Playtime is Over

Reality is a daunting challenge to a pathological liar/malignant narcissist, and things are starting to get REAL

The court of public opinion moves at lightning speed, but the court of law moves slowly and deliberately. It’s taken two and half years to get here, but judgment day is nigh.

It is finally time to stop pretending that either the ex-president or his enablers and defenders are normal. There’s nothing normal about this in our history, and our future is dim indeed, if we accept their behavior as a new normal.

In an Atlantic piece called “Partisan or Patriot?” Tom Nichols wrote, “You can’t be both,” as he laid out the stakes for the Republican Party going forward. He reminds us that all the other indictments pale in comparison to the one accusing the ex-president of, for the first time in our nation’s history, trying to overturn the will of the people, the one expressed in the free and fair election of 2020. Trump tried to discredit our electoral process, and to this day, there are apparently millions of Americans who for a variety of reasons, cannot—will not—see the obvious truth.

Now the rubber meets the road, and all the exclamations of fake news, fake charges, lunatic prosecutors, the Biden crime family, RINO’s, Communist Democrats, Fascist Democrats (seriously, which is it—Communists hate fascists, remember WWII?), and even the ongoing, unveiled threats of more political violence conducted in his name, will not stop this train.

Spineless members of the party he continues to dominate can’t stop it. Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and the myriad websites and podcasts can’t stop it.

Proclamations that these indictments for trying to remain in power after losing an election are political in nature—not legal in nature—can’t stop it either.

We are a nation of laws, and finally, we have evidence that no one, not even a grifting ex-president, is above them.

It is well past time for leaders in the Republican Party to cut their losses, break with the vocal base who will never put country over the ex-president, and step up to the promise that the Republican Party is the party of law and order.

This is and has been a twisted kind of Kabuki Theater. Everyone with an iota of sentience (not to mention conscience and patriotism) knows it’s Kabuki. The remaining question is, will they cut their losses. Mitch McConnell, their leader in the Senate could have put a stop to this with the second impeachment (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence about the United States). He could have had a small handful of Republican senators in safe seats vote to impeach, and thus prevented Trump from running again, but he chose—not for the first time—to put party over country, and supported a guy who consistently puts himself over country, and everything and everyone else.

No more time for fun and games and divisive nonsense about pedophilic pizza parlors, or indulging Q-anon fantasies. It’s time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, for our country is at a crossroads. No more shrugging off indictments or accommodating the bullies at your office or your dinner table. It’s time to stand tall in defense of democracy, and the USA by extension.

Friends, we have a narcissism problem. I’ve long said that anyone who wants to run for president should be immediately disqualified. We should draft the position, picking from our best and brightest—not reality TV stars, or long-serving pols who believe it’s their turn—and then drag the poor victim, likely kicking and screaming, into the Oval Office, where he or she will be sentenced to serving one six-year term as President of the United States. Currently, only egoists run. It’s been a phenomenon since either Reagan or Clinton, with the exception of the Bush’s—the elder because he was a throw-back to the time when duty trumped ego and self-sacrifice trumped grandiosity; and junior, because the party insisted he run, and promised to surround him with people who would lighten the load, not great reasons to seek office.

I think it’s a media-driven mania. As media fragmented from three television channels to a hundred cable channels, then to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the jillions of websites, apps, and podcasts, it gained power, and narcissists were attracted to elected office like moths to a flame. Al Franken famously said that every sitting senator sees the next president in the mirror. Seeing themselves on Joe Rogan, hearing themselves on Rush Limbaugh, reading about themselves on 4chan, was like the next hit of powerful drug, and the thing they want most…is the next hit.

I’ll conclude where I started with the indispensable Tom Nichols who reminds us that patriots are not partisans, and that there are no other cases. This is the case.

©2023 Jon Sinton