Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come

Yesterday, this happened:

President Trump has paid $2 million to eight charities as part of a settlement in which the president admitted he misused funds raised by the Donald J. Trump Foundation to promote his presidential bid and pay off business debts, the New York State attorney general said on Tuesday.

The foundation’s giving patterns and management came under scrutiny during Mr. Trump’s run for office, and last year the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit accusing the president and his family of using the foundation as an extension of their businesses and the campaign.

The payments were part of a settlement announced last month that capped a drawn-out legal battle. In the end, the president admitted in court documents that he had used the foundation to settle legal obligations of his businesses and even to purchase a portrait of himself.

The president of the United States admitted in court yesterday that he stole two million dollars from charities organized to help veterans.

(Trump settled because the alternative would have been litigation that would have exposed some of his finances. Think about what someone’s finances must look like when his lawyers tell him that the better option is to admit that he stole two million dollars from veterans to pay for a portrait of himself.)

This development, which would have simply ended a presidency in the Before Time, now barely even qualifies as a news story, because nobody cares. The reason nobody cares is because any news confirming that Donald Trump is a sociopathic thief is not really news: everybody already knows this.

That is why the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment vote later today will be a farce, as will be the full House’s adoption of those article of impeachment next week, as will be the “trial” held in the Senate shortly afterwards. Impeaching Trump is a farce because he’s being impeached for being exactly what everyone already knows he is. Not impeaching him would also be a farce, of course, because not impeaching a president like Trump — that is, a career criminal who makes a mockery of the law every day of his life — would make the law look like a joke.

But impeaching him by an almost straight party line vote, and then not removing him by another almost straight party line vote, also makes the law look like a joke.

One thing I’ve learned over the past three years is that patriotism can die, as surely as anything else in this world.

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.