An Unflattering Legacy

 OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL DECADES, the great lie,Trump's claim, echoed by millions, that the election was stolen from him, will be prominently featured in American history survey textbooks, and read by generations of secondary public school students, maybe in amazement, of the strangeness of the event. We hope that this behavior does not become the norm, and remains forever an aberration.That, plus the two impeachments and the insurrection will be the lasing legacy of the Trump administration, for their bizarre manifestation, all because of a single mentally unbalanced, corrupt president. Certainly, not a legacy any former president would want, nor one that Trump is likely to acknowledge or appreciate. Whether or not Trump is convicted by the Senate, which he will almost certainly not be, his name will live in infamy, to quote FDR, beginning immediately, as the case is made, the facts laid out, that the insurrection was no random event, was was carefully planned by Trump, premeditated, orchestrated over a period of weeks and months. The case is filled with nefarious activity; constant repeating by Trump of his bogus claim that the election was stolen, a claim he began making before the election was over, his calls for people to come to Washington on January sixth, his refusal to call out the national guard; the proof of treason is overwhelming. The treason will be proven, but there will be no conviction. republicans will offer the lame argument that his incitement to insurrection was only "figurative talk", just like his profane, obscene Access Hollywood talk was  only "locker room talk". At this point, Trump's supporters and enablers will become accessories to crime and treason. Whether Trump or his many supporters were the more reprehensible will be discussed. Hitler was elected by seventeen million Germans, but history tends to focus on him rather than his followers, and the same will likely be true of Trump. It will be recalled that seventy percent of the Republican party believed, long after the fact, that the election was in fact stolen, and that thirty five percent of Republicans believed, after the fact, that the storming of the Capitol building was a good idea, and that the only unfortunate aspect was that it did not succeed in overthrowing the government.History will mention all that. These are the people of whom we are rightfully ashamed, and who should be ashamed of themselves, but will probably never be. They will always embrace their own lies and violence, just as Hitler's followers, many of them, continued to embrace Hitler's evil long after Hitler's death. The sad thing is that these people all know better.