"So what?" HELLO! Kamala Harris is on her way to winning in 2024! The economy is strong and America needs a moral leader

‘So what’: Two words that best sum up the nature of Donald Trump
Echo opinion published in The Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness) by columnist Eugene Robinson.

Donald Trump’s alleged January 6th response related to Mike Pence is damning.

With a month to go until the election, voters have been given the perfect distillation of the myriad reasons Donald Trump must never again be president: “So what❓”

That is what Trump said during the shocking and bloody Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when told his vice president was being hustled to safety, according to court papers filed Wednesday by special counsel Jack Smith. So what if the rioters were chanting “hang Mike Pence” as they stalked the halls? 

So what if the mob beat and trampled scores of police officers and forced members of Congress to flee for their lives?

Any decent human being would have been alarmed, or at least concerned. But according to the court filing, Trump’s display of callousness came just minutes after he had egged the mob on, declaring in a tweet that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

What Trump wanted Pence to do was refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020, election. For the first time in our nation’s history, a president refused to accept the decision of the voters, refused to honor dozens of court rulings confirming his defeat, and for hours refused to lift a finger while a mob of his supporters sacked the Capitol. If this alone does not disqualify Trump from ever again being president, what is wrong with us?

And what is wrong with Trump’s running mate, JD Vance? Does he think Americans are so stupid that they’ll believe him when he says, with Ivy League smoothness and a practiced tone of faux sincerity, that up is down?

“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20,” the senator from Ohio claimed during the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night, earning himself a chapter in the annals of disingenuousness.

Yes, thankfully, the inauguration of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was peaceful — but Trump never “gave over” anything, since he had already absconded to his Florida estate (taking boxes of highly classified documents with him). Trump was the first modern president to snub his successor’s swearing-in, another departure from our democratic traditions.

To this day, neither Trump nor Vance will forthrightly acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. And to this day, Trump will not commit to accepting defeat if — hopefully, when — Harris beats him on Election Day.

“So what❓” That has been Trump’s one constant policy position, his North Star: Nothing really matters. He was for abortion rights his whole life, but to win a Republican nomination he had to be antiabortion, so he changed. But then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, thanks to the three justices he appointed, and he saw how unpopular the ruling was, and so now he shifts back and forth on the issue, depending on the audience.

“EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,”  🤥😖😡Trump announced this week on social media. This might come as a surprise to antiabortion activists who are counting on a second Trump administration to somehow stop the wave of state-level voter referendums that are guaranteeing the right to an abortion. But so what? Trump will surely tell those activists a different story.

So what if Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury? So what if the charges — falsification of business records — stemmed from the way he illegally disguised the payment of $130,000 in hush money to an adult-film actress for keeping quiet about her sexual liaison with Trump? Who cares?

So what if Trump spent a year obstructing attempts by the National Archives to retrieve the classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago? So what if he kept this sensitive material in a gaudy ballroom and a chandeliered bathroom? What’s it to you?

So what if Trump called the top election official in Georgia and pressured him to announce the discovery of just enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory in that state? “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said, in a conversation he cannot deny because it was recorded.

But so what if Trump lies constantly, blatantly, sometimes viciously, even when there is no dispute about the truth? So what if he continues to lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, falsely calling them “illegal” and falsely claiming they eat cats and dogs? So what if he lies about crime, about the economy, about kids supposedly having sex reassignment surgeries at their schools?

So what if Trump called the top election official in Georgia and pressured him to announce the discovery of just enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory in that state? “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said, in a conversation he cannot deny because it was recorded.

But, so what if Trump lies constantly, blatantly, sometimes viciously, even when there is no dispute about the truth? So what if he continues to lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, falsely calling them “illegal” and falsely claiming they eat cats and dogs? So what if he lies about crime, about the economy, about kids supposedly having sex reassignment surgeries at their schools?

Nothing matters to Trump except Trump❗ As easily as he forsakes truth and as easily as he could forsake Pence,💢 he would forsake the nation. That is the “so what” of this election, which Harris must win❗.

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers.