If that whiny sound emanating from so many elected Republican officials sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same high-pitched squeal a balloon emits when you carefully let its air out between your compressed fingers. Republicans have been living in that balloon for so long, they pretty much forgot the fact that the balloon existed in the first place.
Balloons are different than bubbles. You can live in a bubble and not really know you’re in it. When you’re in a balloon, though, you know damn well where you are. You just get used to breathing the same air over and over again until it seems normal.
So here’s a little wake-up call for those former balloon dwellers. Donald Trump is, was, and for the better part of his life always has been, a criminal. The fact that Republicans willingly put him into high office doesn’t make him any less of a criminal. The funny thing is — they knew he was a criminal from the start. They just didn’t care.
For Christ’s sake, this is the guy who bilked young people out of their hard-earned savings with his fake “university.” The same guy who bankrupted his casinos like clockwork and stiffed contractors and other folks he hired as a point of pride. Who grossly inflated his real estate holdings and refused to turn over his taxes. Who routinely sexually assaulted and harassed women. And that was all before Republicans thought it was a great idea to make him president, whereupon he proceeded to turn the Emoluments Clause into a sick joke.
We all know what he did afterwards. He, his cronies and his repulsive family bent over backwards to engage the assistance of the bloodthirsty dictator now waging an unprovoked war against Ukraine. Then he tried to extort Ukraine itself by trying to hold up weapons shipments until Ukraine’s president concocted a phony story smearing Joe Biden’s son. When Joe Biden then crushed him in the general election he summoned America’s very worst specimens to start a riot in an effort to overturn that election’s result. His excuse (for all the others in his balloon) was a phony assertion of “fraud,” which must have been a neat trick since the so-called “fraud” applied only to him, and not to everyone else who shared a space on the same optically-scanned ballot.
In short, this guy is a seasoned criminal, with a mindset to match, through and through. His relatives know it, his former flunkies and button men know it. And the truth is, Republicans know it too. They knew it from the very moment they inflicted him on the rest of us.
I don’t know what’s in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s files about this guy’s dealings, but I have a strong hunch Garland wouldn’t take the unprecedented step of raiding the Florida house of a former president unless something considerably more serious than a breach in archival practices was going on. Based on Trump’s track record with fomenting sedition and fellating foreign dictators I’d be surprised if it wasn’t outright treachery. I guess we’ll find that out soon enough.
But in the meantime, spare us the phony outrage and the “government overreach” bullshit. Spare us the “third-world country” garbage. Is this really how you raise your children, to turn a blind eye to the legal process? To scam others for pleasure, to lie, cheat and steal? To sell out their country? Is that what you’re really all about? At long last, I guess, you really had no sense of decency.
You Republicans have had it really good in that balloon. You could keep getting yourselves elected by just by pretending this guy wasn’t a walking nightmare of racism, cruelty, immorality, and greed. In fact you got so used to breathing his air in that balloon, you became just like him. Parroting the Big Lie, all while nuzzling up to the trough. Winking at obvious treachery. Can you imagine — even for a second — what your reaction would have been had Barack Obama demonstrated even the tiniest fraction of Donald Trump’s venality? You would have been calling for his head on a platter, and probably every other Democrats’ as well.
No, the reason you can’t imagine that is because it would never happen. Because while you’ve been in that balloon, breathing in each others’ air, day after day, year after year, the rest of us have been outside, just shaking our heads in disbelief at the fact that you treated a thoroughly rotten human being like some sort of deity, just because he hated on the same people you hate. That’s really kind of sick, but, hey, it’s your balloon.
Please, though, don’t give us the theatrical “surprised” or “shocked” routine. You’re not surprised or shocked. You knew what this guy was about when you signed on. Spare us the haughty, holier-than-thou crap about how it’s a “dark day for the rule of law.” You’ve shown us all through your behavior and slavish sycophancy that you really don’t give a damn about “law.” That ship sailed a long, long time ago.
Yes, Republicans are making an awful noise right now. But when you get right down to it, it’s all just the same hot air they’ve been breathing for the last five years.