"Americans, You Must Pay Attention Now," Frank Bruni, The New York Times

"Americans, You Must Pay Attention Now"

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

A confession: If it weren’t my job to stay on top of all things Trump, I’d take periodic breaks from the news, retreating for days on end.

It’s all too much. It’s all too wearying. The president’s provocations are ceaseless. The media’s coverage of them can be indiscriminate. The plot is oh so convoluted and ridiculously crowded: Which witness is George Kent and which is William Taylor and what happened to that Sondland character and is Vindman a colonel or a lieutenant or both or neither? Help!

I recently read about a poll that showed that the more an American thinks and talks about politics, the angrier he or she is likely to be. Is it any wonder, then, that many Americans try not to think or talk about politics and do their best to purge their consciousness of Donald Trump? I often wish I could join them.

But today is the beginning of the impeachment inquiry’s public hearings, and it really is time to snap to attention. It really does matter. What Trump is accused of is no piddling transgression, and it’s the culmination of so much bad behavior — and such rank dishonesty — that you can’t turn away from it. That’s an abdication of responsible citizenship. That’s an insult to the democracy that we’re privileged to live in.

Do Democrats sometimes go overboard in their negative obsession with Trump? Maybe. Do we in the media? Probably. But no president in my adult lifetime has so grossly insulted the office and so unabashedly modeled a kind of behavior that no parent would permit in his or her child. No president has been so flamboyantly unethical and so reckless in his realignment of America’s allegiances. No president has been so poised to squelch dissent and stack the deck in favor of consolidating and perpetuating his power.

But beyond and regardless of all of that, the discrete case on which the impeachment inquiry focuses is galling: A president who was just emerging from an investigation into whether he encouraged foreign interference in the 2016 election actively encouraged foreign interference in the 2020 election, using hundreds of millions of dollars of crucial military aid as leverage to try to get a needy government to smear a potential Democratic rival. That’s what the facts so far have shown.

Or at least that’s how I read them. You can come to your own conclusion. Scratch that: You must come to your own conclusion, because the present juncture is too important to take a pass on, too consequential to tune out. (The Times has a guide to today’s hearing that you can find here.)

Trump’s assault on your senses over the course of his presidency has been designed to numb you to a moment like this one and have you looking the other way when he finally crossed one line too many.

Don’t let him get away with it.