The U.S. Senate has acquitted Donald Trump of conspiracy to insurrection. The case for convicting him was clear beyond all doubt. Trump’s Great Election Lie, propagated over many months, and his actions on Jan. 6 were the greatest betrayal of the presidential oath in our nation’s history.
Now Trump has slipped conviction because of 43 Republicans who chose expediency or worse. So where do we go from here with Trump no doubt emboldened? When comes the next attack? Will our Capitol remain forever ringed by soldiers and barbed wire?
We need to free our nation from the cancer that is Trump, from all that his most ardent followers stand for: white supremacy, America alone, environmental degradation, hatred toward the immigrant, Jew, and Black, toward those who have a different sexual orientation.
A lifelong Democrat, I long to see the Republican Party reject the radical right – the traitors Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – and the schemers Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, their fingers in the air. They must expel the tyrant Trump and the mob he sent to loot, to kill, to overthrow our government.
In 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that mob violence would lead to tyranny: “whenever the vicious portion of (our) population … hang and burn persons … with impunity, depend on it, this government cannot last.”
There can never be impunity for the mob that stormed our Capitol, nor for those who incited them: Trump, Cruz, and Hawley. We must prosecute and convict them. They’re domestic enemies in our midst.