Burke: How did we get here, and how to we get out?

By Tom Burke / Herald columnist

Donald Trump is causing marital discord in the Burke household.

Ah ha!, you say. A MAGA (Make America Great Again) and a TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) under the same roof? Take that, you liberal “enemy-of-the-people” columnist! Your wife knows better than you.

Alas, dear reader, it ain’t that.

Here’s the dilemma:

My wife is a product of her upbringing. She attended a Catholic elementary and a private, convent high school. She graduated from a Catholic nursing college and New York University Long Island and Johns Hopkins and through all those formative years was taught basic, solid American and Catholic fundamentals such as: service to others, fair play, love of God, telling the truth, being honest, love of country, the American founding-fathers story, how our government is dedicated to freedom and justice, how the Greatest Generation beat the Nazis and won in the Pacific, and why godless communism was such a threat and how we beat it.

In other words, she absorbed all the values we derive from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan.

I was raised in a more secular environment and, after careers in government and journalism, take a much more jaundiced view of our world and how government operates.

And therein lies the conflict.

She pays rapt attention to the news. She hears Trump lying; like how he says he never met Les Parnas and then we hear an hour-and-a-half tape of Trump and Parnas at a private dinner; or how he didn’t withhold the Ukraine aid — “It was a perfect call” — except John Bolton (who hasn’t lied, like Trump, 16,000 times in three years) writes Trump did.

And she listens to the impeachment proceedings and proof Trump done it; how all the president’s men don’t dispute the facts; and how 53 Republican senators wouldn’t vote to even hear evidence or the witnesses Trump flat-out denied the House.

And she asks me, “How does he get away with it?”

And I answer, “Because the world, at least the Republican world in the House and Senate, is filled with corrupt people.”

She gets upset and still asks, “How?” and doesn’t believe there can be such treachery in our own American government, not the American government she was taught about and believes in.

Ergo: the discord.

Because I patiently explain there have always been those who have aided dictators and would-be despots throughout history: Hitler had Goebbels, Himmler, and the SS; the Ku Klux Klan had racists, bigots and anti-Catholics/anti-Semites marching up the 1925 D.C. streets in hoods with burning crosses; Stalin had Molotov, Khrushchev and Beria; while Donald Trump has Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Sean Hannity, Alan Dershowitz and Rudy Giuliani.

I expound on how the current crop of Republicans are more concerned with their power and seats in Congress; and how they’re terrified of Donald Trump’s Twitter account and his cult-like base; and that “Moscow Mitch” McConnell is only concerned with being Senate Majority Leader and the rest of the country can go scratch.

I explain it isn’t about them doing right for our country (even if it’s only allowing witnesses to testify): it’s about self-interest, money and power.

I describe how the terror of an evolving society has driven 40 percent of Americans into the arms of a grifter who claims to have all the answers, “I alone can fix it.” (Hmmm … he’s had three years, why isn’t it fixed yet? But never mind that, says he, keep your eye on my latest flashy object.)

But, but, but, my wife still can’t believe there are such people in our world, in our government, in AMERICA! who would lie, cheat and steal; for Donald Trump.

Americans died; in WWI, in WWII, in Korea, in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and a thousand other places; and they lost limbs and suffered from PSTD and traumatic brain injury (not “headaches”) to preserve our liberty and the rule of law.

Those sacrifices cannot be in vain. Why did they fight and die if we now have a president without limits who can do whatever he wants, according to his defense lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, when he said, “If he does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

So, as the Republicans aid a “descent into constitutional madness” we must resist ignorance, greed, self-interest, bigotry and hate, and everything Donald John Trump stands for.

But if Republican corruption prevails and he stays president, we gotta make sure that on Jan. 20, 2021 he skips out on the inauguration — from the shame of losing — and crawls back to where he came from: into his fantasy world of narcissism, delusion and paranoia.

Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.