"Not With a Bang But a Whimper"

Poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, was one of the twentieth century’s truly great literary downers. Among his best-known downers were The Waste Land (“April is the cruelest [sic] month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land . . .), The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .”), and above all, The Hollow Men with its soul-stirring last lines:

This is how the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

To be perfectly honest, I‘ve never been all that enamored with Eliot’s poetry; it is too dark, too disheartening and goyish for my tastes. And yet, The Hollow Men has been crawling up my spine for the past several days . . . ever since former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a hair-dyed fool of himself at a nearly two-hour press conference, only to then be followed by Sidney Powell - another member of the Trump “illegal team” - who crazily insisted that her boss’s “overwhelming victory” was ruined by the worst, nastiest, most bestial political crime/conspiracy in all American history. Against all sanity and logic, Ms. Powell, while somehow maintaining a straight face, accused Republican officials of being involved in a payoff scheme to manipulate voting machines. Her ramblings also included a mishmash of lunacy involving Venezuelan Socialists, German Communists and, of course, financial bogeyman George Soros. And all the while, Rudy’s hair-dye continued its drip-drip-dripping from temple to zygomatic arch. If this had been classic cinema, it no doubt would have starred Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester.

By day’s end, the Trump legal team (including Giuliani himself) issued a tweet stating “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not part of the Trump Legal Team. [sic] She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.” Talk about one’s world coming to an end “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Within 48 hours, things got even worse in Trumpland: Federal Judge Matthew Brann (a former conservative Republican and member in good standing of the Federalist Society who nonetheless was nominated by President Barack Obama to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2012) issued a scathing order dismissing the Trump campaign’s futile effort to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania, shooting down claims of widespread irregularities with mail-in ballots.

Brann wrote in his order that the Trump legal team had asked the court to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters. “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote, so much that the court would have no option but to stop the certification even though it would impact so many people. “That has not happened,” he concluded. Having been legally mauled by Judge Brann in Pennsylvania, Trump decided to turn attention towards Michigan, and issued an invitation to Republican leaders of the Wolverine State legislature to come visit him at the White House, hoping against hope that he could convince them to “take one for the team” by invalidating hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes. Another foray into Never Never Land, another failure; the Michiganders refused to beckon to their leader’s call and announced that they would certify Biden’s victory. The same thing happened with Georgia.

And that’s when the whimpering began in earnest . . .

For the past 4+ years, a heck of a lot of political practitioners, writers and geeks have wondered aloud how and why the vast majority of Republican offer holders have stood mutely by while their beloved leader has trashed, humiliated and torn asunder the very fabric of American democracy. How, we have queried, how is it possible for so many supposedly intelligent, patriotic people to let him get away with all the lies, the mindless dismantling of the America we know and love? Isn’t there, we have cried out, even a single heroic voice on the other side of the aisle that is capable of shouting out “You have done enough! Have you left no sense of decency?” like Joseph Welch of old? Those who know their political history will remember that Welch’s words (which he delivered on June 9, 1954) were aimed at then-Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who had turned the nation upside down and inside out with his paranoid conspiracy theories about the Communist takeover of America. Within 6 months of Welch’s rhetorical joust, the senate would censure McCarthy; within another 2 1/2 years, the disgraced “Tailgunner Joe,” long an alcoholic, died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 48. (n.b. It should be noted that back in the 1950s, McCarthy’s chief political advisor/amanuensis was a young New York attorney named Roy Marcus Cohn; a generation later, this same Roy Cohn would become chief political advisor/groomer for one Donald John Trump.)

As the whimpering grows ever louder, we now learn from Watergate journalist and CNN analyst Carl Bernstein that there has long been a sizeable number of Republican officeholders who privately despise Trump, even as they have remained faithful to him in public. Bernstein has now published a partial list of 21 Republican senators who have “privately expressed their disdain” for the president: the list includes Senators Rob Portman, Lamar Alexander, Ben Sasse, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Mike Braun, Todd Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Martha McSally, Jerry Moran, Pat Roberts, and Richard Shelby. In an interview with Vanity Fair staff writer Eric Lutz, Bernstein said: “We are witnessing the mad king in the final days of his reign, willing to scorch the Earth of his country and bring down the whole system . . . They know what's going on.” '

Finally, yesterday the whimper became manifest; the world as Donald Trump and his legions have known it, began its final descent into oblivion. Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, announced that the transition from Trump to Biden could finally commence. In a memorandum sent to White House employees late last night, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, wrote that Ms. Murphy had made an “ascertainment” about the results of the 2020 election “to allow the start of a presidential transition.” (Interestingly, Trump tweeted that he - and he alone - was responsible for passing along the transitional key card to the Biden team. This, of course, is yet another lie; federal law assigns this task to the GSA administrator alone . . . not the POTUS).

Almost immediately, the Biden transition team opened up their first “.gov” website: https://buildbackbetter.gov/ - and started announcing nominees for the new Cabinet. If you get a chance, follow this link and see who the President Elect has already nominated. Unlike with the Trump administration, these nominees (Secretary of State [Anthony Blinken], Treasury [Janet Yellen], Homeland Security [Alejandro Mayorkas], Ambassador to the United Nations [Linda Thomas-Greenfield] (back to being a Cabinet-level appointment), National Security Advisor [Jake Sullivan] Director of National Intelligence [Avril Haines] and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate [Former Secretary of State John Kerry] as well as his first appointment, Chief of Staff Ron Klain, . . . these nominees are a highly impressive group. The caliber of these men and women, the diversity of their experience, and the fact that expertise - not loyalty - is the bedrock of their collective appeal is the bipolar opposite of what we’ve been experiencing since January 2017.

Indeed, the whimper with which the Trump years are ending, will no doubt continue to be heard for years and years to come. The whimper of a loser who now, for perhaps the first time in his life, must face up the consequences of his actions.

For as T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, the fourth and final poem of his Four Quartets:

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

42 days until the senate elections in Georgia;

57 days until the inauguration of the nation’s 46th President.