Loading Guns on Fifth Avenue

Perhaps you remember when our totally innocent and not at all corrupt president boasted that he could murder people in the street and not lose any support?

Yeah, good times.

In any case, murdering the country has been a slightly tougher sell for the guy.

Recently, many Trump loyalists went on television to quixotically defend the president’s shenanigans with Ukraine, and as we all know, “their efforts did not go well and produced a number of cringe-worthy moments.”

Indeed, it’s difficult to spin an open-and-shut case of pressuring a foreign government to interfere in American elections, and our most esteemed Republicans appear to be “woefully unprepared to defend a president whose conduct is becoming increasingly hard to justify.”

In fact, one hot rumor holds that “if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump.”

By the way, that’s over half the GOP representation in the Senate and, assuming that every Democrat would vote for conviction, far more than is needed to remove the president from office.

But of course, any impeachment vote — if and when it happens — will not be in secret. It will be a very public, very messy spectacle.

And in those circumstances, those 30 anonymous senators will gulp and say, “not guilty,” for fear of offending their psychotic overlord.

Imagine such a scenario, and then realize that it is far worse than mere cowardice. It is treachery. After all, these senators are saying, “Yeah, I know that the president has committed grotesque crimes against the Constitution and has unleashed lasting devastation upon America, but I really, really don’t want to lose my cushy job.”

And that is clearly jamming personal ambitions ahead of the nation’s interest, which is a sickening dereliction of duty from people who constantly boast about how patriotic they are.

There has been much talk — justified talk — that Republicans regularly put party ahead of country. But the truth is that they put their individual needs ahead of even their party’s future viability, leaving the country a distant third priority, at best.

But they are not the only ones who live in fear of offending a man who flies into a rage if, for example, he’s asked to answer basic questions about his lunatic behavior.

No, the Log Cabin Republicans, the country’s best-known conservative LGBTQ organization, recently endorsed the president’s 2020 reelection bid. It’s interesting that the group “declined to endorse then-candidate Trump in 2016,” back when they thought they had a choice.

But now, the Log Cabin Republicans have fallen into line, displaying “a certain level of perverse chutzpah, or a certain level of confidence in your gaslighting abilities, to claim that President Trump is good for LGBTQ people.”

The Log Cabin Republicans suddenly got into groveling because Trump’s hardcore supporters are the real power in the GOP. And they will not be dissuaded, even if the administration’s disastrous policies nail them personally.

For example, my home state of Wisconsin continues to top the nation in family farm bankruptcies. No one seriously disputes that Trump’s idiotic trade war is “contributing to their economic hardships.”

So those Wisconsin farmers must be mad as hell at the president— right?

Well, these rural soon-to-be paupers are “appear to be sticking by Trump — not just the Republican they largely supported in the 2016 election, but the trade warrior who has put their industries in China’s sights.”

Many of these farmers don’t blame Trump for destroying their livelihoods. Instead, they aim their ire at unknown, nameless “Washington bureaucrats,” (always an easy target). And in an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance, some farmers will continue to vote for oligarchs because they are “not in favor of any kind of socialism,” even while lining up to receive their government-funded bailout packages.

But don’t worry, because most of the $8.4 billion of Trump's farm bailouts has gone to the richest farmers, the top 10% of all recipients. Yes, even farmers have an elitist class that grabs most of the cash from everyone else, so I guess they really are like the rest of us.

As a final reminder of just how fervently, how obsessively Trump’s base clings to his aura, please keep in mind that about 40% of Republicans don’t even think the president mentioned Joe Biden’s name on that phone call with the Ukrainian president. Never mind arguing whether or not Trump pressured anyone or jeopardized American foreign policy or committed impeachable offenses. Four out of ten Republicans deny that the president even said Biden’s name, which is of course, an undisputed fact, and the most innocuous aspect of this whole sordid fiasco.

So how are you going to convince this crowd that their messiah did anything the slightest bit wrong?

Now, there is a sliver of optimism in this depressing compendium of right-wing fanaticism. Many political experts believe that “the good news for Democrats is that for every argument that pushing ahead on impeachment will hurt them, there is another that it won’t hurt much and may even help.”

And for the first time, “a plurality of Americans now support impeaching Trump and removing him from office.” Furthermore, support for impeachment is only growing with each passing day.

So maybe, possibly, in some distant future, one or two GOP senators will meekly stand up and say this administration is just the slightest bit shady.

But they probably won’t.