Trashing the citadel...

The president of the United States - yes, the actual president - incited his followers to invade the Capitol buildings in Washington, the citadel of American democracy. If this was happening in what Donald Trump calls a “shithole country”, we’d call it an attempted coup. Five people died. Having seen a lot of footage of the rioting, I’m only amazed the death toll wasn’t a great deal higher.

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has spoken to the Pentagon’s top general about “preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike”. Though Trump is due to leave the White House in ten days, he could still do a lot of damage between now and then. He already has blood on his hands, along with his many ‘enablers’ in the Republican party. That’s even before we factor in the number of Americans - 340,000 and counting - who have died from Covid-19 while Trump did nothing except take to Twitter with his lies, taunts and conspiracy theories.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”, Trump boasted in 2016. Can this narcissistic psychopath really be allowed to remain in post, even for one more day? Ideally he should be locked inside the Oval Office, with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pearl-handled revolver, and told to “consider his future”. Failing that, he should be frogmarched out of the White House - tomorrow preferably - by military police, and deposited, like a sack of rubbish, in Pennsyhlvania Avenue. There’s still time to change the locks, fumigate the building and prepare for the low-key inauguration of “Sleepy Joe” Biden on January 20th…