Charles M. Blow: It Is So Much Worse Than I Thought

[babylonsister]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/opinion/trump-russia-michael-cohen-charity.html

It Is So Much Worse Than I Thought
How can a family that can’t run a charity run a country?
By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
Dec. 19, 2018


I will be going on book leave soon — today is my last column for a while because of the holiday schedule — to write what I believe to be the most important thing that I’ve ever written.

No, it’s not about Donald Trump, just in case you were wondering.

But since I have written almost exclusively about Trump for more than two years, please allow me this parting assessment: It is so much worse than I thought.

My original objections to Trump, the things that pushed me into the Resistance, were his immorality, dishonesty, fraudulence and grift.

I freely admit now that I was seeing only the pointy edge of an enormous machine. I had no idea how immoral Trump actually is.

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I could not have predicted the overwhelming number of contacts that would have existed between people in Trump’s orbit and the Russians during the campaign, or the number of people who would take plea deals and ultimately be charged, indicted or convicted of lying about those contacts.

I couldn’t have predicted any of it, but here we are, and the president, his congressional backers and his citizen supporters are continuing to tell us that this doesn’t matter as much as we think, that this is a politically driven prosecution, that everyone does what Trump has done.

They are all wrong. This is huge, and the longer we pretend that it isn’t, the more damage we do to the health and stability of our own country.

While I am away, I will enjoy not having to follow the hourly insanities too closely, but every day I will worry about the republic in which we live. Trump has the capacity to damage or even destroy it. That’s not hyperbole. That’s an observation informed by a close reading of history.