He Won’t Let Us Walk Away
Wouldn’t you like to see that last of this face?
Here we are.
Six months from the defeat of Donald Trump, and we can’t walk away from him. Why is that? After we got rid of the last awful, destructive administration (yep, it was George W.). We talked about him, but we moved on as quickly as we could. Bush helped by staying out of sight and not popping up to swing at every pitch thrown at the backstop.
Trump has no such problem. He issues opinion and edicts, scorn and ‘blistering’ takes on everything thrown his way, and always ties it to either; how great he was and how everyone sucks, or how the election was ‘stolen’ from him and everyone sucks.
Rinse, repeat.
But that’s just Trump himself. We may have Joe Biden in the White House, but we are still living in the sulfur ruins of TrumpWorld ™, which threatens at all times to ignite into wildfire proportions. This is why we can’t rid the national psychic of the man and his followers. He may not have social media anymore, but he still has the entirety of the GOP to push and scream his message. Like an parasite, Trump has hollowed out the host GOP and now controls the party, making them more than happy to keep advocating his lies, keep swinging spiked baseball bats at the legs of democracy, keep riding that wave of Trump grievance into power.
We can’t stop talking about Trump not because he won’t go away (and he just won’t) but because we have to. He’s the toddler that heads right for the china collection the minute you look away, the dog who will pee all over the living room if you don’t pay an ever-increasing amount of attention. Only this time, the living room is our democracy.
Look at Texas.
Texas has been descending into the fever swamps for years, but now they’re expediting it using Trump’s elections lies as an excuse. This past weekend, under a midnight deadline, the Texas house GOP was trying to ram though a particularly egregious voting ‘integrity’ bill. This was a bill that went into closed-door negotiations one size, and came out nearly double, with all manner of conspiratorial garbage shoved in. Like making it easier for a friendly judge to thrown out an election based on a ‘preponderance’ of the evidence of fraud, instead of actual evidence of fraud. Or limiting early voting to 1pm-9pm on Sundays. Or illegal to transport more than two non-family members to the polls. I wonder who that might be directed at?
Lots of crap like that. And they had the votes.
The Texas house Democrats (the minority, of course) though, after trying everything they could, just slowly, one-by-one, left the chamber. When the time came to vote on the bill, the Democrats were gone, denying the Republicans a quorum. The deadline passed, the bill died. For now. It’ll be back. But it’s still a victory.
The Democrats did two things here: they stopped a voter suppression bill and made headlines, and they took that ugly, racist and grotesque bill and dragged it into the sunlight for all to see. ‘This is what the Trumpublicans are doing! This is what we have to stop!’ and the Texas Democrats literally said “This is how we are fighting in Texas, why aren’t you fighting in Washington?”
They listened to Trump, just as the GOP is listening to Trump, but they acted to stop him. In DC, we have at least two Democrats who refuse to listen, who refuse to act and will likely continue to do so until it is too late. Joe Manchin, I think, has a stubborn if deluded sincerity to his insistence on a bipartisanship that hasn’t existed in decades, killed mostly by the grab for power by one party. The other, Kyrsten Sinema… Well, I have no idea what the hell Sinema thinks she’s doing. Arizona, her state, is a purple state where the GOP is screaming that it’s really dark, blood red if you only count the votes the right way. Maybe she thinks she’s keeping to the middle? Maybe she thinks she’s being a ‘maverick’ by acting like well, a jerk. She does admire John McCain she says, but playing cute games while the building is on fire is not the way to be a ‘maverick’, it’s the way to be a dead donkey.
And out of a job next election. If we still have elections by then.
No, we can’t look away from Trump and get on with our lives as much as we all yearn to do so, because he and his followers are still there, flicking matches into the pool of gas that is the country at the moment, trying to stay in power, or just to see what will happen if it all goes up at once.