Stop Waiting for a Savior
August 21, 2018, was a low point in the Trump presidency: On the same day—indeed, in the same hour—the president’s former campaign chairman was found guilty of federal crimes, and his former lawyer pleaded guilty in another case. While the president may have weathered the storm of that summer day, this past Wednesday, November 13, presented a similarly ominous double spectacle. In the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., prosecutors provided their closing arguments against the Trump confidant Roger Stone for obstructing the investigation into Russian election interference. At the same time, less than a mile away, the House of Representatives was in the midst of its first public hearing in the impeachment inquiry against the president of the United States.
The split screen of Stone’s trial alongside impeachment hearings was a vision of the past and present of the investigations into the president. After years of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference, the story has rapidly shifted from Russia to Ukraine and from the special counsel’s
