Two pieces from the National Review website presented some ideas
in ways that I agreed with. That is, they
distilled what I had been thinking a bit chaotically into statements I wish I
had made.
One was “The Impeachment Train” by Yuval Levin that can be
found here:
This seems to explain something I’ve been wondering about:
But in the laying out of both the case against Trump and the
case in his defense you find the pattern that has repeated in these last few
years by which serious people end up backing themselves into conspiracy
theories because they want the world to make sense. The incoherent jumble of
Trump’s own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American
presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn’t hang together.
When we each try to explain it to ourselves and others, we naturally incline to
fill in blanks and sketch connections that might make it all cohere, and so
we end up painting perverse conspiracies, most of which are surely false.
We can already see that happening in this case, as we all try to reason our way
through an avalanche of unfamiliar figures and preposterous events and end up
acting like we’ve always had strong views about how many people listen to
presidential phone calls and the relative merits of different Ukrainian state
prosecutors. [Emphasis added]
Trump is his own reality distortion field and this warps all
of us into trying to adjust. I’ve felt
that for a long time but hadn’t the words to describe it.
Levin also points out this:
My rule of thumb for how to think about the endless chain of
outrages and counter-outrages that compose the Trump era is that every scandal
will proceed in whatever way is maximally damaging to public confidence in our
core institutions.
The farther down this road we go the likelier it is that
something will fracture the Republic irreparably. I hope I’m wrong and I don’t know what our
Reichstag Fire might turn out to be, but I have trouble seeing us on a path to
sunlit uplands. Nor do I know what
individual course to take except to support what laws and institutions I can by
not cutting corners, by being nice to my neighbors and co-workers, praying,
fasting and keeping a civil tongue. And
don’t be stampeded and don’t panic.
In “Prince Don” by Kevin D. Williamson at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/donald-trump-personal-flaws-led-him-here/
I found another summation of what I’ve been thinking:
And so that leaves at
least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult
to keep under the same hat:
1) I am glad that Hillary
Rodham Clinton is not the president;
2) Based on what we know
right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;
3) I do not want to see
Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;
4) Donald Trump cannot be
gone soon enough.
In data processing terms, this leaves me thrashing: whipping
between logical paths that are mutually exclusive.
I am beginning to wonder, though, if the best long term
course might be for the impeachment process to remove Trump from office in early
2020, leaving Mike Pence to stabilize things and present a more temperate,
constitutional alternative to whatever shrieking progressive the Democrats
nominate.
