Motus Mentis

The lovely Nina and I are back in the States after a ten-day visit to Ireland. We spent time with family in Lucan (a western suburb of Dublin), and toured around a bit. Among the latter were a “black-taxi” tour of the troubled sections of Belfast (an area still deeply divided, in which the walls put up during the Troubles to separate Protestant and Catholic enclaves are still standing, with their gates closed at night); a visit to the Titanic museum, also in Belfast; a look at the Book of Kells in Trinity College, Dublin, and a two-day road-trip to County Clare, on the west coast, where we visited the spectacular Cliffs of Moher, and drove extensively through the Burren.

There was also an awful lot of Guinness, and daily Irish Breakfasts, for which I now must atone.

As usual I paid little attention to the news while we were away, and I am still catching up. As far as I can tell things are pretty much the same here, by which I mean that we still seem to be moving smoothly and steadily toward civil war. Apparently even the Washington Post has finally caught on to this increasingly obvious fact, and ran a story about it last Saturday. The authors generally pooh-poohed the idea, without saying why; but because they couldn’t sign off without a swipe at Donald Trump (I think it must be in the standard contract at the Post), they offered this:

Then there’s the persistent worry by some about the 2020 election. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,’ Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday.

On that score, Cohen is not the only one who is concerned. As far back as 2016, Trump declined to say whether he would concede if he lost the election to Hillary Clinton, prompting then-President Barack Obama to warn that Trump was undermining American democracy. “That is dangerous,’ Obama said.

That issue was uppermost in the mind of Joshua Geltzer, a senior Justice Department official under Obama, when he recently wrote an op-ed for CNN urging the country to prepare for the possibility that Trump might not “leave the Oval Office peacefully’ if he loses in 2020.

“If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020 .”‰.”‰. he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the U.S. government potentially at his disposal,’ Geltzer, now a professor at Georgetown Law Center, wrote in his op-ed in late February.

Geltzer urged both major parties to require their electoral college voters to pledge to respect the outcome of the election and suggested that it might be necessary to ask the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reaffirm their loyalty to the Constitution over Trump.

“These are dire thoughts,’ Geltzer wrote. “But we live in uncertain and worrying times.’

The irony of raising concerns about Republicans not accepting election results did not, I am sure, cross the authors’ minds. Meanwhile, I see that Jerrold Nadler has today subpoenaed 81 people variously associated with Donald Trump, as part of the Democrats’ tireless effort to find some way — at whatever cost to the lives and reputations of scores of innocent people who now will feel the crushing, arbitrary power of the State — to eject from office the man who won the election three years ago.

But I’ll leave all that for later. We’re a little weary, and need to rest up for a day or two. Back soon.