"For years, I have been wondering when Americans would draw the line on Trump and his minions. We could rehearse the litany of Trump’s awfulness: his vulgarity, his racism, his callous disregard for veterans, his pathetic submissiveness around Vladimir Putin. We could remind ourselves of the attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government that got him impeached (the first time).
"None of it seems to matter, because for a large swath of the American public, nothing really matters. And here, I do not mean only the 'MAGA Republicans,' loyalists who are already a lost cause. (Trump was tragically prescient when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they would not abandon him.) Nor do I mean the people who have attached their parasitical careers to their Trumpian host.
"No, I mean the ordinary Americans who shrug at a violent insurrection and the near-miss of a coup. As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump 'probably wanted to declare martial law.' He also pointed out that the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if 'Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.'
"But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?" -- Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, wondering what we've been wondering for a long, long time about what it would take for our fellow citizens to care about what the Malignant Loser and his cult have wrought. Nichols concludes that, to vote for the party that has aligned itself so intimately with this is to demonstrate no interest in the constitutional order or in the United States remaining a democracy. There are tens of millions of the true believer cultists that cheerfully acknowledge this as their goal, but the mystery is the "ordinary Americans" who don't see the peril, or can't be bothered to care. There was another time when "ordinary" citizens of a country were similarly blind or indifferent to the destruction of their institutions, ultimately becoming "willing executioners" of an evil order of "darkness and cruelty."
But we have more important things to vote on, right?!?
