Four Years Ago, He Led Us Into the Darkness
The nation recovered and healed itself…wait!
For 187 minutes, Trump gleefully watched as thousands of misinformed traitors proved to the world just how far America had sunk in the era of Internet 2.0 and Fox News. The culmination of 40 years of Reaganism, with its inherent racism and focus on making the rich richer and the rest of us participants in a massive scrum for the scraps tossed under the table, led us to January 6th, 2020.
For 187 minutes, Trump rejected calls to demand the rabid losers stand down, drank Coke after Coke, and giggled in a mist of orange fart dust. When he finally called for them to go home, he called the criminals patriots and told them how much he loved them. They all had one quality that made them worthy of his love: They adored him. Trump would be tried by a House Select Committee led by a Republican — one of two brave enough to protect the U.S. Constitution — and disgraced by only the facts of that day, he would wallow in self-inflicted misery, lost among boxes of stolen, national secrets privy only to the eyes of a president, at his Florida hideaway.
He wallowed, and the rest of us took a deep breath and reveled in how nice it was to be in a semi-post-Trump world. “Semi,” however, proved not to be enough. The lifeline thrown to him by virtually every Republican member of Congress and SCOTUS — and the painfully slow work of the attorney general — meant that we wouldn’t turn THAT corner. You know, the one where finally, untethered from the sickness, hate, and ignorance of Trump, America would begin to heal and move forward. We would accept that January 6th was not a “love fest” but a dark day in our nation’s history.
However, the corner was too big, and turning it proved harder than we could have imagined. Four years between elections is not a lot of time to re-educate and rehabilitate people. The right-wing wave of misinformation and the effort by everyone to milk the Trump phenomenon for every click and ad dollar they could just wouldn’t let Trump fade into the dark.
In two weeks, Donald Trump, the criminal, the felon, the abuser of women, and the close friend and fellow partier of Jeffrey Epstein — a pedophile — will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. The scum of January will be pardoned, and in a tip of the hat to Adolf Hitler, January 6th will eventually be declared some perverse national holiday by Trump.(Hitler made November 8th and 9th holidays in Nazi Germany. It was during those two days the Bavarian authorities put down his first rebellion.)
The attack on the Capitol led to several deaths. More than 850 people have been charged with taking part in the riot, with more than 325 guilty pleas so far.
Near the end of the hearing, the committee showed outtakes of a video Trump made on Jan. 7 addressing what he called “the heinous attack.” But he refused to say in the speech that the election was over.
Trump eventually left Washington on Jan. 20 rather than attend Biden’s inauguration that day.
Asked for his assessment of the riot, Cipollone said in the testimony shown on Thursday that it could not be justified in any way. “It was wrong and it was tragic and it was a terrible day for this country (Trump Watched Janaury 6th).”
Trump watched January 6th like the rest of us throughout the world. Only where most of us were stricken by the horror of the day, Trump was as giddy as a crack-head with a freshly-packed pipe.
This was Trump’s last walk from Marine One to the plane that was supposed to have taken him forever from our lives.
One week after Trump left Washington, Kevin McCarthy was back at the table working to mend fences with Trump. He wanted to bring Trump back into the fold — and he did. Despite the lunch at Mar a Lago, McCarthy was stuck with a thousand-dollar lunch bill. Depressed as he was, the grifter in Trump never loses his energy.
Today, January 6th, 2025, the nation’s capital prepares for the inauguration of the raping felon.
As a lifelong optimist who has spent his life rebuilding after many — many — setbacks, this is one of those times when my optimism is waning.