Three historic Wednesdays to start 2021 – Orange County Register

Three Wednesdays this year – January 6th, January 13th and January 20th – will be remembered forever.

On Wednesday, January 6, Congress met to count the votes of the Electoral College that formalized Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

The count was infamously interrupted by a crowd of angry Trump supporters called to Washington by the president himself, who drove them into a frenzy with a barrage of lies completely unmasked.

The president then sent them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where thousands physically attacked the heart of American democracy.

On Wednesday, January 13, the same Congress whose members were forced to run for their lives voted for the impeachment of Donald Trump for the second time, making him one more when it comes to historic disgrace.

Hopefully, the first president to suffer a second impeachment will be the last.

I would hate to see what it would take for a third impeachment.

In those tense, late and post-tumultuous hours of electoral certification, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, called Donald Trump a “consistent” president. Donald Trump’s second impeachment is the consequence of his reckless betrayal of his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Depending on where the numerous investigations into the January 6 uprising go, post-presidential criminal charges are even possible.

That would be another historic debut.

By definition, all presidents are historical figures; some elevated to the pantheon of Monte. Rushmore, many forgettable mediocrities, some condemned as infamous failures.

Strangely, the judgment of history is not set in stone, with popular giants sometimes falling into disrepute as social values ​​change; Andrew Jackson comes to mind.

And sometimes the stature of “failed” presidents can increase as modern historians examine their records for the second, third and even fourth.

Generations far removed from the passions that colored their own times, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover and Ulysses S. Grant recovered.

Trump’s presidency was the product of a populist movement driven by passion, a justified anger at a bloated bipartisan system that took care of itself while mouthing “We, the People”. It is not just nature that abhors a vacuum. With Democrats and Republicans offering more of the same, millions have turned to a man outside the system, a man who has made his ignorance a virtue.

Although many of us would not trust a pilot with zero experience, millions entrusted the most complex job in the world to Donald Trump, a man who has never held public office of any kind.

And not just any experience; a man without curiosity, without loyalty, without a sense of history and without restrictions on his volatile ego and revenge.

Making Trump president was the political equivalent of handing a machine gun to a monkey.

The president’s continued insistence that the 2020 election has been stolen makes a condemnation in the Senate not only more likely, but essential.

In the short term, a guilty verdict would forbid Donald Trump from taking a federal position again.

This would not only relieve Democrats who fear Trump’s return in 2024, but it would also free the Republican Party to find a new leader, hopefully one who can return the party to a set of values-based principles, not a man’s personal whims. .

Historically, a Senate culprit verdict would make Donald Trump proof-proof, a warning to future generations of how things can go wrong when great power is tied to a flagrantly unstable ego.