From the article:
“ In the Senate, Mr. Trump is being judged by a jury of his lackeys. The trial is a loyalty test for Republicans, who will decide whether to take their criminal President and crown him criminal king. It is a test of whether they will obey their own abuser: According to CBS, GOP Senators were allegedly warned that those who voted against Mr. Trump will have their heads “on a pike." The choice for Republicans has always been to pledge fealty to the President or leave; a record number of Republican elected officials have retired since Mr. Trump took office.
For Democrats, the trial is a battle against the formalization of the dictatorship to which Mr. Trump has always aspired, and it’s one they wage too late. As I have warned in these pages for years, an autocrat must be stopped early or he will rewrite the law so that he is no longer breaking it. Many officials had the job of holding Mr. Trump accountable – James Comey, Robert Mueller, the Republicans, the Democrats and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who sits in the trial like window dressing for the defenestration for democracy – and they have failed to act with the urgency and bravery required. The President does not want to be punished but he loves to get caught. He flaunts every crime he gets away with because it showcases the degradation of law, which ironically was furthered by his opponents’ blind faith in it.
Last week the Senate debated as to whether the trial would be allowed witnesses. This request had an element of saviour syndrome – the delusion that one person, such as the notorious warmonger John Bolton, would swoop in and set the U.S. straight – but it was also an attempt by the Democrats to honour legal precedent. Since Mr. Trump and his backers’ aim is to destroy legal precedent, thus paving the way for one-party autocratic rule, the GOP voted against it.
But the trial still had witnesses.
We, the people, are the witnesses. We witness crimes carried out in plain sight by this government every day. We witness them on TV and we witness them in our daily lives, as ordinary citizens suffer from Mr. Trump’s ceaseless corruption. We are so tired of being witnesses that we feel like a captive audience. But it is important to remain a witness in a time of autocratic consolidation.”
So, I say, keep hope alive. We, the people, are the witness. And more of us see the truth than are blinded by the deceptive smoke and mirrors. Time will tell.