By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – If there was any doubt that we now live in strange, sad times, these last days have dispelled it.

On the day before he was to become only the third president in American history to be impeached, Donald Trump sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, a six-page letter. The kindest word one can use to describe the letter is “unhinged.”

The letter rambled. It railed. It dropped the f-bomb, decorously clad with asterisks. It sprinkled in other obscenities, uncloaked and naked to the eye. It scattered lies and distortions across its pages with the careless regard of a small child kicking pebbles on a gravel road. It delivered vague, impotent threats.

In all ways, it was a temper tantrum, settled into incoherent prose and printed on the letterhead of the greatest elected office of the greatest nation in the world.

In just about any other circumstance, if someone sent such a missive to a colleague or even a competitor, the result would be dismissal or legal action.

But this is not any other circumstance.

This is life in Donald Trump’s America, where the rule of law, the niceties of common courtesy and basic considerations of human decency have been discarded.

We now are free to be as nasty and disconnected from reality as the worst of us wish to be.

We see that here in Indiana.

At almost the same time the president of the United States was delivering his obscenity-laden letter to the speaker of the House, the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission recommended that Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill’s law license be suspended for two years.

The commission’s recommendation is the product of another disturbing, depressing saga. At a party marking the end of the 2018 legislative session, Hill – according to more than 20 witnesses – got drunk. He gripped and groped a series of women – including a state legislator – who complained.

Just about every political leader in Indiana called for Hill to resign.

Hill refused.

Investigations have followed, along with litigation. All have confirmed Hill’s boorish conduct – and in fact established that it began long before he became attorney general.

Hill’s defense throughout has been classically Trumpian.

Everyone else is lying.

Everyone else is wrong.

Everyone else is to blame.

At the heart of Hill’s argument is the contention that he’s entitled – that, in fact, he deserves – to be the face of Indiana law enforcement so long as he’s not behind bars.

There are many people who are angry about all of this, and no one should deny them the right to their anger.

But it leaves me with a sense of tremendous sadness.

That the president of the United States has elevated what therapists would call denial into a legal defense and chosen to use projection as a rallying cry is the stuff of tragedy.

Watching relatively low-level hacks such as Curtis Hill, as if infected by a communicable disease, transform the president’s approach into both playbook and Bible only deepens the sense of gloom.

We’re about to watch an impeachment process in which Republicans, to defend this president, say they don’t want witnesses. They don’t want documentation. They don’t want to know the truth.

They even boast that they don’t care about the truth.

This is the party of Lincoln. Of Theodore Roosevelt. Of Eisenhower. Of Reagan.

All were forces, powerful, directed men who approached the great office they inhabited with equally great dignity. They saw the presidency as a public trust, not an entitlement. They rarely, if ever, indulged in the kind of self-pity in which the current occupant of the Oval Office routinely engages.

It is impossible to imagine anyone of them sending a letter to anyone, much less the speaker of the House, like the one Donald Trump sent to Nancy Pelosi.

The commitment Republicans have made to defend this president at all costs now comes more and more to resemble a political suicide pact. The more the president revs up his base, the more he and other Republicans alienate moderates in the suburbs, where the next several elections will be fought and won.

He diminishes a great office and shrinks and demeans a great political party before our eyes, and everyone seems powerless to stop it from happening.

Strange days.

Sad days.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is the director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.