I just read that the Senate doesn’t have enough votes to convict former President Trump of impeachment. If the impeachment doesn’t have the votes, I hope they try censuring Trump and invoking the 14th Amendment to prevent Trump from running for office again.
Former President Trump just incited a mob to storm the Capitol building to try to overturn a free and fair election that Trump lost by 7 million votes. This isn’t something that you give Trump a free pass on.
One of the things that most bothers me is how the Republican Party has become a cult of Trump whose only governing philosophy is blind loyalty to Trump. The Republican Party is in the dangerous grips of a leader who will try to destroy any person who offers even the mildest criticisms of him.
At this moment, the Republican Party are in the grips of an extreme form of groupthink. Groupthink is a weakness in human nature and all groups and political persuasions are vulnerable to it if we’re not careful. Today the biggest problems of groupthink are found in the right wing. But the left wing can get caught up in groupthink too. In 2016, for instance, I had to leave a few facebook groups when I got into a few arguments with some Filipino leftists who were trying to defend Duterte’s extrajudicial killings. That same year, I had some bad experiences with some of the more rabid Bernie Sanders supporters.
You don’t have to give up your independent point of view if you join a political party. If you join the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the Socialist Party or the Libertarian Party, it doesn’t mean that you have to agree 100% with that party. I am a liberal Democrat and I voted for Joe Biden. But I know that I’ll be agreeing with Biden some of the time and I’ll be disagreeing with Biden some of the time. That used to be normal for Democrats and Republicans. We don’t owe blind loyalty to any political leader or political party.
Many anti-Trump Republican Senators and Representatives like Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Justin Amash, Mark Sanford, Liz Cheney and Ben Sasse have said is that in private, their Republican colleagues are very critical of Trump and worry about how Trump attacks democratic norms. But these Republican colleagues are afraid of voicing their concerns in public for fear of losing the support of the Republican base and losing friends, families and possibly getting death threats.
Here is a video I saw a few weeks ago by CNN’s Brianna Keilar where she calls out Republicans for warning Americans about President Trump in 2016, then choosing to ignore his “uniquely troubling nature” and ultimately end up supporting Trump and keeping quiet at Trump’s more troubling actions as President.
