It would seem that McConnell feels a need to disguise the fact that the Senate impeachment trial is a sham and a cover up. Americans expect a fair trial. Assuming most Americans have retained at least some shred of sanity, McConnell's obvious cover up would lead them to vote out Trump and the senators who participated in this cover up next November. It's clear that what we know about Trump is just the tip of the iceberg, and more awful stuff about Trump will be coming out after the Senate trial. McConnell and most of the Republican senators know how bad Trump is. The question is why they would risk their own political careers in protecting him, if it's inevitable that the American public will find out just how horrible he is. Won't this backfire on his GOP defenders?
So why would McConnell be willing to take this risk? Does he think that the Fox News world view is the one that most Americans share? Does he believe that most Americans don't care and are not paying attention? Does he believe that public perception no longer matters because the only thing that matters is the use of raw power to get the results he wants? Is he right about that in a way that people like me, who do care and who are paying attention, cannot understand? I guess we won't know for sure until November.
But it would seem that McConnell's bet is that he has no future if Trump has none, and so he and the rest of the GOP must go all in and do whatever it takes to insure he stays in office. And if that means running a sham trial in the Senate, so be it. Once he gets past that, then he will do whatever is necessary to insure he gets elected. If that requires Moscow Mitch to work with the Russians to subvert the election, so be it. If this makes him look bad in the history books, so be it. History is written by the victors, and he intends to win. And so that's what's at stake. The Democrats are going to run on what we know and will continue to learn about Trump's corruption, and they will run in the House and Senate against the cultists who support him. We'll find out what kind of a country we have become.
Maybe most Americans don't care that the GOP has become this cult of raw power. I honestly don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter what most Americans think anymore, because most American by a 3-million-vote margin voted for HRC in '16, and that didn't matter. And it's likely if the election is close again, as it's likely to be, then the interference of Russia and others could throw it to Trump once again. This is McConnell's bet. If he's going to lose, he's going to lose fighting on this hill, and he'll fight with all the raw power he has or can enlist from elsewhere.
His winning is not a sure thing, but if it turns out that McConnell's calculation is correct, if next November Trump gets reelected, and McConnell and enough GOP senators get elected to retain the majority, then we will have clearly passed the point of no return. For the last three disgraceful years under Trump and McConnell, the United States has become a dysfunctional banana republic. Elected Republicans and the people who support them either don't understand that or they want it. The election in November will provide Americans a last chance to decide if they want to make it permanent.