Trump is a domestic terrorist, rapist. He's despoiling our histories and erecting monuments to himself in their place

[bigtree]

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten… History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - (Orwell's 1984: Winston Smith, reading Goldstein’s book, Part Two, Chapter 9, Page 155)

By the end of Trump's term he will have unilaterally destroyed whatever is in his way to transform the history of a city he's never supported - not the government or the people - into a fetishism of himself.

He's like an elderly serial rapist whose victim is forced to bear his children, obligated to care for the ever-present reminders of his putridity into eternity.

If we don't stop him in his tracks before he builds this idolistic palace, and the others he has planned, republicans will defend them forever as monuments to his and their open contempt for America and the American people

Garrett Graff puts a finer point on this...

___It matters a great deal whether you have congressional leaders who care about the Constitution and their responsibilities as a co-equal branch of government to hold the excesses of the executive to account, a la Sam Ervin and Howard Baker or even Mitt Romney, … or you have moral cowards like Mike Johnson and John Thune who care first and foremost about serving a party leader and his personality cult. It matters whether you have justices on the Supreme Court who believe in the court’s rule to uphold precedents and established law … or you have partisan hacks like Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts who see their role as deciding the politics first and then backing into the law, Calvinball style. As Justice Jackson dissented this year, “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”

For generations, we have been saved from these fates and uncertainties because voters chose leaders of both parties with good character who, in turn, appointed people of good character, who, in turn, were constrained by a professional and nonpartisan civil service of good character that took seriously their oaths to serve the Constitution and not an individual.

That most basic protection was lost last year when voters returned Donald Trump to office. And what Donald Trump internalized early on was that our government by norms was for sisses. Most of what we think of as the functioning of the US government turns out to be norms, not laws — and the laws aren’t very powerful if you don’t care about the fear of breaking them. (Look at the video Kristi Noem is playing at TSA checkpoints across the country, as clear a violation of the Hatch Act as there ever has been.) His very elevation and return as president violated the one check-and-balance that the Founders didn’t write down: Be a good, caring person.

Once you elect or appoint someone who has no moral core — who then appoints people with no moral core and fires those who do — nothing else in the system of checks-and-balances turns out to matter.

If you step into the White House as president thinking it’s your own house — not the people’s house, not a national treasure you’re inheriting for four years, handed down across centuries and generations by the 44 men who have lived there before — it turns out that there’s not really anything that can stop you from tearing down the literal White House if you really want to. What’s stopped the previous 44 is that none of them would have ever dreamed of such a thing in the first place.

The President’s House – as the White House was known – was seriously affected by the fire, as seen in this watercolor by George Munger (ca. 1814-1815).


“The British invaded Washington with a primary goal,” Bill Bushong, a historian with the White House Historical Association (WHHA), told BBC Mundo. "That goal was to demoralize Americans, to symbolically put them on their knees by burning their public buildings."

Judith Lewis Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror wrote that,

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”

“The essential act of war is destruction… War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

“We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

(excerpts from Orwell's 1984)