I have a huge amount of respect for Josh Marshall, but I have a bit of trouble with his post this morning entitled We know Trump is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting it. Josh’s argument on guilt is ironclad, a lot of it summed up in this Doonesbury comic from some time back:
But I’d submit that like Mark Slackmeyer (for the Doonesbury illiterate, he’s the character in the cartoon), we non-brain dead, non Fox watching silent majority (well, actually, not so silent, thanks be to…ummm…I know! Our excellent educational system.) have known since the evidence came out early in his presidency that he was guilty, for precisely the reasons Mark and Josh explore. Not only have we known, we’ve had no trouble admitting it.
I think I speak for a large slice of that majority when I say I’ve long since put that question aside, and am struggling with far more existential questions related to the fact that we have a criminal in the White House.
The question is whether our system can expel the poison that is Trump (and, by extension, the Republican Party’s present incarnation), and, in the likely event that it does not, whether our representative democracy can survive as even a shadow of its better self.
The majority of the people in this country are more or less alive to the danger. However, the system was rigged from the start, and has become ever more rigged, to enable the minority to control the public policy of this nation. States with a sliver of the nation’s population control the Senate; the House has been gerrymandered to further empower that sliver; and the courts, which have and will even more in the future enabled voter suppression and gerrymandering, enhancing the power of that sliver still more, have been stacked by recent presidents (Bush and Trump) who came to power against the will of the majority, enabled by the votes of Senators that represent the aforementioned sliver.
We know he’s guilty. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! We just can’t quite believe anything will be done about it, and we fear for the future of our children and their children.
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