First, an apology. I’ve found it difficult to blog consistently since the inauguration. This is a result of two factors. The first is my own tendency to take roughly a week to write a blog post; I’m not currently wired to crank out a post every day.
But I’m going to try to pick up the pace from here on out. We in the #resistance simply need to keep punching: frequently, accurately, and hard.
The second factor is the sheer amount of pyrotechnic noise being generated by this administration, across so many different areas of concern. From health care to refugees to Betsy fucking Devos to this week’s astonishing silencing of Elizabeth Warren’s speech on the Senate floor…it’s been difficult for me to deep-dive on a single issue. Because a few hours later, without fail, some new, precious aspect of American life is engulfed in flames.
So today and going forward I’m going to try to be as brief as I can, while simultaneously trying to cut as deep as I can.
Let me start (and end) today with one issue: the issue that strikes me as this President’s greatest vulnerability. This is the pressure point that has the best chance of ejecting him from public life, and therefore stabilizing our children’s futures, once and for all.
It’s the tax returns.
Here’s the heart of the matter.
The idea that the Republicans in the United States Congress are comfortable with this President not releasing his tax returns - which is to say, that they are comfortable going about their business willfully ignorant of the degree to which the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces is in debt to Russia - represents a shocking and unprecedented state of affairs for our country.
It also, in my opinion, strongly indicates the existence of actual evidence that can actually bring this President down.
If the evidence were anything less than seismic, we would have seen it a long time ago.
Now, there’s a part of me that wants to deep-dive on why these Republicans are so willfully ignorant, why they’re willing to literally jeopardize the fate of the planet to maintain their own self-interest…but that’s the post for a longer-winded me on a less urgent day.
Today, let’s focus on what the fuck we need to do.
Because I believe that if we in the #resistance find a way to marshal our considerable resources and press down on this one issue - relentlessly, like tens of millions of thumbs on a nerve - we’ll succeed. The truth will out. And I believe that the exposure of this evidence will flip the otherwise morally barren Republicans in Congress. McCain and Graham and yes, even the sickening McConnell and Ryan…if these men are confronted with evidence that the man holding the nuclear football is nine or ten figures in hock to Putin’s Russia…they will act.
Now, I hasten to add, they will not act because they have finally reached their moral breaking point. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that morality does not guide the actions of these men. Rather, they will act simply because they will lose their jobs if they do not. A majority of their constituencies will demand action. And that action will be the beginning of the end of this administration.
Friends, these tax returns exist. They are not some idiot rescue fantasy spun in our desperate minds. They’re fucking real. And they are the lever we’re looking for.
Let me expand slightly on my definition of “tax returns,” given the very real possibility that our President kept his financial relationship with Russia off the books. These transactions are on some books somewhere. Hundreds of millions of dollars do not otherwise change hands. There are multiple documents and files which prove the precise nature of these transactions. These documents are currently in the possession of people within Trump’s inner circle, and the Kremlin. Squint, and you can hardly tell the difference.
So let’s spell it out, plain as day:
The leverage to expel this President exists.
How many degrees of separation are you - I’m talking to you, reader - from someone in possession of some corner of this evidence?
Betcha it’s fewer than six.
So: towards this unassailably moral end:
What can you do?
What will you do?
Message me, y’all. Like our fellow soldier Rosie O’Donnell, I am here to serve. And I too have a big fat mouth.
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