On January 13th, 2021, the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump for the second time. While the first impeachment had taken months to resolve, the process this time took place exactly one week from the alleged impeachable offense, after a 232-197 vote. And, while the first impeachment had been entirely imagined and propelled by the Democrats, the second exercise was technically a bipartisan initiative: 10 Republicans voted for the President’s demise.
[T]his is what America has become because Democrats allowed months of lawlessness, violence, looting, and rioting to continue with casual approval.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who was never Trump’s friend or supporter, suggested this impeachment would draw some degree of Republican support. Like many others, he fantasized that Trump had led an “insurrection” on January 6th, when a bunch of hooligans exploited a rally and brought destruction, violence, mayhem, and terror during what has become known as the Capitol riot. “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States,” Romney said. “Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. They will be remembered for their role in this shameful episode in American history. That will be their legacy.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) also turned on President Trump following the riot, claiming, “There is no question that the President formed the mob. The President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. This is what America is not.”
But of course, (and most unfortunately), this is exactly what America is. In 2021, this is what America has become because Democrats allowed months of lawlessness, violence, looting, and rioting to continue with casual approval. At that time, the progenitors of this chaos were advocating radical left-wing policies. And, as long as the violence and rioting were apparently on the right side of a racial divide that the Democrats have created and sustained to enhance their power base, it was allowed to continue.
The evidence in favor of impeachment was so exiguous and politically-motivated that it makes the very act nothing but an exercise in gross partisanship. Moreover, for House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cheney to wield it as a political cudgel against President Trump reveals more than blatant opportunism. It exposes her deep animosity towards the President, her abiding contempt for his followers, her failure as a party and Congressional leader, and her disqualification to ever lead the Republican Party.
With her own words, Liz Cheney has come out of the closet, not just as a NeverTrumper, but as a woman lacking any political coherence or comprehension. She harbors no compassion toward the millions of voters who supported Donald Trump, nor does she understand that they did so because they felt disenfranchised by both parties. These Americans saw in the mercurial businessman someone who seemed to understand their growing alienation and increasing impoverishment within an opioid-imploding America that seems indifferent to their participation—or even existence.
Cheney is the late-blooming NeverTrumper who should never have left the backbenches of Congress. Instead, she should resign from her current leadership position as the very prominent Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has demanded.
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Mitt Romney.[/caption]
CHENEY UPHOLDS HER FATHER’S LEGACY OF FOREVER WAR FOREIGN POLICY
Liz Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was such a dominant force in the administration of President George W. Bush. You could not imagine nor construct a more establishment team than Bush and Cheney, two leaders who were both committed to keeping America at war, wherever and whenever it was deemed both possible and permissible.
[T]o define American interests in a more focused and minimal fashion—without the Cheney-Senior-esque forever wars.
Unlike her fellow NeverTrumper Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney has not been a chronic and persistent thorn in the President’s side during his one term of office. Instead, she’s been more of an occasional pain in the butt, one who has obdurately opposed President Trump’s “third way” foreign policy that was neither isolationist nor interventionist, but sought to define American interests in a more focused and minimal fashion—without the Cheney-Senior-esque forever wars. Trump’s foreign strategy opts for tactical strikes against America’s enemies instead of regime changes that necessitate the titanic use of U.S. military forces and taxpayer dollars.
Ever her father’s daughter, this turned out to be intolerable for Cheney. In fact, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has suggested that Cheney and her allies actively sought to limit the President’s powers to withdraw troops from places like Afghanistan in order to achieve “perpetual war” for the United States.
In the post-Cold War world, the U.S. has seen its global responsibilities not only increase, but become increasingly muddled. The threat to world peace has evolved from communism and the Soviet Union to regional instability that is chronically vulnerable to Islamist extremism and the terrorism that it cultivates and exports. But even if one believes that America has a moral responsibility to be an efflorescent democratic presence worldwide, it is an obligation that is even less economically viable than it was four years ago when Donald Trump came to office promising to reduce America’s military presence around the world.
The United States national debt currently stands at $27 trillion and counting. With President-elect Joe Biden already promising another $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package—and committed in campaign promises to another estimated $10 trillion more in spending—that figure is destined to balloon even further. We are not heading into an administration that will be characterized by penury. So Cheney and her kind can expatiate all they want about the need to maintain order and stability around the world, but those words are rendered meaningless by the fiscal reality of such an undertaking—not to mention the human toll on our veterans.
The sad reality is that the United States can no longer maintain order and stability at home, let alone globally. The Capitol riot was not some strange phenomenon or aberration that seemed to defy current political conventions. America is now defined by an inability by too many to understand that the wanton destruction of private or public property is against the law and unacceptable in civil society. With 20,000 national guard troops waiting for Biden’s inauguration to occur, it is apparent that law and order on the home front is at present a bridge too far.
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Capitol building.[/caption]
FOR CHENEY, IT'S MORE THAN NEVER TRUMP—IT'S NEVER TRUMP SUPPORTERS, TOO
Cheney’s snap decision to embrace impeachment demonstrates a thorough lack of judgment and abysmal political calculation. It is not just a stretch to claim that Trump was inciting an insurrection on January 6th; it is pure fiction.
[I]t would be a historical first for a sitting President to lead an insurrection against … his own government.
If you were standing in front of an angry mob and determined to foment a coup d’état, then surely one’s instructions to that crowd would include some clarity, some stated purpose, some dramatic declaration. Nothing President Trump said on that day, however, possessed any of these qualities. Instead, all he had for the agitated mob seemed to be empty words of frustration, anger, resentment, and rage at how events had overwhelmed what had been an overwhelmingly successful presidency before the arrival of the coronavirus and the failures of election night. Besides, it would be a historical first for a sitting President to lead an insurrection against … his own government.
But without any debate, any proper assessment, any thorough analysis, the Democrats announced their intention to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection. And Liz Cheney embraced that vision.
On impeachment day, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) made perhaps the most cogent and precise comment of all. Amid the verbal flurries to encircle the Capitol during the hours of accusations and diatribes, McClintock said, “If we had prosecuted BLM and Antifa rioters across the country with the same determination these last six months, this incident may not have happened at all.” The congressman also commented on the “unconstitutional” impeachment process: “I cannot think of a more petty, vindictive and gratuitous act than to impeach an already defeated president a week before he is to leave office.”
None of this seemed to occur to Cheney, however, who remained determined to impeach President Trump. But she did more than issue her opprobrium against Trump—she appropriated an entire book of Democratic talking points that had been issued between the time of the riot and the day of impeachment. According to Cheney (and the Democrats), white supremacy had somehow been the motivating force for the riot, something that all Trump supporters were as guilty and as heinous as President Trump himself. Soon Democratic-apologist-masquerading-as-a-journalist Don Lemon said that all Trump supporters supported the KKK and neo-Nazis just because they voted for Trump.
So, in her eyes, Cheney was not merely impeaching Trump. She was impeaching anyone who attended the January 6th rally, peaceably, and decided not to enter the Capitol building. She was impeaching everyone who suspected the 2020 Presidential Election had included at least some voter fraud and demanded the right to at last request a second opinion. Ultimately, she was impeaching all Donald Trump supporters who felt their last political hope, their final say in the business of government, was disappearing before their eyes—a tragedy that some of their supposed allies in Congress were aiding and abetting with the removal of their political icon from not only the presidency, but their lives.
Big Tech has already shown how easily they can remove Trump from social media, with as little effort as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had his real or imagined political enemies airbrushed from photographs after he had those men murdered. Now corporate America is following suit, with some suggesting it would be a mortal sin to hire even some hapless refugee from the Trump administration.
Cheney and her allies in the Democratic party—along with progressive elites in corporate America—seek to obliterate popular conservatism from office, from history books, from the American consciousness. If January 6th was a failed “coup,” January 13th will go down in history as a veritable regime change.
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Nancy Pelosi.[/caption]
THE AGE OF EVANESCENCE
It used to be said that we lived in an age of “planned obsolescence.” Manufacturers sought to ensure the merchandise we purchased on Monday would be ready for replacement the following week. But we have moved beyond that in the 21st Century. We now live in an age of evanescence—where so much of what enhances our lives today disappears tomorrow.
Did they hate the people who loved (and still) love Donald Trump?
While so much information is now available on the internet, it is increasingly unavailable elsewhere, and we are undoubtedly headed towards a society bereft of books. The music that we knew on records, tapes, and compact discs is now largely retrieved from digital downloads that we can never really touch in the way we did a phonograph collection. And how long will it be before the products that play music in the traditional way are no longer available, and we will be dependent upon Apple and others for our musical pleasures?
Politics, too, has become subject to the apparent law of evanescence where leaders and policies that seemed at least transitory are banished overnight to the dungeons of cancel culture. That is precisely what happened to President Donald Trump. How else can political figures like Liz Cheney decide to defy their own base and impeach a President whom they have seemingly supported for the previous four years?
It remains an open question as to what has been the primary motivating factor in the NeverTrumper’s abhorrence of the president. Was it merely his overbearing manner or his tendency to attract scandal? Was it his lack of ideological purity and his pragmatic approach to politics? Or was it just the kind of people who supported him: those non-traditional Republican voters who were often blue-collar and not National Review subscribers? Did they hate the people who loved (and still love) Donald Trump?
If that is what prompted Liz Cheney to condemn Trump’s presidency, then she will be nothing but a caucus leader of 10—herself and those other Republicans who enabled the Democrats to end the Trump era with a flurry of ignominy and betrayal. She is certainly not equipped nor fit to lead Republicans or conservatives as they continue to work to be a party and a movement that is welcoming to the dispossessed and not contemptuous of them. If Cheney thinks she was making some great and principled statement by supporting impeachment, then she is greatly mistaken. She was merely feeding the forces of totalitarianism that are seeking to eradicate all opposition, silence all critics and grind every last Trump voter under its heel.
