At this point his image, his character, his presidency have deteriorated beyond salvage. The Trump Administration will not get better. It will go either of two ways:
► He can try to distract the nation by provoking international conflicts while stoking racism and xenophobia at home.
► He can leave office through some orderly process.
Pray for the latter.
If it is to be the latter, we need to start preparing our Democratic and Republican members of Congress to respond in a way that serves our nation best.
First, there can be no pardons.
Conservative pols and pundits will say that pardons are necessary for the nation to “heal.” They will be wrong. The nation won’t begin to heal until the people who voted for Trump are confronted with a full accounting of his involvement with organized crime, money laundering, and other illegal activities. That can only be done through investigation and prosecution. Lance the boil. Let Mueller finish the job.
Second, his appointees need to be fired too.
This is particularly true for the appointees who were confirmed despite evidence of their own corruption — HHS Secretary Tom Price, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. But don’t stop there. In order to really clean house, we need to make sure the momentum of Trump’s decline takes the whole of his administration with him. Insist that Pence must start from scratch, and that he must put forward nominees who will be met with bipartisan consensus.
These should be our instructions to all the members of Congress who will call for the nation to “come together.” Reconciliation and unity can only be achieved by first scouring the corruption away. It’s up to us to figure out how to start framing that message now. It is the patriotic path forward.
(This is probably the most centrist damn post I have ever written. Kos.)