Political Irony

Will Wilkinson has written a devastatingly fantastic opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020“. It is short, to the point, and incredibly well written. I’m going to quote the first few paragraphs, but it gets even better after that. Go read it!

“I think the American people are going to have a chance to decide this at the ballot box in November 2020,” Beto O’Rourke said in March, neatly expressing prevailing Democratic opinion on the question of impeaching President Trump, “and perhaps that’s the best way for us to resolve these outstanding questions.”

This is no longer a tenable position. The president’s bungled bid to coerce Ukraine’s leader into helping the Trump 2020 re-election campaign smear a rival struck “decide it at the ballot box” off the menu of reasonable opinion forever. Mr. Trump’s brazen attempt to cheat his way into a second term stands so scandalously exposed that there can be no assurance of a fair election if he’s allowed to stay in office. Resolving the question of the president’s fitness at the ballot box isn’t really an option, much less the best option, when the question boils down to whether the ballot box will be stuffed.

Impeachment is therefore imperative, not only to protect the integrity of next year’s elections but to secure America’s continued democratic existence. If the House does its job, it will fall to Senate Republicans to reveal, in their decision to convict (or not), their preferred flavor of republic: constitutional or banana.

On a related note, I want to point out that if impeachment is going to succeed the Democrats are going to have to educate and inform the American public so that they know what is going on. As one pointed example, a new poll done by Monmouth shows that only 40% of Republicans believe that Donald Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. This is astounding considering that Trump publicly admitted that he did just that, and the transcript released by the White House quotes Trump doing it.

Republicans seem to have taken the phrase “Who are you going to believe, Trump or your own lying ears?” one step further. They don’t believe Trump himself when admits doing something.