Midnight in Chernobyl

 

Midnight in Chernobyl is about the disastrous explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 that made the area around the plant so uninhabitable that it is still dangerous 36 years later. That fact, however, did not matter to the Russia troops who recently invaded Ukraine, because they marched right through the area surrounding the plant. The meltdown was caused by the incompetence and dishonesty of the Russia government, and it nearly led to the destruction of the entire plant.

 

When I was at the library recently, I noticed that Adam Schiff’s book, “Midnight in Washington” was in the non-fiction section – so I picked it up.

The book starts on January 6, and goes backwards from there.

Just as the problems in Chernobyl were a result of Russian incompetence and dishonesty, the insurrection on January 6 were the result of the incompetence and dishonesty of Republicans in Congress, but also by the incompetence and dishonesty of the 45^th president.

The subtitle on the cover is “how we almost lost our democracy, and still could”.

So far, I’ve read 14 or 15 books about Donald J. Trump – and had vowed to not read anymore. To a large degree, the ones that I had read so far highlighted the fact that Trump is more than a little crazy. Many of the books also touched on the corruption that was a big part of his administration.

Schiff’s book goes into much more detail on the corruption that existed at all levels in the Trump administration, and why Trump had to be impeached twice, even though the makeup of the Senate (and the fealty of the GOP) meant that he would never be convicted.

Nearly every day, we are learning additional facts about the insurrection that took place on January 6. The January 6 committee has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and has received more than 100,000 pages of documents. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson has been able to validate a lot of statements attributed to Trump and Pence without their testimony. Much of the evidence the committee has released to far has come from White House aids and staff. So far, the committee has not issued subpoenas to either Trump or Pence. Since Trump would undoubtedly would be a hostile witness, there is little point in asking him any questions at all, and I doubt that the committee would gain a lot of new information by interviewing Pence.

The committee plans to make public their report sometime in June, and it should make for very entertaining reading.

The danger that we fact as a society is that Trump still has a firm grip on the Republican Party. He was the preferred 2024 candidate at this year’s CPAC candidate, and Ron DeSantis (who would not be any better) came in second.

60% of the 2020 Republican voters still don’t believe that Joe Biden won the election, and their ignorance continues to be reinforced by the “talking heads’ of FOX news, who still claim that the riot that occurred on January 6 ‘was not that bad”.

In Arizona, Kari Lake is the leading Republican candidate for governor – and she would be a total disaster for the state. Like some of the other candidates, she believes that Trump actually won the 2020 election – and she has held a fund-raised at Mar-A-Lago, Today’s Arizona Republic had a front-page story that compared her campaign to the one that Trump started in 2015 – and it is eerily familiar.

It's impossible to predict how the 2022 midterms will come out, but am not optimistic that we are going to like the results. However, Adam Schiff’s closing paragraph should give us some hope:

 “Seventeen years from now, when the present is a distant memory for all but the cicadas, we will look back on this time as a decisive moment for our country, when we were at sea and our destination remined unknown, our future obscure, the great enterprise in self-rule in doubt. Did we turn back towards the shores of our Founders, or was this the moment when the clouds descended, the stars disappeared, and we became irretrievably lost? We must understand that we are not the passengers on this journey, unable to steer the country that we all love in one direction of another. It is within our power to take hold of the rudder, choose the future we want for our children and grandchildren, and, with the grace of God, we make it so."