The Week That (May Have) Marked The Turning Point In Donald Trump's America

GUILLERMO ARIAS / AFP-GETTY IMAGES

We have been waiting -- and waiting desperately -- for the turning point in Donald Trump's America, where his endless litany of lies and grievances, overt racism and open criminality become too much.  At the risk of being crushed yet again, this week may finally have been it. 

It is no longer a matter of whether Trump will be impeached, it is when that fraught and long overdue process will begin in earnest.   

It is no longer a question of whether Republicans will abandon the monster who has turned the GOP into a cult because they won't as a party but are bleeding congressmen 
at a prodigious rate who won't be running in 2020.   

It no longer is an issue of whether Trump can win next year because his appalling performance in the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton left him not only isolated when he bigfooted into those grieving cities and cast aside a president's duty to console to spew yet more hate, but horrified and further alienated the suburban voters whose support he must have to be reelected. 

The usual caveats apply: Trump cannot win, but only if the election is fairly contested. His base, at minimum a third of all voters, is immovable.  His ability to wield his authoritarian cudgel is enormous as he boasts that under Article II of the Constitution, "I can do whatever I want."  And the Democrats, despite a field rich with qualified candidates, somehow manage to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory by nominating a dud. 

In short, America -- the many millions of us beyond that basket of deplorables where nothing Trump says and does will ever be ghastly enough to alienate them -- is sick to death of Trump, who staggers from day to day live tweeting "Fox and Friends" and feuding with or firing anyone who dares disagree with him while cooking up new abominations. 

In an era in which minorities are becoming majorities (can you say Texas?), suburban areas that once were safely Republican are trending blue as Trump openly advocates sending non-white immigrants back to their homelands as part of a reelection strategy centered on the wholesale demonization of minorities -- which is to say renounce one of the core values that once made America a great country. 

A prime example of the red-to-blue shift, reports The Washington Post, is Atlanta's northern suburbs, which sent the demon spawn known as Newt Gingrich to Washington a generation ago, but is slipping out of its Republican shackles because of the economic turbulence Trump is fomenting, the access to lower-cost healthcare Trump would deny the middle class and poor, Trump's rollback of environmental protections, and the instability, fear and violence Trump's words and actions are causing. 

Lucy McBath, an African-American and gun-control advocate whose son was shot and killed in 2012, narrowly won Gingrich's former seat as part of Democratic Blue Wave victories in 2018 by building a coalition of college-educated white Republicans who have fled from Trump.   

It is no surprise that the 41 seats Democrats flipped last year to take control of the now impeachment-ready House were predominately suburban, while the best the national Republican Party has been able to muster to try to counter this trend is to accuse McBath and others challenging the party's hegemony of "fundraising off the mass shootings," two of which appear to have been a direct consequence of Trump's anti-immigrant hate speech.  In El Paso, in fact, most of the 22 fatalities were Latinos; eight were Mexican citizens. 

The cycle of anxiety, disbelief, fear and grief that has gripped us for the past two and a half years finally is being transformed into anger.   Forgive the analogy, but it is now Trump who has a target on his back.  Given his mental unfitness, narcissism, smallness and inability to feel, let alone express, compassion, he will not be turning back. 

Nor should we.