I'm old enough to remember the people crowing that Nixon's impeachment hearings and subsequent quitting was evidence of the system working the way it was intended. That may have been true, but trump's trial and potential ouster wouldn't be a proof of the system's efficacy but of how, faced with a misbehaving and harmful leader, who should have been surrounded by people who could check the worst impulses of a candidate who had proved he was all impulse, the system allowed him to dismiss the adults in the room, bring in his sycophants, and allow his fantasies of making himself chief executive officer over not just a corporation but over a nation where real lives are affected, and now has to make the argument that only in his removal can the system be set back to factory settings. This should be easy, too, given his predilection to act out in public. But he's shown to have surrounded himself with such toadying miscreants willing to excuse and ignore all the harm he does that there's a genuine fear not only could he receive exoneration from them, but they could actually enable his reelection.
Despite all the harm and abuse he and his family, both blood and behavioral, have done the American people and the people relying on them, I don't want him impeached. I want an end to his reign more in keeping with it. I want him, his family, and his upper administration sneaking onto Air Force One at midnight with the clothes on their backs, clutching loot grabbed from White House shelves in last-minute desperation, heading to permanent exile in Moscow, knowing their alternative is arrest and the Hague, living out the ends of their lives like Marcos, Duvalier, Pahlevi, in constant fear one of those toadies will gladly give them up to curry favor with the new administration. They have made this country a banana republic, let them endure the poetic endings of those rulers.
They can have Air Force One.
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