Impeachment Cannot Heal This Divided Nation

By Cynthia Tucker (copied from: https://www.troyrecord.com)

There are two Americas, and they are at war.

In one, every word uttered by President Donald J. Trump is the golden gospel, swaddled in larger truths if hostile to simple facts. In the other, Trump is a habitual liar — a con man who has run the Oval Office as a criminal enterprise. To one America, Trump is a leader trying to salvage a nation set on a course of moral decay, attempting to turn it back to a time of purer values.

To the other America, the president is a flagrant reprobate, a lecherous narcissist with no moral fiber.

To one America, Trump is a strong defender of traditional Western mores, with their emphasis on Euro-centric values, “Father Knows Best” families and Caucasian cultural standards. To the other America, the president is an unrepentant racist, a bigot who vilifies racial and religious minorities, a demagogue who would turn back the progress of the last 50 years.

How will those diametrically opposed views of the Trump presidency ever be reconciled? Can they be?

There was nothing in the halting and reluctant testimony of Robert Mueller that could repair the breach, and it was foolish for anyone to expect there to be. Evidence of Trump’s perfidy has long been abundant and public. Any partisans willing to reconsider have had ample opportunity to do so.

But faith in Trump isn’t a rational exercise. It’s tantamount to a religion — or a cult. Trumpists have an existential fear of a browning America, a primal sense that their hegemony will be lost, and the president gives profane voice to their basest impulses. He is, he tells them, riding to their rescue. Neither rational arguments nor mounds of evidence can overcome that.

This is the backlash to the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. For racially resentful white voters, it was a harbinger of things to come, a reminder of inexorable demographic change.

The fear of a browning America has been brewing for decades. In his 2011 screed, “Suicide of a Superpower,” the ultraconservative politician and commentator Pat Buchanan predicted a swift decline for a nation that, in his view, was being overrun by people of color. Writer Peter Brimelow — an immigrant himself, albeit a white one — penned a similar tract, “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” back in 1995.

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