Trump bears a greater stigma than impeachment

Even though by all reports Donald Fredovich, that most personally insecure of presidents, is humiliated and furious about the stigma impeachment places on his name before the bar of history, he won't admit it. He and Nancy Pelosi are sparring over that very point. "Impeachment is for life," she points out, and no result of the highly dubious Senate "trial" yet to come will change the fact that Mr. Trump will go down in history as one of only three American presidents to be tried before the Senate for "high crimes and misdemeanors." Mr. Trump, of course, never admits to anything, no matter how obvious and undeniable.

But that whole argument is just as surreal and Twilight Zone-ish as the entire Trump era in general is. The president can't admit this to himself, of course, and neither can his supporters- at least to others. But there is no question of his place in history being somehow merely compromised by impeachment. His place in history is certain. It is set in stone. Impeachment makes it no worse, and while it might theoretically be possible for it to be improved, the nature of his dilemma precludes that.

Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He is personally unfit for the office he holds and unfit to a degree unprecedented in American history.

His presidency is a bad joke. The fact that he has served in that office and simply been who he is demeans it more than anything his critics can say or do. He is an ignorant, emotionally immature, crude bully without the slightest notion of what he's doing, lurching from decision to decision based on ill-informed whim and momentary impulse. He has alienated our allies, praised our enemies to the skies, and greatly paved the path of authoritarianism in the world, being himself an authoritarian at heart and an enemy of the freedoms and values for which our nation stands and which are embodied in the Constitution he swore at his inauguration to support and defend.

He has built a brand and a following out of ignorance- some of it willful, some not- and intolerance and cynicism and the darkest impulses of human nature. He has built a career out of corruption and lawlessness and greed. He has taken a nation which, with all its faults, has always valued fairness and compassion and sympathy for the underdog and not only governed it as a bully but has made bullying popular and fashionable among a loud and vocal minority of the American people.

He treats facts with scorn and truth with contempt, and as a result of his serving as our president, the world is laughing at us. Far from  "Making America Great Again," he has made America silly and small. And neither he nor his supporters apparently can tell the difference.

Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And however dishonest he or his followers might be about this, there is nothing more certain than that history will laugh at him, too. Being impeached does not compromise his place in history; there is very little that could.

He is a foolish and silly man whose historical significance is that he has given ignorance and paranoia and xenophobia a voice, who has managed to get the majority of those who identify themselves as "conservatives" in America to reveal their professed allegiance to freedom and free trade and patriotism and the Constitution to be sheer hypocrisy, and whose greatest misfortune is that he will appear in the pages of history at all.

Generations will laugh at Donald Trump, and that is a far less enviable thing than to go down in history as one of a handful of presidents to have been impeached. The worst mistake Donald Trump ever made was to put himself into a situation in which he could not help looking ridiculous in the eyes of history.