Will The Republic Of Absolution Without Confession Permit The Don To Go Free?

VANITY FAIR

Richard Nixon's Constitution-undermining crime spree is rewarded with a presidential pardon and he is later rehabilitated as a sage.  General William Westmoreland is rewarded for his ruinously deadly Vietnam War policy by being named Army chief of staff.  Elliott Abrams is a leading architect of the law-breaking Iran Contra affair whose bloody hands are all over the massacre of nearly 1,000 El Salvadoran women and children and is rewarded with jobs in the Dubya and Trump administrations.  Only a few low-level subordinates are punished for the extralegal Bush Torture Regime while the real perps are rewarded with cushy retirements after being excused by Barack Obama. 

And so it goes in the Republic of Absolution Without Confession. 

This shambolic history keeps repeating itself, and you'd better believe that it will play an outsized role in determining the fate of Donald Trump.   In fact, because Trump is president (pardon the term) of the Republic of Absolution Without Confession, he may never pay for his methodical destruction of the things that once made America great. This despite the best intentions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and subpoena-empowered House Democrats. 

(The only exception to that Absolution Without Confession history actually strengthens the argument: Vice President Spiro Agnew, an out-and-out crook, copped a plea to a single felony charge of tax evasion in 1973 and resigned not because he was repentant but because he needed to be gotten out of the way because of the growing likelihood of Nixon's impeachment.  Removing one crook only to replace him with another might have created big problems.)   

Absolution Without Confession in America -- as opposed to the canonical law version of the Roman Catholic Church -- and the possibility Trump will benefit from this recurring lapse of judgment has been much on my mind because removing Trump is not just about lawbreaking.  He is a mentally unstable incompetent with only a fleeting acquaintance with reality and a pathological liar toxically unsuited to be in the same room with the nuclear football.

The recent and long overdue dressing-down of an unrepentant Abrams before a House committee by a freshman congresswoman wearing a hajib and armed with a conscience really brought the Absolution Without Confession conundrum into focus for me.  And Charles Pierce, as well, whose Esquire essay is a must-read if you love America but are bewildered, as you should be, about how the worst official misdeeds go unpunished.   

Writes Pierce:

In so many of these cases, the process bespeaks a fundamental distrust among our political elites about the sturdiness of our democratic institutions, a distrust that weakens them in turn and renders them less sturdy. 

The ostriches amongst that political elite, as well as too damned many constitutional and presidential scholars, fear that impeaching Trump would be too traumatic for a nation that has survived a lot of very heavy shit, including two world wars.  

In a democracy, what doesn't kill you will make you stronger, and Pierce is atypically sanguine in believing Trump will get his just desserts:

This may be the administration that breaks the pattern for the first time since Nixon skulked off to San Clemente. Donald Trump's corruption is so sweeping that the sound of the confessions may well be deafening.  I don't think anyone worries about whether or not this presidency fails, since it began to fail just about from the moment the president*'s hand came off the Bible. . . . 

The crimes and misdemeanors are so grossly obvious that the elite terror of holding their friends accountable will not be a factor this time around.

Still, and as Pierce notes, Trump is the beneficiary of 40 years of constitutional negligence and cowardice just as were Nixon, Westmoreland, Abrams and the five lapel-pin patriots in the image atop this post -- Douglas Feith, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, George Bush and Dick Cheney, important players all in the embrace of torture and willful subjugation of the rule of law. 

As in, maybe Trump will resign if we promise not to prosecute him, which is a contemporary version of Agnew Lite since the disgraced veep never saw the inside of a prison cell.  

This is a test.  It is a test of our durability and mettle as a people.  The Blue Wave victories of November, Maximum Bob and Adam Schiff notwithstanding, our institutions of checks and balances have thus far failed us, and all the while the Lindsey Grahams and Roger Stones gin up outrageous claims of Trump being the target of a deep-state coup d'état as The Don packs federal appeals courts with right-wing zealots who will separate us from even more of the things that once made America great. 

Yes, this is a test.