The other evening, when the air quality had become too poor to go
outside because my state was burning, sitting in a window facing another
of those apocalyptic red suns going down we’d gotten used to here, on
the week that the president unleashed more coal on the world and thus
more of the climate change driving the trouble that afflicted oceans and
upper atmospheres and, while the wildfires burned the lungs of
asthmatic children, I turned again to the chaos and destruction
emanating from the White House.
The commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another
crime, but if they keep them coming, it’s hard to keep your eye on any
one or keep track of them all, or so it seemed on that day last week
when the president had tweeted out some white supremacist bullshit
about South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people
from the fact that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named
him as a coconspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist
dogwhistles and shouts he’d broadcast while some people waited for
evidence that he had said the n-word as though his constant insults to
black people from Maxine Waters to LeBron James to Congressman and civil
rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on Latinos and immigrants and
voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day that the White
House had, with a tweet,
turned the murder of a young white woman into an attack on undocumented
immigrants even though the alleged murderer’s immigration status was
unclear and there had been a more recent and more spectacular murder by a
native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant wife and
daughters and dumped the little girls’ bodies in oil tanks belonging to
his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment
of that murderer’s category, because collective punishment is never for
straight white men (and should not be for anybody).
But you couldn’t stay focused on the racism alone with the many kinds
of destruction which also, at times, felt like a distraction from the
crimes, and that the law was getting closer to the crimes was clear, as
was the president’s fear, for he had put out another of his all-caps
tweet at 1am the night before
about collusion and witch-hunts, those constant refrains of his,
because his lies were the only transparent thing about his
administration.
He was a man who was forever lying and whose lies could not help but
point toward the truth he was anxious about trying to cover up,
incapable of leaving alone, like a murderer returning to the crime
scene, like a dog returning to its vomit, like an elephant in the room,
stomping and roaring (and I often thought of him as being something
like a bull elephant that state of enraged excitement called musth, with
his staff trying to herd him away from his most destructive impulses
while fearing getting trampled, for the news was forever full of stories
of their attempts to gingerly dissuade, to nudge away, to redirect, to
correct, and of all the ways they worked around him, and the fact that
he is ignorant, incompetent, and often out of touch with what is legal
and eager to violate the law, a state that would disqualify any other
office holder, and even his statement after the Cohen verdict, that “I
have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff.
It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal,” was not only
the language of gangsters—“Trump goes full Gotti” Vanity Fair
put it—but oblivious about why presidents shouldn’t talk like gansters
about opposition to cooperation with the federal government, though that
remark too had no obvious repercussion). ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-why-the-president-must-be-impeached/
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