Turning the swamp into a cesspool

Donald Trump is desperate to win the 2020 election.  That's about the only way he can stay out of jail. The Department of Justice has decreed that a sitting president can't be indicted. When Trump is no longer sitting in the Oval Office, he could face a multitude of indictments.  


While a strong majority of  GOP voters remains stalwart in their support of Trump, and Congressional Republicans have formed a protective cadre around him, he has a few  GOP dissenters in Congress.  But he has the full-throated rejection by prominent conservative journalists, such as George Will and Bill Kristol, and the condemnation of many former GOP officials.  The media has focused on the factional disputes of the Democrats and their many candidates, but has devoted little attention to the fact that old-line Republicans are convinced that if the party is not to lose its place in the political spectrum, Trump must go.  He has put his brand on the Republican Party, and it is a brand of politics against which America has fought wars to resist.  Trump represents the antithesis of the democracy that the United States has tried to be. Recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans understand that fact.  Others don't really care what kind of government they have, only that it serves their small-mindedness and their petty hatreds.

Trump's so-called campaign rallies have become unabashed hate rallies.  At his recent rallies, he has attacked his opponents with barrages of malicious lies and accusations that defy credulity in the most casually sentient citizens.  His dishonesty and malice are an indictment of the nation that tolerates him.  Some accounts are referring to his campaign events as Klan rallies.  And some Republicans are repudiating that what he says and does has any relationship to their party.

One of his rallying cries, along with locking up Hillary Clinton and The Squad, has been "Drain the swamp."  The assumption put forward by Trump and his supporters is that all of Washington, D.C., is crooked and the offenders are their political opponents.  Trump is always claiming accomplishments that history has never before witnessed.  What history has never before witnessed is the level of corruption Trump has brought to Washington.   He has turned the city into a sepsis tank.

Any capitol city in America becomes a gathering place for hatching schemes and soliciting favors.  It depends upon people of principle and integrity to hold the grifters at bay.  Upstanding civil servants are among those who keep the government honest.  But Trump is chief among grifters.  His resume is a rap sheet.  People who support him are accomplices in the corruption.  And their first line of attack is to malign the honest and hard-working people who keep the government functioning free from the malignant infection of Trump and his followers.  That includes the press and the honest and competent civil servants.  Those who do not submit to the Trumpian plague are falsely excoriated and driven off.  

The problem for Americans now is not to drain the swamp, but to remain free from the overflow of Trump's cesspool.
Even some Republicans understand that.