This morning, while helping my nephew strip tobacco, one of his neighbors stopped by to shoot the breeze. This neighbor is originally from Wisconsin, so I thought he might have a different point of view than most locals. Additionally, he never has any reason to be on the road by my house, so I thought it unlikely I’d risk being run over while out walking along the road if I accidentally pricked a Trumpian. During a lull I asked him if he thought Trump would be peached (corruption intended).
He said he thought Trump probably would be impeached but not convicted. I then went on to say that the thing he was being charged with was so simple and the proof was so airtight, what with the transcript plus Trump’s open admission of having done the thing in the charge, it seemed like an open and shut case.
Knowing how impervious to news my nephew is, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when he asked what Trump was being charged with. The neighbor was also just as ignorant of what the charge was. Unlike trying to tell anybody about what all Mueller dug up, explaining this charge was easy. I was able to say in one sentence, “He’s being charged with withholding aid already authorized to Ukraine in exchange for getting the head of Ukraine to look for dirt on Biden. That’s using the power of the Presidency for personal gain.”
Thus ended the easy part. Neither my nephew nor the neighbor saw the qualitative difference between this and the sorts of things all politicians do. And the what about Hillary something something push back was this — “What about Clinton using the White House as a place to have sex with that woman?”
Was Clinton only able to find someone for consensual sex besides his wife because of the power of his office? And did any of that sexual activity cost the taxpayers any money of affect U.S. policy? Of course not. But the push back was so stupid, I moved to shift the conversation on to something else by offering up the assessment that whatever anybody in Washington does, we’re all going to live until we die.
After that we moved on to the extended hot dry spell, kiln drying wood, tobacco diseases, etc, etc.
Bottom line — This conversation didn’t make me hopeful the coming months will be easy. Only our side is actively observing the state of play.