America's Most Serious Polarization

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
-Donald Trump, Iowa Rally (January 23rd, 2016)

After a year of denials it turns out that Trump associates – including his son - had repeated contact with individuals related to the Kremlin. Several have been forced to correct official forms and potentially perjured testimony under oath. Since Trump was elected he has attacked American allies, NATO, the EU, the media, his own executive branch intelligence community, the judiciary, and alleged voter fraud in the very election he won, all of which furthers Putin's plan of "strategic deterrence" to weaken the Western Alliance. He has been scrupulous not to attack Putin or Russia in any serious way, refusing to accept that Russia attacked our election and endeavoring to weaken existing sanctions. And the list goes on…

And, in the end, in the next several months or years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller may, in the end, do what the Justice Department (as announced by the FBI) decided to do with Clinton's email server issue: talk about appalling judgment, lack of transparency, etc., but determine there is insufficient evidence to seek an indictment.

If, at the end of the day, it is determined by the Special Prosecutor that nothing illegal was done by any of Trump's people and that nothing they did could be traced back to Donald Trump himself, I will be absolutely astonished.

I'd be downright flabbergasted, in fact.

But I would accept it.

But if Robert Mueller indicts any of Trump's folks, or submits a report to congress that results in Trump's impeachment or resignation from office, the 35% – 42% or so who still support Trump despite (or maybe because of) all the media coverage of everything we've found out about his campaign, his transition, and his administration, will never, never, believe he did anything wrong and that, in the end, the jailed are innocent martyrs and Trump was overthrown in a "soft coup."

Those of us old enough to remember are – or should be – sobered by the fact that, "By the end of his presidency, Nixon’s approval rating had tumbled to 24 percent."

In other words, even after…

July 24, 1974: United States v. Nixon decided: Nixon is ordered to give up tapes to investigators.

Congress moves to impeach Nixon.

• July 27 to July 30, 1974: House Judiciary Committee passes Articles of Impeachment.
• Early August 1974: A previously unknown tape from June 23, 1972 (recorded a few days after the break-in) documenting Nixon and Haldeman formulating a plan to block investigations is released. This recording later became known as the "Smoking Gun".
• Key Republican Senators tell Nixon that enough votes exist to convict him.

Timeline of the Watergate scandal (Wikipedia)

…one in four Americans still supported his presidency.

And that's what those of us not living in Alt-America are dealing with.

It's not about the facts anymore… if it ever was.

And, as one pundit put it, Republican congressional representatives are torn between their duty to defend the US Constitution and the fact that, as of April of this year, 88% of those who voted for Trump still support him.

I will, as my evangelical, pro-Trump friends tell me, pray for Donald Trump.

But I will also pray for those Republican representatives in Congress who are trapped in a vicious double bind to verbally distance themselves from the president, or take action to remove him from office.

Their political careers and legacy, the future of the Republican party and our nation, and the realization that whichever course they choose will complicate the American situation (presuming that's still possible) and further polarize their constituencies puts them in the most unenviable of situations.