You’ve heard the expression: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” It’s meant to explain why people choose to remain in uncomfortable, even dangerous, situations rather than free themselves, when freeing themselves means moving out into unknown territory. Will they really be better off? Will their problems really go away, or will they just be replaced by new, possibly worse, ones?
As a nation, we’re now two-and-a-half years into what is frequently being called the Age of Trump, and plenty of us find ourselves feeling like something between abused spouses and subjects of an unscrupulous autocrat. So why are so many still afraid to speak the “I” word? Why does our Congress continue to treat the subject of impeachment as if it’s something to be explored or investigated? And why, for the love of God, is there still one citizen of this country who wants to elect this disaster to a second term? Why are we so afraid to seek escape?
Sure, there are plenty of unseen and unknown devils along the path if an actual impeachment inquiry were to be launched and Articles of Impeachment filed. But here’s the devil we know: the person who currently occupies the People’s House is a pathological liar, an unscrupulous businessman, a person ignorant of every bit of knowledge necessary to be president, a person with the morals of a barnyard animal, and a “president” who every day places our democracy in greater jeopardy by his flirting with foreign adversaries and alienating allies. And those are only his most conspicuous flaws.
For over two years, our nation waited eagerly for Robert Mueller to complete his investigation and issue his report. Some anticipated the report for its proof that the investigation was, as their leader tweeted daily, a Hoax, a Witch Hunt. Others of us waited for it as evangelicals await the “rapture”–as the Jesus in the clouds who would remove us from the ugly morass in which we’ve lived for over two years, the official document which would provide the conclusive evidence that our White House squatter is a criminal who should be handcuffed and transported immediately to a maximum-security prison where he would live out his remaining days.
The long-anticipated report satisfied neither side. Although Donald Trump and his staunchest allies read “complete and total exoneration,” others read plenty of criminal activity which could not be substantiated to the level necessary to win a court case and which couldn’t be reported anyway because of the precedent that says a sitting president cannot be indicted. That’s a long, long way from exoneration but also a long way from getting our wishes of seeing this grifter fitted for an orange jumpsuit.
When Mr. Mueller did finally issue a public statement, he said, “If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” They didn’t say so. Therefore, they obviously did not see Donald Trump as an innocent person. And let us not forget these statistics reported by Time Magazine on March 24, 2019:
Along with a team of experienced prosecutors and attorneys, the former FBI director has indicted, convicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies, including top advisers to President Trump, Russian spies and hackers with ties to the Kremlin. The charges range from interfering with the 2016 election and hacking emails to lying to investigators and tampering with witnesses.
It’s difficult to see as innocent a person who has been surrounded by and benefited from the work of so many guilty people. My mother always said–and I bet yours did, too–“Birds of a feather flock together.”
Elizabeth Warren, who read the entire redacted version of Mueller’s 448-page report as soon as it was presented (finally!) to Congress, summed it up succinctly. She said three things are unambiguous: Russia made multiple efforts to tamper with our 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump be elected; Donald Trump welcomed that assistance; and Donald Trump has made countless efforts to shut down the investigation, to block the report’s release, and to discredit the findings. Nothing in those statements would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Donald Trump has been exonerated of all wrong-doing.
We needed the Mueller Report for its thorough investigation, its carefully chosen language, its documentation of evidence and findings which will allow both prosecutors and historians to find a more accurate picture of these events, and the proof that our “president”–though not conclusively proven a criminal himself–has surrounded himself with criminals. For all of that information, the Mueller Report is a vital legal and historical document.
We did not need the Mueller Report, however, to know who Donald Trump is. Since that iconic escalator ride on June 16, 2015, he has been telling and showing us exactly who he is. Even before the tragic night he was elected, we knew he was a racist, a misogynist, a compulsive liar, a person with shady companions, an ignorant person, a draft dodger, a sexual predator, a nonreligious person who claimed Christianity as a political tool, and the most immature person ever to take the national stage. This is the Devil We Know–and have known from the beginning. For decades before he announced his candidacy for president, we have watched him grift, con, sleaze, marry, commit adultery, boast about his sexual exploits, do TV shows, host beauty pageants, and anything else he could think of to keep his name in the tabloids. We didn’t need the Mueller Report to tell us any of this.
Most damning of all is the complete absence of any attempt on Trump’s part to find out to what extent Russia’s interference in our 2016 election was successful and to hold them accountable for their actions. Somewhat reminiscent, I’d say, of O.J. Simpson’s declaration that he would devote the rest of his life to finding the “real murderer” of his wife and her friend–except that Donald Trump hasn’t even given lip service to seeking justice and protecting our future elections. He has publicly stated his belief of Vladimir Putin’s word over the word and the evidence of our own intelligence agencies. Does that not in itself constitute treason?
In Trump’s narcissistic universe, he is the sun and everything else revolves around him. Believing the obvious and demanding its investigation might possibly incriminate him, and only he knows precisely what he is hiding; therefore, the security of all future elections must be sacrificed on the altar of his ridiculous ego and our country placed at ever-increasing risk just to avoid the inevitable revelation that his election is illegitimate.
This is the Devil We Know. Can the Devil We Don’t Know really be worse than that? What keeps otherwise seemingly intelligent people from all-out support of removing this national menace from power? Undeniably, there are risks to impeachment. Trump’s base is so rabid and so well-armed, it’s not difficult to imagine their resorting to violence. Our electorate is already so polarized, it’s easy to imagine another national split like the one which led to the civil war. At the very least, a failed impeachment could have the adverse effect of enhancing Trump’s credibility and support, which could doom us to yet another four years of hell. That’s the Devil We Don’t Know.
The core question lies in who we are as a people, who we want to be, and how we want to be remembered by future generations. Historians, guided by the ethics of their profession to record the truth and freed from the political warfare that currently engulfs us, will portray Donald Trump as a liar and a fraud. The running tally of his lies since taking office is now at almost 11,000. That’s 11,000 lies in less than three years, and Bill Clinton was impeached for one lie: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Many Americans in the 1990s said it wasn’t the infamous blow job that they resented the president for; it was the lie they just couldn’t forgive. Now we have a “president” who has told almost 10,999 lies more than that, and people just shake their heads and move along when they hear the latest. Do we want to go down in history as the people who decided honesty and facts don’t count?
Historians, with the advantage of hindsight, will present an honest record of Trump’s profound ignorance. They won’t laugh at “covfefe,” “hamberders,” or “smocking gun” or call them simple typos. They’ll probably label them what they are: evidence of an uneducated, sloppy, careless person impersonating a president. Those who excuse these should apologize to Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s Vice President, for the uproar over his not knowing how to spell “potato.” Stacy Conradt reports that Quayle was embarrassed and “later wrote in his memoir Standing Firm that ‘It was more than a gaffe. It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the whole event was.’” No such angst for Donald Trump. For him, it’s all in a day’s tweets.
Historians, looking at the entirety of our experience as a nation, will struggle to understand how Donald Trump’s illiterate speeches fit in with those of the great orators who have held the office. They will wonder how a large percentage of our electorate could possibly have had confidence in a “president” who daily calls his opponents “losers,” who attacks the man who portrays him on Saturday Night Live, and who struggles to form coherent sentences. Those speeches we humorously call “word salad” will to future generations probably lose their humor and speak the real tragedy of this era.
Historians, with a firm knowledge of our founding documents and how our system of laws has evolved, will be challenged to explain how we for two-and-a-half years–or 4 years or 8 years–allowed a “president” to live above those laws. Knowing that America was founded as a nation where people didn’t need a king, they’ll surely wonder why–after 44 presidents who to a greater or lesser extent upheld our laws and kept their oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”–we allowed our 45th “president” to anoint himself king, ignore the rule of law, scoff at the Constitution, and profit off the presidency–all without consequence.
Historians, with their deep reverence for the past and the lessons to be learned from it, will surely shudder when they have to record the way this “president” has cozied up to our adversaries and alienated our allies. They’ll certainly feel like weeping as they search for records of any other president who was so reviled by people in other countries, so flummoxed by Americans’ sudden loss of national pride and unity. There will be photos, I feel certain, of the giant “baby Trump” blimp that flies over London each time Trump visits, the toilet tweeter inflatable also on display, and the vast crowds of protesters carrying the most unflattering placards. Do we really want the history of the era during which we were responsible for our nation’s welfare to be represented by a photo of a diaper-clad, pacifier-holding baby? God help us!
Historians, I think, will also be hard-pressed to explain how a religion turned into a political movement and then abandoned its founding theology. Perhaps this is the area in which hindsight will lend insight to the trail which led to the weaponization of theology and explain that the election of Donald Trump is the effect, not the cause.
We have a “president” who says things like “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest–and you all know it” and “This [Puerto Rico] is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water.” Of course, it takes a person with an extremely high IQ to recognize that islands are surrounded by water and to know that the moon is part of Mars. We have a “president” who insults other Americans while he stands on foreign soil. We have a “president” who sat for an interview with the gravestones of our fallen D-Day troops as backdrop and insulted and attacked the Speaker of the House of Representatives. We have a “president” who mocks the fact that Russia interfered in our most recent presidential election and has done nothing to ensure they won’t do it again.
Worse than all of that, we have a political party and a lot of citizens who support, promote, and plan to reelect the person described above. We have millions of voters who can’t understand anything beyond winning and losing elections, who think those of us who are appalled by the current state of affairs are just “sore losers.”
Remember the often-quoted words of President Lincoln:
A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
We–the adults who are alive right now–are the ones who get to decide which way we’re going to go. Will we become a whole nation of liars, bigots, misogynists, people with no regard for truth, hypocrites using religion as a political tool? Or will we heed some other words of President Lincoln:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
In the more recent words of Representative Elijah Cummings, current Chair of the House Oversight Committee, “Republicans need to stop circling the wagons around Trump and start circling the wagons around this country.”
It’s too late to erase the ugliness and division of the last three years; our portrait in history is already well underway. What we can do, however, is acknowledge the Devil We Know and stop being afraid of the Devil We Don’t Know. Donald Trump is at little risk of being removed from office because of the evil leadership in the Senate, but that shouldn’t stop the House from placing their stamp of disapproval on him, pinning on him the scarlet letter so that at least we’ve asserted our moral stance as a people and condemned the corruption that’s happening right before our eyes.
Since neither Donald Trump nor any of his cohorts (yeah, I’m looking at you, Mitch McConnell) has any sense of shame, the scarlet letter may not have the desired effect on them. But failing to impeach Trump means that WE wear the scarlet letter, the symbol of our moral failure to stand against the destruction of our democracy. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne wore a scarlet “A” for adulteress. We will wear a “C” for coward, or maybe a “D” for derelict of duty, or maybe an “H” for hypocrite.
We didn’t need Robert Mueller to tell us any of this. We all knew what we were electing–even those who elected him. The only remaining question is what we’re going to do about it.