Trump Acquitted, America Indicted

Not surprisingly, former President Donald J. Trump was acquitted in the United States Senate of charges of incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection levied against him by the House of Representatives.

I am not generally someone given to rash judgements on historical matters. Especially regarding the United States, which from my personal observation, has tremendous resilience as well as awesome powers of recuperation and reinvention never seen in History.

However, I make bold to say that except Trump is politically neutered and made to account for his many sins in office, January 6, 2021 will be considered as the watershed day when American decline became irreversible.

Unless there is accountability, the legacy of January 6, 2021 will forever burden American democracy. Together with today's acquittal of Donald Trump they both signalthat American democracy has climbed into a children's slide.

We all know that once you climb into a children's slide, there is only one route to go, and that is downwards. Your only opportunity to climb out is if you are still hanging from its top.

The United States Senate had an opportunity to extricate America while it was still at the top of the slide, by dishing out justice to Donald Trump. It failed to do so today, and the descent has started.

Only justice and accountability for January 6, 2021 can extricate America. All eyes must now turn on the judicial system because the U.S. political system has obviously failed to extract accountability.

America’s failure to extract accountability from an avowed white supremacist President, will have unfathomable consequences on American society.

As a pointer, I do not see how non-white Americans will fight to the death, and shed their blood in future battlesdefending America, defending American values, and defending American democracy, when they know in their innermost hearts and the bottom of their minds, that American exceptionalism is built on a hoax. The hoax of democratic rule of law and racial equality.

And I do not see how white Americans alone can pick up the slack of unenthusiasm stimulated in other races, ifthey are left alone to bear the burden of projecting American power and waning prestige abroad.

Therefore, unless Donald Trump is made to personally account for his self-evident political and moral transgressions, acknowledged around the globe, Americanpower and prestige abroad will rapidly recede.

Coupled with the inevitably ensuing racial tensions at home, this lack of political or judicial accountability will be the bullhorn signaling the long-predicted era of American decline.

The only thing still counting in America's favor is that no other superpower on earth, referring to China and Russia,has shown the capacity and capability to step into the moral vacuum being created by America's accelerating moral deficit with Trumpism as the accelerant.

With American moral authority in terminal recession as perceived across the globe, the world will become a very unstable international jungle, where might is right, and the great lord it over the small, with no nation able to muster the moral credentials and righteous indignation to cry foul.

By acquitting Donald J. Trump, a second time, the Republican Party especially those who voted to acquit him this time, have brought his sins down upon their heads.

History shall judge them very harshly as it inevitably judges all those who stand against the Truth.

On the contrary, regarding the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump in the House of Representatives and convict him in the Senate, I think even more than the Democrats, they are the real heroes of American democracy and the last vestiges of the rapidly dwindling American moral greatness.

History will be extremely kind to them. Their moral authority has grown exponentially. But regarding their immediate individual political futures, I cannot say as much.

We await and watch out for the verdict of History, which is always merciless, unremitting, and irreparable, favoring some and disfavoring others, depending upon where they stand in relation to the objective truth.

Anthony Chuka Konwea, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, MNSE, FNIStructE, MNICE.