It’s deja vu all over again
Imagine that Richard Nixon had been impeached. Imagine his Senate trial ended in acquittal. Then imagine Nixon ordering his Plumbers to break in and bug the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate hotel all over again. Now imagine Donald Trump.
Now that Donald Trump has been impeached for attempting to blackmail (yes, “blackmail,” not “bribe”) a foreign government into announcing an investigation (not actually doing an investigation) into a discredited conspiracy theory involving Vice President Joe Biden’s son and Burisma, now that he’s been acquitted in a disgraceful, sham trial, he’s going ahead and doing it anyway. He’s once again promoting this most thoroughly debunked, idiotic conspiracy theory all over again. Susan Collins to the contrary, Donald Trump has learned absolutely nothing.
But where on earth did anyone ever get the idea that he ever would? This is a man who, the day after the Mueller investigation was over, was on the phone with the Ukrainian President trying to yet again involve a foreign government in helping him win an election, the very same thing that triggered the Mueller probe in the first place.
Who remembers, in the run up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “national emergency” that caused Trump to send troops to America’s border with Mexico to stop the “caravans of criminals” from crossing on to American soil? The minute the election was over the troops were withdrawn and all talk of the “national emergency” evaporated. It was Trump using fear and taxpayer money to influence the election, and it largely failed.
Well now he’s doing it again, and by doing so, he and his enablers are registering their contempt for the intelligence of the American voter while using taxpayer dollars to continue this sham investigation into Joe Biden. Welcome to the new Benghazi, and it will continue to absorb the feigned outrage of Republicans and the cynical attention of William Barr’s corrupt Department of Justice — which is once again receiving information from Rudy Giuliani who is even now in Ukraine — until the very second Joe Biden drops out of the race, or someone else gets the Democratic nomination. Then, and only then, it will be dropped like the proverbial hot potato and never investigated again.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.