife the prior regime that also claimed to have been chosen by the gods, it becomes much easier to see cause and effect.  Looking at a timeline, the connection between seemingly disparate events emerges.  The events can be seen, after the fact, as steps in a clear pattern that led, seemingly in a straight line, from one thing to another. 

Experiments in democracy are not immediately cancelled when an autocratic party takes control.   There are leaders of the opposition to be silenced, beaten up, discredited, removed from public view.   There is the shaping of public opinion, which must be done strongly and systematically.   There is the criminalizing of dissent, which becomes treason, a terrible crime justly punishable by severe penalties including death.   After enough struggle, with violent safeguards against rebellion firmly in place, a new society can be born, a culture based on values inculcated through years of hard work by the new leaders, their ideologues and financial backers, and the party faithful.   

One template for looking at how this change comes about is the transition from democracy to totalitarianism in Germany last century.   It was the farthest thing from a historical certainty, though the stars were lined up perfectly for it and it seems inevitable today.    A hundred years ago the forces of the extreme right in Germany were starting to brawl with crowds of armed leftists in the streets in a nation on the verge of revolution.  The liberal Weimar Republic, which at the time had the world’s most enlightened democratic constitution, was ill-equipped to enforce its laws and new democratic values in the face of mounting despair after a humiliating military defeat, increasing financial desperation and political violence and propaganda.   The stage was set for a decade or more of pitched battles at political rallies before the fateful late 1932 election when the Nazi party won its largest share of the votes ever in an open election, 37%.   After March 1933 the Nazi vote total was a constant 100%, once it became the only party in Germany.

The history of the end of German democracy in 1933 is well-known to anyone who has read any of the numerous books on the subject, or seen a history of World War II documentary.   Let’s take a quick look at few selected moments from  the timeline, for a sense of how long it takes — how many years it takes, even in the perfect petri dish for the change that was Germany in the 1920s, the early 30s — before the proposed solutions of cynical autocrats become irrevocable and final solutions.

The German military refused to take part in the surrender of November 1918 and its leaders afterwards helped perpetuate the myth that an undefeated German army had been stabbed in the back by the “November criminals”, the treasonous liberal members of the new Weimar democracy who signed the punitive peace treaty that led in a straight line to World War II.   General Kurt von Schleicher was a top military leader in World War I who, after refusing to participate in the humiliating surrender, pushed this narrative and sought political power in the turbulent years leading up to the Nazi takeover.   He was regarded by many patriotic right wing Germans as a national hero.

Fast forward to January 1933 and the calculations of the German right wing, including Schleicher, that 84 year-old general Paul von Hindenburg was a strong enough president, with robust powers to appoint or dismiss the chancellor under the law at that time, to control the uneducated, emotional leader of the Nazi party.  Hitler became Chancellor, appointed by President Hindenburg, serving at his pleasure, as they say.   History shows unambiguously that the idea that Hitler could be tamed by his social superiors and restrained by others on the right was wildly wrong.

In February 1933 the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire.   That night, in a coordinated nationwide sweep, the police, on orders of Herman Göring (who was busily putting together the Gestapo) arrested hundreds of people whose names had been on Nazi  enemies lists for a while.   The following day, in an emergency session of the Reichstag, the constitutional provision for political emergencies was invoked and an Enabling Act was passed with bipartisan support, giving the Chancellor vast emergency powers he never relinquished.   There were several major parties, all of the right and center, and center-left parties voted with the Nazis.  Think of the rush of support from across the American political spectrum for the massive, “patriotic” Patriot Act hastily passed by our Congress after the al Que’da attacks of 9/11/01.  In the name of fighting “terror” terrifying compromises can be made by otherwise decent and well-meaning politicians.

After the Reichstag fire, and with the invocation of emergency powers and passage of the Enabling Act that made it all legal, Hitler was the all-powerful unitary executive in Germany.  His word, and increasingly his whim, was effectively constitutional law for the next twelve years, under the enhanced emergency powers he invoked after his party set fire to the Reichstag.  He exercised those powers wantonly, sometimes insanely, until that fateful day in the bunker under Berlin when his enemies were closing in from all sides and he declared Germany too weak not to deserve its total destruction.  And then blew the top of his head off with a pistol in his mouth after killing his new wife and faithful dog.

Here’s the thing that caught my eye, the passage of time before the Nazis took the next violent, decisive step, even after they had what we now see as unchallengeable power.  In some cases, like the eventual program to physically exterminate the Jews, this took five to seven years.  Public sentiment has to be carefully and systematically cultivated before previously shocking proposals can be seen as “normal”.  Think of the frogs in the pot of slowly heated water, realizing too late that they are becoming frog soup and there’s nothing they can do about it.

After Hitler became the undisputed leader of Germany it was more than a year before the chilling “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934.  On that night, in coordinated nationwide raids, the leaders of the brawling SA, the three million man army of violent Nazi brownshirts (including a contingent of  working class socialists) that had been crucial to the rise of National Socialist Hitler, were killed.   The newly formed SS would be the strong right arm of Hitler going forward, its members bound to Hitler by an oath of unquestioning personal loyalty to their Fuhrer.

Here’s the thing that jumped out at me about the gradual escalation of autocratic violence, listening to the audiobook of Benjamin Carter Hett’s well-done The Death of Democracy. 

On that fateful night of orchestrated murder in June 1934, two armed men showed up at General Kurt von Schleicher’s house.   He was a well-known national public figure, of the stature of a General Patreus, or Colin Powell, or some of the generals who once sat as members of Trump’s cabinet, to some Germans almost like Quaseem Soliemani in Iran.   He was regarded by many on the German right as a national hero.  The Nazis who went to his house found him in his office, shot him dead at his desk and also killed his wife, who was also in the office when they found Schleicher.

The story in the Nazi-controlled press was that Schleicher had died in a gunfight with police, resisting arrest (it went without saying that he was a dangerous criminal who needed to be taken into custody to face justice).  The Nazis had fired on him in self-defense, returning fire, the stories said, and his wife had been killed in the crossfire, what we now blandly call “collateral damage”.   That was the story trumpeted on German mass media right after the killing.   Within a few weeks Hitler could nonchalantly tell German crowds at rallies “I had Schleicher shot.”   The clear message being: what the fuck are you going to do about it, or Nazi lies about it, traitor?

The Nazis are famous for their wholesale, industrialized slaughter of Jews and other enemies.   We have all the factual details about the sometimes disputed “Final Solution”, the evolving improvised mass murder program that ended in very efficient death camps, gigantic mass killing facilities.   In hindsight we think: Nazis seize power, start World War II, perpetrate Holocaust.   Each of these things was many years in the works.  Each proceeded by many small steps, over time.  Over years.

Some will remember Kristalnacht, “The Night of the Broken Glass”, the nationwide Nazi-sponsored orgy of violence against Jews across the country.   That was in November 1938 (probably organized around the 20th anniversary of the famous Jewish orchestrated “stab in the back” by the “November Criminals”) more than five years, almost six, after Hitler’s seizure of dictatorial power under a legal provision of the Weimar Constitution.   

It would be several more years until the actual mass killing of Jews would begin in the territories conquered by the German army.   Ditches and machine guns, trucks with exhaust pipes directed inside to kill undesirables with carbon monoxide, these crude methods were not up to the daunting task of killing millions.  The kind of plan the Nazis eventually devised and put into operation does not happen overnight, or in a year, or even in five years.  It takes time.  People have to accept every step leading up to it.  First you euthanize the mentally ill, see how that goes.   You stop the euthanasia program due to public outcry and there is more work to do to convince everyone of the necessity for ridding the earth of dangerous human parasites eternally intent on raping German women and poisoning the gene pool.  The public eventually falls into line, but it can take years sometimes.

Then, suddenly, one day, you have Adolf Hitler, full-blown, the way history remembers one of its most successful and prolific liars and mass murderers.  

In our current age of in-your-pocket/in-your-face instant, disposable communication, traditional written documents are relied on less and less in daily life.   If you want to test how little a written page is regarded by most people today, try writing a letter to somebody.   Put it in an envelope, mail it.   In my recent experience, it is rare to ever hear more than a peep about it, if that.

It’s a shame that quickly thumbed, highly opinionated, disposable smartphone ephemera has largely replaced good writing in public discourse.   The famously short American consumer attention span is shorter than ever before, and growing shorter all the time.    The published statements of public figures like Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, Nixon, Goebbels live on.   They are printed on paper for the ages, available to scholars, historians and everybody else.   Not so with a text, email or tweet, which serves its immediate purpose and is quickly forgotten, lost in a massive haystack of such disposable communications.  

Check out the Hitlerian overtones of this one, part of a long tweet stream by the president of the United States, from last April, less than a year ago.  The echoes should be noted, and they deserve to be remembered.   Shot off right after AG Barr exonerated Trump of all wrong-doing in connection with accepting sweeping and systematic Russian help to win in 2016, with making sure insufficient evidence of “collusion” reached the Special Counsel and for his numerous attempts to thwart the investigation itself.   Trump tweeted “complete and total exoneration!” denounced the “big fat waste” of time and millions of dollars and ended on this ominous note:

A favorite trope of Mr. Hitler and his followers was turning the tables on the “November Criminals” the sick and traitorous Jews and socialists who were forced to sign the humiliating and punitive German surrender on behalf of the military in November 1918.   The generals would not be tarred with that defeat, it was, the right wing story went, the goddamned sick and dangerous Jews and socialists who “stabbed undefeated Germany in the back.”  The popular justice often proposed for these treacherous traitors, shouted often in enthusiastic rallies of humiliated, angry Germans, was to “hang them from lamp posts.”  

Nothing to worry about here, of course, in our great democracy, with its exquisite system of checks and balances, ensuring that a tyrant will never be able to seize power here.

Here are a couple of the president’s many tweets, at random, from today, which should be reassuring:

… America, America, God shed His grace on thee…

… and shit…