Impeach Pit

 So the new argument is whether impeachment only makes things worse. The current assumption is that the Senate will not convict, leaving Trump free to continue his established ways, and his most rabid followers to virtually and literally attack those who opposed him.

This morning I heard a respected expert suggest a 9/11-style commission as a substitute. My first thought was that, today, almost ten years after 9/11, there remains a significant part of the American public that rejects the findings of that commission, that puts forward a range of conspiracies from the idea that the Twin Towers were collapsed by bombs and not the plane strikes, that the entire event was a "false flag" to justify Middle East intervention, and even that the planes never struck the towers and the Pentagon and all the video we have is fake (and the live broadcasts were a ruse that the networks were in on from the beginning).

Commissions and hearings just drag out the controversy and allow the fringe nuts to point to theories expounded in that testimony as "the real truth" or as evidence of whatever conspiracy they choose to accept.

Short of Trump dying (and I'm not even sure that would work, as there would surely be people who presume reports of his death are false--either perpetrated by his supporters or his detractors), I don't know how to end his influence on our politics in the short term. As was pointed out recently, Juan Peron died in 1974, but the movement he began in 1946 persists in modern Argentina.