Perhaps somehow I've misread — by now, several times over — this comment by the NY Times' masterful Roger Cohen: "[Fiona Hill's] truth made Republicans squirm, because no 'beacon of hope' can survive their craven sellout."
The beacon is the United States, which our multicolored Mephistopheles of a president, rather than keeping or remaking it great, has simply denied what it was meant to be. Trump's prelapsarian mission was "a frontal attack on the rule of law" in this Madisonian republic, a tradition of which we could all be proud.
We were, once. But pride, as we also know, comes before the fall. And rather than "squirm" at Dr. Hill's surgical delineation of the snuffing out of our light — of America's upward, historical gradations of light over darkness — Republicans are reveling at having dodged the bullet of their constitutional malpractice.
Hill's father idealistically dreamed of moving from his class-locked, hierarchical society to one in which the "ever renewed gathering-in of strangers made [everyone] equal," writes Cohen. Such was our theoretical foundation, anyway, in time codified into law. Her father never made it, constrained, as he was, by the tethers of family duty. But Fiona did, and her inherited dream was in fact "the very revolutionary American idea [now] under attack from Trump and his Republican enablers and the Fox News fabulists."
Under Trump and his corrupt privy council, America is now a society in which Republicans are on top, in which Republicans make the rules, in which Republicans effectively rewrite the laws and only selectively follow the Constitution. All others are but pests — militant Dudley Do-Rights who cannot comprehend the need for political expediency; mere blighters who cite antediluvian claptrap that means nothing to those who know better.
Of foremost importance to the ruling class is Trump's reelection. And if achieving that goal means extorting an ally and exposing it to "kinetic" destruction and Soviet-style repression of imperialist roguery, then so be it. "Nothing [here] rises to the level of impeachable offenses," says "moderate" Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. "I’ve not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion," says another extremist moderate, Texas' Rep. Will Hurd.
Dr. Hill may have been better off emigrating to a more democratically destined country — one in which at least two political parties vie for power, and one can't rig the rules so that the other remains a disposable joke. "[The GOP is] not a party anymore in the traditional sense; it’s a cult," Republican strategist John Weaver tells the Washington Post. "So [Trump will] be successful in averting conviction in the Senate and removal from office because the party is completely subjugated to him."
As we all are.