Sunday, after days of waiting, Attorney General William Barr delivered his summary to Congress of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has an idea about what comes next, asserting that even without any further recommended criminal charges, there’s a national reckoning that must take place with the fact that Donald Trump was ever able to ascend to the presidency in the first place. That issue’s solution includes but is not limited to getting a Democrat to replace Trump in the White House come 2020.
Ocasio-Cortez shared, in part:
‘As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems. Even foreign influence plays on nat’l wounds that we refuse to address: income inequality, racism, corruption,a willingness to excuse bigotry. He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020. But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified + reanimated.’
It’s true — Donald Trump didn’t ascend to power in a vacuum, and not just because of Russia’s help via their disinformation campaign against the Democrats. High-dollar Republican donors poured overwhelming sums of money into getting him elected, across the country, untold numbers of Americans turned out for rallies in which central themes included the demonization of immigrants and the violent mocking of opponents, and very few high-profile Republicans dissented in the slightest. They jumped at the opportunity to use a Trump presidency for pet causes like packing the nation’s judiciary with right-wingers.
That charade can’t last forever, though. There’s not any particular indication that House Democrats will pursue impeachment proceedings against Trump as of mid-Sunday afternoon, but the issues the Russia investigation has touched on have inescapably marked his presidency anyway. Trump is forever the guy who brought radically conservative figures into the White House for an administration that sees him routinely upending tenets of global policy because it suits him personally, financially or otherwise. According to his spokeswoman, he withdrew brand new sanctions on North Korea because he “likes” their dictatorial leader, Kim Jong Un.
Down at the street level, there have been further clear and toxic demarcations of the Trump presidency. In 2017, for instance, the FBI reports that hate crimes rose at a dramatic rate. They recorded a full 7,175 compared to 6,121 incidents the previous year. The spike is clearly not accounted for by the increase in law enforcement agencies participating in the hate crime reporting program in 2017, which maintaining the same rate would have culminated in some 360 additional crimes over the previous year, not more than 1,000 more.
More specifically, overall, counties that hosted Trump presidential campaign rallies also hosted a whopping 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, including to newly analyzed data.
In other words — something is very wrong that will not be addressed by Robert Mueller’s report, as Ocasio-Cortez herself has faced on a number of high-profile occasions when she’s been harassed with sexism or racism.
Check out Twitter’s response to the Congresswoman below…
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
