Monroe Dispatch - No Struggle, No Progress

Ok, it’s over. No one was surprised at the outcome. Some might say, to borrow a word from ex-president Donald Trump, it was a “rigged” trial. Donald Trump is once again a “free man” to do what he has done since he arrived in the White House and that is to get and keep a nation deeply divided. Not that the nation was ever united in the first place. However, if there is one thing that Trump’s second impeachment trial showed the nation is that, when the nation was warned by those that Trump would be worse from his first impeachment, they were right. How else can someone who was impeachment and acquitted after trying to shake down a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent who he ended up losing to in order to keep “his job” in the White House. So, what does the ex-president do? He goes around telling everyone that the election is rigged, that everyone is out to get him and no matter what, he will not go quietly, if at all. No one was out “to get” Trump, as he asserted, but in every election, someone is always trying to get the incumbent out of power. That’s politics, the nature of the beast. Trump tried to get Barack Obama with racist under tones before Obama won the White House. Did Obama lament that someone was trying to get him, even after he won the presidency and during his reelection? Did he or any other president (Dem or Rep) say that if they lost, it was because the election was rigged? No! Trump did what all individuals do to get people’s confidence by playing them as the victim and only he can “save” them or restore what has been stolen from them. Hence, the so called “make America great again” slogan that convinced millions of people that the nation indeed had to go to “being great again.” Now four years later, and with someone in the White House, of whom most Americans through their votes, believe that they made a wise decision to deny Trump a second go round in the White House.

That proved to indeed be a wise decision when the nation saw that after the first impeachment, Trump in a losing effort (when he knew he’d lost), tried to get a state secretary of elections to” find” him “one more” vote from the official tally to show him winning by just, get this, one vote. For a “stable genius” as Trump claimed to be, that was not exactly a rocket scientist move on his part. Talk about rigging an election in your favor, in plain sight, as the conversation that he had with the election official, was recorded and everybody heard it. That was something that presidents just wouldn’t or was supposed to do when they lose. They would accept defeat, and sometimes after contesting the results, they would graciously congratulate the victor and move on. That was missing in Trump, that something called, “statesmanship”, a term that hasn’t been used much in American politics since the election of the nation’s first Black president. With time rapidly running out, Trump would do what no other person who has sat in the Oval Office has done and that was try to overturn the very government that he was elected to lead.

The Constitution says that a president is removed from office through impeachment after that person has “committed high crimes and misdemeanors” against the government. The Jan. 6 attempt insurrection to stop the U.S. government from functioning has Trump’s fingerprints all over it. Who did those insurrectionists look to as their leader? For those who may have missed the Senate trial, one could not overlook all of the evidence in video/audio of exactly what happened at the Capitol. What the nation/world was able to see was not fake news. Even Trump’s attorneys and those in the Senate could not deny or downplay the events. They all wanted to make it seem as if it “wasn’t as bad as it looked.” Yes, they gave a “generic” condemnation of the incident, but imagine how nonstop their outcry would have been if a Democrat was president and the insurrectionist were Black? Sure, a few lives were lost, even that of police officers whom they are supposed to support and just a “little” physical damage to the Capitol which can be repaired, would not be lost on Trump supporters, right? Republicans wanted to get the trial over in a hurry and “put things” behind them by talking about “unity”. They could have had the trial while Trump was still president, but politics and love of party was too much for McConnell, Cruz, Graham, Hawley, Rubio, Paul and Kennedy. Not the rule of law and the Constitution. They will never be able to convince the majority of voters that the system was rigged to exonerate Trump after he was out of office. The arguments will go on for a while over if the trial was just. To many, if people who tried to over throw the government maintain that they did what they did because that was what Trump wanted, who would you believe. Trump may have been acquitted by a “trial”, but that doesn’t equate to him being innocence for his part in the insurrection. Trump wasn’t “lucky” to have escaped two impeachment trials, politics played the important role. More importantly, we have seen that if prosecutors go after Trump in other possible criminal proceedings, with the same vigor as in the fake university case, where he will have to testify or surrender information that he doesn’t want to, there may be a different outcome. He won’t have the Senate to save him. Remember, the world is watching. So is God.