The titillation surrounding the second impeachment of Donald Jennifer Trump is akin to the bloodthirsty animation accompanying a bullfight; namely, we know who wins in the end but not without the prospect of crowing about severe injury on both sides. The vindictive interest of the masses in the outcome is partially excused by the novelty of the citation in the history of the United States of America. The more compelling peculiarity in this instance is that the outcome will affect not only the combatants but also the spectators. America’s Grand Old Party (GOP) is on the precipice of more than cosmetic surgery.  Already certain of the Republicans have solidly distanced themselves from Trump. Their party colleagues are undoubtedly facing the same moment of truth, poised to fall back upon conventional identity or fall into the abyss of white supremacism that is called “Trumpism“.

The failed logic of those Republicans who mollify Trump’s behaviour behind the guise of preferred policy is reprehensible not only because it unjustifiably seeks to distance Republicanism from Trumpism but more importantly because it conveniently ignores the issue – which is Trump not Republican policy. Furthermore those opportunist Republicans who are out to preserve their employment without having to confront the elephant in the room have unwittingly characterized Trump (and by association, his base supporters) as mere puppets of the GOP. Not to mention their complete absence of morality as highlighted by repeated shameful and contradictory statements of avowal and disavowal.

The popular Republican argument that it is unconstitutional to impeach a president no longer in office is utter taradiddle! For one thing it offends logic thus to legitimize a repugnant sitting president if he has the courtesy to escape censure by his own act of adventitious retirement. To think otherwise is wholly to dilute the impeachment process.

The more offensive though equally questionable reasoning by the Republican majority is that Trump did not incite the malicious behaviour of white supremacists, Christian evangelicals, Q-Anon supporters and Confederate racists when overtaking the Capitol on January 6th last.  The Republicans prefer to limit their analysis of Trump’s motive to his crowd-pleasing inflammatory speech moments before the storming of the Capitol.  While such evidentiary limitation may by the most generous study equate only to “political rhetoric” it fails to include it in the broader abuse of Trump by having proclaimed for months before that he won the presidential election by a landslide in the face of rampant electoral fraud. This patently wrong assertion was routinely and unforgivably advanced by Trump and his acolytes with dramatic frequency. That Trump’s uneducated base so willingly followed the lead of the head bison over the cliff is indisputable. That the base is uneducated is nothing more unfavourable than a strict interpretation of the word. They clearly had no idea that Trump’s selfish assertion of lost victory was unsupported by a wealth of judicial pronouncements. It was an absence of thought which not long afterwards expanded to include another whacky congressional member Marjorie Whatever from Georgia – where the Republican elite were playing the same game of distancing themselves while submitting to the grovelling demanded by Trump.

The greater outrage of Trump’s behaviour is that it was Trump and his Republican menials who promoted the false assertion in the first place; and then the Republicans seek to distance themselves from the resulting violence by somehow defining they had no direct involvement. Proof once again that you cannot do indirectly what you cannot do directly; and, that mercenaries are mere staff with no requirement of leadership.

Knowing as we now do that many of the insurrectionists were in fact educated people, some of whom were former FBI members and who had security clearance, the inescapable fact is that not only were they part of a planned mob but also were they determined to advance the cause of white supremacy notwithstanding what Trump or the Republicans thought.  Trump was merely the enabler, the siren of battle luring the unwary to the rocks of defeat.

Nor can the Republicans escape punishment by suggesting that, if re-elected, they’ll behave like nice little boys.  Even if they are re-elected they will never rid themselves of the stain of their conduct in the upcoming impeachment of an ignorant clown whose façade has overtaken the GOP. They’ve got a serious decision to make.