MAGA man

During the Watergate summer, fifty years ago, I was transfixed by the courtroom drama that went on, day after day. I was a grad student at Arizona State University, taking summer classes, not seminars but ordinary classes, to compensate for what the English department marked as my undergrad deficiencies.

TVs were rolled into the hallways between classrooms in the English department. Whenever classes went into a break, the hallways would fill with kids watching every minute, waiting for the blade to fall. When I'd leave campus, I'd listen on the car radio. When I'd get back to our little apartment, I'd put on TV, first thing.

Last night I watched, stem to stern, what once purported to be the last of the January 6 Committee hearings. I hadn't watched any of them before, even though I think it's fair to say that my distaste for Donald E. Trump is even greater than the hate--let's call it that, I confess--I held for Richard M. Nixon.

Even though nothing would suit me more than to put the Orange man behind bars for what he's done and what he didn't do, I didn't take the time to watch, in part, because it seemed to me the man was already guilty of whatever it was the Jan 6 committee would dig up and dish out. The only mystery in this case is how on earth Trump gets by with so much of what he's done. Remember that phone call to Georgia? 

This morning's New York Times Magazine's feature attempts to explain how on earth a crooked New York grifter altered American Democracy, specifically how he retooled the entire Republican party to the tune of "Stop the Steal," when clearly he was the crook doing grand larceny. Ex-President Trump may well ride off into a Florida sunset--his adoration is fading--but the MAGA movement, a hybrid religion really, is going strong. A whole array of MAGAs are poised to take control of all kinds of things, including elections in a bevy of states. They win, Trump wins.

Thus, the Republic is in danger, or so the opposition argues--and I agree.

Trump lied. How's that for understatement?

Trump is the great MAGA potentate of lies. Trump wouldn't know the truth if it bit off his nose. The sad, reprehensible truth is, right now, watching Fox and Friends in his boxers in Mar-a-lago, Trump believes, righteously, that he won the 2020 election "in a landslide," as he can't help saying. He's not lying if he believes it himself, right? 

What last night's prime-time Jan 6 committee established clearly is that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, that Donald E. Trump would not act when just about everyone him told him in no uncertain terms that what was happening on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue had become an insurrection, would lead to the deaths of capital police, struck fear in the hearts of every last senator and representative, and, in fact, threatened the life of his own VP, who finally took it into his own hands to call in the troops and quell the riot when the Donald absolutely would not.

How anyone can believe him is beyond me.

Still, whatever the Department of Justice does with what the Jan 6 committee has so plainly and convincingly established, what Trump began--the MAGA movement--will remain. As the Times essay says this morning, "History, faith, crime, retribution: These are the rudiments of a new strain of Republican politics, shaped by the last year of Trump’s presidency — the second impeachment trial, the coronavirus pandemic, the campaign — but destined to extend far beyond it."

It's not over. Not by a long shot.