Donald Trump, totally discredited coup leader.
There has never been a President more deserving of the distinction of having been impeached twice, or less deserving of the office he still occupies until either the Senate acts courageously to convict him or his term expires, than Donald Trump.
We are not safe with Donald Trump in the Presidency—it was true four years ago, and it is acutely, intensely, urgently true today. He has incited domestic terror, not only through his actions over the course of one day, but over four years. A week ago we saw the consequences of the President’s desperate attempts to cling to power and his emboldened supporters’ desperate attempts to cling to a system of supremacy where they are empowered–these remain ongoing threats.
The vote to impeach Donald Trump is one of moral clarity and governing imperative. I am glad that unlike the first House impeachment, today’s vote was bipartisan, but the reality is that it should not take four years and an armed insurrection against our Congress to know that Donald Trump has always been an existential danger and unfit threat–yet this party has enabled and championed him for years.
It’s true that there have to be accountability and consequences in order to move forward – for the President and for his enablers. But there also has to be admission of culpability from those enablers, and real steps toward contrition if we want to strive for the kind of unity being invoked in recent days.
Impeachment was a necessity. But it was the beginning, not the end, of the work to combat the forces that led to Trump’s rise and empowered his atrocities.
