Sen. Lamar Alexander was one of the key votes in transforming our republic into a cult of personality in which the emperor is completely unaccountable to the law or the people. So you’d think he’d be better able to explain his decision to turn Donald Trump’s impeachment trial into a sham:
CHUCK TODD: Does it wear on you, though, that one of the foundational reasons, uh, ways that the framers wrote the Constitution was almost fear of foreign interference?
ALEXANDER: That’s true.
TODD: So … and here it is.
ALEXANDER: Well, if you hooked up with Ukraine to wage war on the United States, as the first senator from Tennessee did, you could be expelled. But this wasn’t that. This was the kind of … What the president should have done is, if he was upset about Joe Biden and his son, what they were doing in Ukraine, he should have called the attorney general and told him that and let the attorney general handle it the way they always handle cases that involve public figures.
TODD: And why do you think he didn’t he do that?
ALEXANDER: Maybe he didn’t know to do it.
TODD: I, okay …
[Both laugh]
TODD: This has been a rationale that I’ve heard from a lot of Republicans: “Well, boy, he’s still new to this.” At what point, though, is he no longer new to this?
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but … “Great question, Chuck Todd!”
Really? That’s the answer? Donald Trump isn’t irredeemably corrupt, he’s just an idiot who can’t be bothered to learn how to do his job?
That’s not terribly comforting.
If you’d hired a bathroom attendant who wouldn’t stop eating urinal cakes in front of your customers and occasionally dry-humped the sous-chef on his cigarette breaks, you’d fire him. You wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, he’s only been at his job for three years. Give him a break.”
But if he’s president? Nah, it would be too destabilizing to remove him. Let’s wait until he leaves the nuclear football behind in the champagne room at the Spearmint Rhino. But keep in mind, that’s only impeachable if he actually trades the launch codes for a hand job.
The Republican Party is already the joke of the 21st century. We have 80 years to go, but I don’t think we’ll see anything quite this absurd again until, I don’t know, Emperor Donald Trump Jr.
(Insert your own vomit GIF in the comments below.)
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