Impeach

Missed this when it was made in August 2017.  It's pretty good.

Several weeks before Trump was inaugurated, America’s intelligence agencies reported that Russia had engaged in cyberoperations to help him win. In the months that followed, there was one staggering revelation after another about secret conversations between Trump’s circle and various figures linked to Russian intelligence.

At the same time, the new administration unleashed on the public a degrading cacophony of lies, of the sort many of us associate with authoritarian countries like Russia. The day after the new president was sworn in, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, stood in the White House briefing room and insisted that the inauguration crowd had been unprecedented in size. This was terrifying, despite the petty stupidity of the untruth, because Americans were not yet used to being told to believe government diktats over the clear evidence of their senses.

This quickly became our new normal. Once Republicans realized the power they could amass by collaborating in Trumpian mendacity, most of them gleefully abandoned any sense of epistemological solidarity with their fellow Americans. There’s a reason “gaslighting” has become one of the most overused terms of the Trump era. And perhaps the biggest lie of all was that Mueller’s investigation, rather than the events that precipitated it, was the real scandal, an attempt to frame Trump rather than an effort to get to the bottom of an assault on our democracy.

[...]

Numerous commentators have said that the report reads like a road map for impeachment, and in a remotely functional country that’s what it would be. Mueller makes it clear that because of the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, “we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” Instead, the evidence is laid out for congressional action, or even for prosecutors to indict after Trump leaves office.

The test for us now is how much evidence still matters.

  NYT

Or how susceptible to gaslighting we are.

Weeks before anyone else could read the report, [Trump's hand-picked Attorney General William Barr] tried to close the door on obstruction, implying falsely that Mueller meant to leave the decision to him. In a news conference on Thursday, Barr repeatedly said that Mueller had found no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller, however, never examined the case through the lens of “collusion,” which isn’t a term in criminal law: “In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion,’” the report says. Barr claimed that “evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.” The report is overstuffed with evidence of corrupt motives.

[...]

Republicans have already seized on Barr’s words — and on the lack of criminal charges in a document that was never going to contain criminal charges — to claim total vindication for Trump. The president’s manifest disloyalty to the country in trying to halt an investigation into a foreign attack on an American election is, to the right, of no account. Nor are the counterintelligence implications of Mueller’s findings, which aren’t part of the report. In the eyes of the president’s supporters, his campaign did not participate in the criminal conspiracy that helped elect him, so no more needs to be said.

But his campaign did participate. Not to a degree that would be likely to produce a criminal conviction - at least that the investigation discovered - but it did participate.

The reaction to the report shows that between the minority of Americans who support Trump and the majority who do not, there may no longer be even the possibility of a shared sense of reality or national purpose. Even as exemplary a figure as Mueller cannot change that.

Another reason to disregard the excuse of an impeachment hearing being divisive.

Compounding the problem, Republicans are willing to act unilaterally on their perception of reality, but Democrats are not. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, “Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.” The same logic underlies Republican threats to actualize fantasies about an attempted deep-state coup by opening an investigation into the Mueller investigation’s origins.

Most Democrats, conversely, have facts on their side, but not conviction. They are reluctant to begin an impeachment inquiry into Trump because majorities, in polls, don’t support it, and there is no Republican buy-in. Whether or not this is politically wise, failing to impeach would be a grave abdication. If you want people to believe that the misdeeds enumerated in the Mueller report are serious, you have to act like it. To not even try to impeach Trump is to collaborate in the Trumpian fiction that he has done nothing impeachable.

Amen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.