Mr. Write's Page

The malignant influence of Donald Trump is growing. Metastasizing. We need to excise it.

Most people acknowledge that Donald Trump is a deplorable, disgraceful, awful human being. He is a shallow, petty, vulgar, vindictive man who has no skills of a positive nature.

He is not remotely qualified to be President and merely is winging it. For policy guidance, he watches Fox News, or asks his sycophants, always weighing how the issue would benefit him personally.

In front of a microphone, he is given to weaving wild, stream-of-consciousness tapestries of lies and exaggerations — the diatribes of a man who fancies himself to be suave and clever. The sheer madness of the Trump presidency is accelerating.

If he were not President, none of that would matter. We would be free to tune him out as just an obnoxious gasbag. Instead, his lack of character and qualifications affects us all.

Trump is a national embarrassment. To most of the rest of the world, he is a laughable clown, best avoided, but usually easy to manipulate.

Worse, his loyalties are not with this country. Owing to his long-time financial ties to Putin and the oligarchs, he is indebted to the Russians, literally and figuratively.

He also toadies-up shamelessly to the Saudis, who murdered and dismembered a journalist, because, as Trump admits without qualm, they are good customers.

Benedict Arnold had more class.

As for the Trump supporters, who are out there in disturbing numbers, they fall roughly into five groups:

— Cynical conservative politicians, from national to local level, who are beneath contempt with virtually no exceptions.

— People mentally flawed owing to nature, and whose reasoning abilities thus are out of whack.

— People mentally flawed owing to Fox News and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine, and whose reasoning abilities thus are out of whack.

— People with some degree of a persecution complex, who feel discriminated against and disrespected, and who applaud the fact that Trump can so easily infuriate the liberals.

— People who are nominally rational, but have some kind of grievance that they believe justifies supporting Trump as a protest. Maybe they are irritated by the bureaucracy, or coastal elites, or Hispanic day laborers waiting for jobs at Home Depot. (Hint: no grievance justifies supporting Trump.)

In general, except for the politicians, these are not bad people. They are damaged people.

But they have done genuine harm to the country. Integrity and honor are not in their makeup.

Nor are they patriots, as they like to claim. History will remember the conservatives of our time as misguided enablers. They deserve both scorn and pity.

But forget about the Republicans. They are easy to understand and unlikely to change. The question is, how do the rest of us address the problem of having a dangerous nut job, an erratic loose cannon, as President?

The question from Day One has been whether to impeach or wait for 2020 and hope to vote Trump out of office.

Some Democrats say we should have impeached him long ago, and they want to start the proceedings without further delay.

Others believe impeachment is futile because the Republican Senate would never convict. They believe pursuing impeachment would only inflame the Trump voters, and the Democrats risk losing their majority in the House.

You also hear that the Democrats diddled around too long, waiting for Robert Mueller to strengthen the case against Trump, and we have run out of time for an impeachment procedure. Our only option, then, is to rally the faithful and eject him from office in 2020.

For two years, I have vacillated on this subject, just as I have favored first one Democratic presidential candidate, then another, then another.

Well, I haven’t settled on a candidate yet, but I reached a conclusion on how I think we should deal with Trump. I believe the House Democrats should move forward immediately with formal impeachment.

Maybe the process will go nowhere. Even if Articles of Impeachment pass the House, they easily could die in the Senate.

Maybe it will, indeed, outrage the conservatives, and the Democrats will lose control of the House.

Maybe so.

But no one ever deserved to be ejected from office more than this President at this moment.

And further, more is at stake than simply getting rid of Trump. We owe it to future generations to stand up for fundamental principles established by the Constitution.

Too much has happened during Trump’s presidency that is unprecedented and dangerous. I could give you a laundry list of reasons why he deserves to be booted from office, but to spare us both, I’ll only mention two easy ones.

First, blocking the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, when we know the Russians helped Trump win, is naked obstruction of justice. Prima facie grounds for impeachment.

And second, refusing to respond to lawful congressional subpoenas treats Congress as subordinate to the Executive Branch. That can’t be allowed to stand.

The Constitution created three co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial. As a safeguard, it designed them so that each branch has the ability to limit the powers of the other two.

The Constitution also provides impeachment as a mechanism to stop a President who exceeds his powers and places himself above the law.

Maybe impeaching Trump is politically risky. Maybe it will fail. Maybe it will help his chances of being reelected.

But consequences and politics be damned, we have an obligation to protect American democracy from this malignancy.

History will remember Trump as a self-serving, amoral crook. It will remember his administration as a den of vipers feeding at the public trough. It will remember his supporters as frightened, gullible stooges.

History will revile us, too, if we don’t hold Trump accountable.

The solution to the problem isn’t complicated. Just do the right thing.