The view that our president should be impeached is countered by the view that he is a president who does what he said he would do and succeeds at getting things done.
What trump IS getting done “for” America, what “progress” he’s making that feeds his supporters’ unwavering belief in him, are things that so many people – politicians or business leaders – could get done, and probably get done better and faster* IF they were willing to compromise their own integrity, compromise the integrity of our governmental structure, and compromise the integrity of the country.
The things he’s “accomplishing” were never impossible, they were just difficult to accomplish within standards of integrity. But because Trump puts success and winning above integrity and even above the law, yes, he gets things done. People who ignore the tangible and intangible short- and longstanding negative repercussions of this Machiavellian approach are enablers and colluding in selling the soul of America down the river.
The things Trump is “accomplishing” must be so attractive to his supporters that they’re willing to betray their own integrity by reducing his delusions, improprieties, deceptions, and criminal activities as irrelevant, incidental, or non-existent. These blind believers are putting some desired societal or personal gain high above the obvious deviant behaviors that mar our culture and devolve the future of society, democracy, the environment, and possibly our survival.
On a personal note, I was a Star Trek fan back in the day of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty. What’s relevant about that here is that Kirk’s mission was to lead the crew of the USS Enterprise through challenges and interventions intended to make the Universe a better place. The whole crew was aligned with this mission. And all the races they met up with pretty much shared that value, too, of making the Universe a better place. With the exception of the Romulans and the Klingons. The values of integrity, honor, empathy, compassion, and generosity that Captain Kirk and his crew had were seen by these other two races as weak and stupid. But in the Star Trek depiction of the distant future, the Universe had for the most part evolved quite nicely.
The picture I’ve had in my mind of what the future will look like is a natural evolution of humanity, an evolution leading us to live in harmony, united in making the Universe a better place. We become like Kirk and his crew. I’ve enjoyed trusting that through the imaginable and unimaginable challenges ahead, the humanistic aspects of humanity will make the future more and more positive. But ever since the campaign for the Presidency of the United States got underway in 2016, I’ve been seeing our future looking more like the Romulans will rule the Universe. It’s as if evolution has been on the Captain Kirk trajectory for years, then, all of a sudden, our trajectory got skewed. It’s not Trump, he’s simply an individual. No, this shift in evolution is from the complicity, resonance of agenda, or outright selfish greed of those who follow him and especially those who support him in congress and media in the face of his immorality and lies. It’s as if humanity had a fighting chance to evolve in consciousness when, out of some dark corner, a virus invades our species and takes over, turning the future of our race into Romulans.
If integrity is an embodiment of compassion and service to the greater good then integrity in a society is a measurement of that society’s movement between self-serving pre-barbarianism and altruistic support of the community.
Trump’s supporters accuse his dissenters of “not seeing the forest for the trees”**. But you can’t make America sustainably great again any more than you can move humanity in a positive direction if what you’re doing is at the expense of integrity, dividing the country, and how we’re seen by the rest of the world.
I am a person who wanted the old political and governmental structure to fall away. But while Trump represented the promise of such an outcome, I have not fallen into the trance of discounting or denying the unacceptable cost of his intentions and actions. My wish is that more people who consider themselves Patriots would wake up out of their hallucinatory trance and smell how bad the coffee is.
* they could do it better and faster if they weren’t as narcissistic as Trump and weren’t inhibited by the fragile ego he has
** Michael Caputo on Alex Witt MSNBC 3/3 10:15 MT