The presidential perp walk

It's shameful, but Trump and his supporters are, sadly, shameless

We have become accustomed to watching the President of the United States stroll across the White House lawn to the presidential helicopter, Marine One, to board. We have, countless times, watched the president come down the stairs of Air Force One. Each year, for fifteen minutes, at least, the president walks down the aisle of the U.S. House, shaking hands all the way, in order to deliver his State of the Union speech. These scenes are a normal part of the American political landscape.

But, today in Washington, Donald J. Trump, as he is hit with a third set of felony indictments, is regularizing something completely new in this country: the presidential perp walk. And, it seems that there are still state felony RICO charges coming down the tracks in Georgia any day now—because Trump and his minions tried to steal the state’s electoral votes from Joe Biden in 2020.

It’s shameful. But, don’t expect Donald Trump to hang his head as he is once again fingerprinted and arraigned. We all know by now that he’s utterly shameless.

And, sadly, his supporters have become just like him. Do they even blush as the whole world observes the destructive chaos they have wrought with their political and financial support for this craven demagogue? No. They are beyond embarrassment. They’re still spinning elaborate (obvious) lies, and reviling their opponents, and verbally attacking law enforcement and the criminal justice system, just as hard as ever, just like their political idol. All you have to do is turn on any one of the Trump Republican propaganda channels to hear and see this for yourself—if you can stomach it, that is.

And, of this group, Republican members of Congress are the worst. Not only are they lying at a record pace, they know very well that they’re lying. They didn’t get to where they are by being stupid enough to believe any of this vile stream of Trumpish nonsense.

When will our national nightmare be over? It’s hard to say. In a normal world, any other politician would have been brought down politically long ago if he had engaged in even a fraction of Trump’s wicked words and deeds, much less committed any of these obvious Trump crimes. But, Trump, like other cult leaders that came before him, seems to have a preternatural ability to keep these people tightly in his grip.

Don’t get me wrong: locking up Trump is a worthy goal, in and of itself, if the rule of law is to ever have any meaning in this country again. If a politically powerful supposed billionaire demagogue is shown to be above the law, we are in deep, deep trouble as a nation.

Will convictions on the more than one hundred state and federal felony charges that are likely to be filed against him by the time this is done finish Trump’s pathetic, destructive political career? One can hope, I guess.

But, more important than arresting and confining the cult leader, we have a very tough job to do to try and deprogram the cult members, tens of millions of them, without whom Trump could not have committed any of these crimes and thereby endangered the republic in such a massive way. And that’s not going to be easy. It can’t possibly be accomplished with liberal, democratic political rhetoric. It can only be done with a huge dose of scripturally-accurate, constitutionally-sound TRUTH. In other words, the only real antidote to Trumpism is real Christianity, real morality, real conservatism, and real republicanism, in the historic, true, sense of all those words.