All those who said impeachment of a powerful nation’s sitting President for high crimes and misdemeanors is a somber business need to be introduced to Donald Trump. And don’t get me wrong — having Trump as President makes most people pretty somber, but, by God, when it comes to his impeachment, the Trump Administration, the Republican Party and the right wing media makes the whole thing really funny. It’s even almost merrier than the time Trump paid off a porn star!
The element that makes this whole affair so comedic is the same one that’s made the whole Trump Presidency so comedic (admittedly, in a lumpy, unsettling way): the incessant firing of contradictory statements, weird Twitter proclamations and stubborn denial of reality.
“No quid pro quo!” is the new “No collusion!” Trump repeated the latter line hundreds of times during the Mueller investigation, at every chance he got — on camera, on Twitter, on Fox News, presumably in front of the bathroom mirror and in the face of every White House staff. With a judicial magic akin to that of Dorothy’s ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz,” the “No collusion!” chant, repeated enough times with enough clicks of heels, miraculously transported Trump out of trouble. And then happy outro music played and then scene faded to black — I mean white.
With the Ukraine scandal coming into the public eye faster than premature Christmas decorations at Starbucks, Trump might need a replacement pair of magic slippers for an early Christmas present this year. “No quid pro quo!” isn’t working as nicely as “No collusion!” even though the President and all his friends are shouting it just as hoarsely and clicking their heels just as vigorously.
As always, when Trump gets in trouble (which is often), Fox News comes to his aid. Fox jumps a step ahead of the President, bypassing defenses and going straight for the Hail Mary: convincing Americans to just not watch the proceedings at all.
Why watch the proceedings, they ask the people, when you can’t even point out Ukraine on a map?
Even if you can, why waste your time trying to follow a bunch of lawyers talking back and forth?
Even if you understand lawyer-talk, it’s a stupid, unimportant, phony illusion put up by the Democrats to bamboozle you right before the next big election.
Even if it’s authentic, it’s boring — there was burglary for Richard Nixon, sex for Bill Clinton, but there’s only a phone call for Trump. And phone calls, unlike smoking gun tapes and blue dresses, simply aren’t trending-material.
It is unclear whether the expensively educated people of Fox News find the things that come out of their mouths the slightest bit insane. At the core, they’re news anchors and political pundits who are actively telling their viewers to turn away from political news. It’s like if a baker tells you to stop eating pies altogether because pies just aren’t sexy like pastries or cakes, which he’s now selling for $30.99 each.
And then just as you’re about to take the baker’s advice, Rudy Giuliani comes charging in the bakery, lobs an apple pie at your head then immediately denies he was ever in the store. Indeed, every time Trump, his staff, or Fox denies something, Giuliani goes on TV, confesses to the charge, and shows the location of his evidence (his iPhone). Sometimes, given a day or two, an article would come out about the President’s anger at what Giuliani has said, along with dozens of the President’s Twitter attempts of putting sane legal context around what his lawyers had said. See, it’s Orwellian, because the people are expected to believe the continuous and contradictory “facts,” cognitive dissonance be damned, but it’s also funny, because these contradictory facts all sound ridiculously dramatic and are espoused by the same group of people who, by some magical rhetoric, manage to simultaneously agree and disagree with each other.
An observer of the administration and the right-wing media has reasons to wonder what flaming mayhem goes on behind the curtain, and just why, after three years, they are still having such a tough time with reality. While the administration attacks the truth by intimidating, discrediting and blocking witnesses, Fox News is shutting it off altogether. In order to believe them, it no longer merely requires a certain mindsets, it requires a complete mental barricade from the world, an extraordinary ability to say “two plus two equals 33,000 emails” and a flexibility to swing from fact to alternative fact and back around, because, in the words of great late-night host and comedian Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
