The GOP Confirms Its Identity: Power At Any Cost.

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Trump’s takeover of the Republican party was already completed. But we can say that this was the week that Trump was confirmed as bulletproof. No crime can bring him down while he is in office. So he will continue to commit crimes. And those crimes will include selling out US foreign policy to win Trump advantages in the upcoming election. Our democracy is dead.

It also simply needs to be said that this impeachment and Senate trial of Donald J. Trump has been a terrifying chapter in our nation’s history. Terrifying because multiple branches and departments have aided Trump’s crimes. He had a lot of help hiding them and then excusing them after he was caught. This ordeal was also terrifying because of the on-record defenses of Trump’s crimes. Those defenses make it impossible to impeach a president ever again, and make the office more powerful than ever before. This trial has reduced the Senate to a broken chamber - possibly until the nation no longer exists. The Senate has lasted decades being called “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” But as long as C-SPAN has existed, it has been shown to be a mainly empty private club of millionaires who do very little debate. It did have greats. It had Robert C. Byrd, Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone. They are long gone.

The American experiment is over. The Republic is dead. And all because the Republicans would rather destroy it than share it with Democrats and the brown people and young women who generally vote Democratic.

And life for those Americans, who represent the majority of voters, is not going to get any better. For starters, I expect Roe to be overturned in June. For another, we still have children in prison camps on our southern border. And now Trump is going to seek revenge over many people, both elected and not, and do it openly.

Trump's manner may be embarrassing to a shrinking number of mainstream Republicans, but he's governing precisely as they would like. He's appointing right-wing judges, deregulation of businesses, and cutting taxes for corporations and the rich. If the price they need to pay for such favors is tolerating his open and boorish racism and cruelty, so be it. They also get a new dose of voter suppression at the state level, often upheld by his stacked Federal circuit courts.

We know Trump well. And we know Republican politicians. Republican politicians are craven cowards. They're classic bullies, savaging the poor and weak and defenseless, but quaking with fear when confronted by Trump. The Donald, as it's been said, is a weak man's idea of a tough guy But to his Republican sycophants, Captain Bone Spurs is a combination of Attila the Hun and Rocky Marciano. He must never be criticized in public, never crossed, never angered, because his wrath is the equivalent of a political death sentence. His cult-like following will not forgive the failure to worship the dear leader.

About those children in cages. This is why the right reacted with such vehemence to Clinton's book, It Takes a Village (1996). To them, children are the property and responsibility of the family, preferably a white,Christian, patriarchal family, of course. Abortion is opposed by these people, because women must be held responsible for their pregnancy, and cannot be allowed to decide for themselves whether to carry a child to term. What happens to the child after his birth is not the government's business, but before his birth, the full police power of the state must be employed to enforce the woman's responsibility to give birth. It helps explain the current and insane policy of Alabama, which briefly indicted a black woman for manslaughter. This pregnant woman was shot five times in the abdomen, leading to the death of her fetus. According to the police, the shooting victim started the confrontation, so the victim was arrested and held responsible for the death of the fetus. And, because the shooter claimed she was standing her ground, she walked free, while her seriously sounded antagonist sat in jail. Meanwhile today, also in Alabama, a white woman was denied her right to claim that she used the ‘stand your ground’ statute when she killed her rapist, who was very high on methamphetamines, and was viciously attacking her brother who had just arrived to help.

This is the United States in 2020. Run by a criminal strongman who uses his office as source of business revenue, our justice department as his legal cleanup crew, and the judiciary branch as his most powerful enabler. He is bulletproof, and is not subject to any checks and balances for at least 11 more months.