Donald Trump will not just go away

• Author: Kathy Sheridan
• Published date: 29 June 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

In a 24-hour span last week, Americans experienced the whiplash of Donald Trump being lionised by veteran Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for stacking three conservative judges on the court expressly to strip a constitutional right from women, while just yards away parades of Trump's own Republican political appointees were providing detailed accounts of his efforts to tear up the same constitution and steal the presidency

In a functioning democracy, Thursday's live testimony by former Georgia electoral worker Shaye Moss and her grandmother Ruby Freeman, describing their monstrous defamation by the president, would have instantly united a nation in a reset of its democratic values and public morality.

The president of the United States baselessly accused an ordinary woman and her grandmother of industrial scale electoral fraud, deliberately putting them in the crosshairs of a homicidal mob convinced — by him — that the election had been stolen from him. Freeman had to abandon her home for two months after thugs broke in to effect a "citizen's arrest" and the FBI warned that her life was in danger. Her granddaughter quietly told the hearings that the constant threats, harassment and vile racism have turned her into a fearful recluse who has gained 27kg.

Equally staggering in its own way was the procession of former top Trump Republican appointees detailing how a losing president had tried to pull off a coup using the tactics of a crazed old ruler of a banana republic — and how he had come within a whisker of succeeding.

First he claimed widespread fraud by count officials, then tried to bully the Department of Justice to switch the electoral college vote to one that favoured him, then provoked the insurrection whereby organised thugs roamed the Capitol seeking to hang vice-president Mike Pence. All this was laid out in authoritative evidence, by Trump loyalists in many cases.

A couple of elements made many witnesses particularly compelling. These were the Trump loyalists still in his administration in the period leading up to January 6th but who finally put up a stout resistance to actions they deemed profoundly undemocratic, immoral and illegal. In doing so they drew the wrath of the mob upon themselves and their families. Rusty Bowers, Arizona House speaker and ardent Trump supporter, testified about a gunman who threatened Bowers's neighbour. He spoke about people on pick-ups outside the family home with videos blaring that Bowers was a paedophile, a...