A Christmas Carol For The Trump Era

On a frigid evening in the nation’s capital just days before Christmas, a mean-spirited and ruthless fibber named Adam Schiff works meticulously on a speech he plans to give on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Despite the harsh weather, Schiff refuses to pay for another lump of coal for the fireplace to warm his office.  His cruelty and bitterness have a chilling effect on his toiling staffers.

Suddenly, Eric Swalwell bursts into the office offering holiday greetings with an exclamatory, “Happy Festivus!”  The grumpy Schiff responds with “Bah! Humbug!” refusing to share in his Festivus cheer.

The hour is quite late, but Schiff follows his same old routine of taking dinner in his usual Beltway bar and returns home through the dank Washington streets.  Just before entering the house, the doorknocker on his front door, the same one he has passed through every day catches his attention.  A ghostly image in the curves of the knocker gives the scoundrel a momentary shock.  He looks away then refocuses and sees nothing but a doorknocker.

Slipping the key into the lock the doorknocker comes to life.  It’s the peering face of President Trump.  Unsettled by the vision, Schiff mutters to himself, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.  There’s more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

He plods up the wide staircase to his bedroom.  He prepares for bed when the carvings on his mantelpiece suddenly transform into visions of voters shouting their disgust with him and the role he has played in the impeachment proceedings.  Determined to dismiss the strange visions, blurts out, “Humbug!”

Moments later Schiff hears footsteps thumping up the stairs and, in a flash, a ghostly figure of Jonathan Turley floats through the closed and locked door.  He tells him he is there to save him from the growing contempt Americans have for all Democrats in 2020.

Turley leads Schiff to an open window and gestures to him to look out.  He sees a throng of spirits each of whom is bound in chains.  They wail about their failure to lead honorable lives and their obsession with impeaching a president simply because they hate him for winning in an electoral landslide.

Turley warns that Schiff will be visited by three spirits and quickly leaves him trembling alone in the dark.

In this retelling of the classic Dickens tale, the Spirit of Impeachment Past recounts Schiff’s egregious lies about the FISA warrants, the Russian witch hunt and the deceitful Articles of Impeachment he and his minions rammed through their committees.

At the stroke of one, a second spirit, the Spirit of Impeachment Present, appears before him.  He whisks him away to a number of Christmas gatherings of Americans who are better off than they were four years ago and are dismayed with the Democrat Party and their railroading of a duly elected president.  Finally, the Spirit takes him to the White House where President Trump is hard at work for the forgotten men and women of this country.  Schiff is bewildered at the sight.  He wonders aloud, “How, in the face of all the forces arrayed against this man, can he continue to successfully make the country great again?”

As the clock strikes two, Schiff is visited by a hooded phantom coming toward him.  Schiff kneels before him asking if he is the Spirit of Impeachment Yet To Come.    

The menacing wraith takes Schiff to the New York Stock Exchange where a group of businessmen discuss the death of the economy; a dingy pawn shop on the Southside of Chicago where shady characters sell the personal effects from a dead man; the dinner table of a family who were forced to go back on food stamps and the husband and wife expressing relief at the death of an unforgiving man to whom they owed money.

Schiff struggles to understand the lesson of the silent ghost.  In that moment he finds himself in a churchyard where the Spirit points to a freshly dug grave.  Schiff draws nearer and reads the inscription on the headstone:  2020 General Election.

Schiff inquires if nothing can be done to change the future.  Mockingly, the ghost quotes the Mueller Report. “No collusion.  No obstruction.”  The ghost reminds him the Horowitz Report revealed his own lies about the FISA warrants and his contact with the whistleblower.

Unlike Scrooge who faced an imminent moral reckoning, our character is faced with the very real prospect of a quick death in the Senate of the Democrats’ impeachment dreams.  They do not have the bipartisan takedown of this president and the public tenaciously resists impeachment over the Ukraine fantasy.

In the end Tiny Tim, perched upon President Trump’s shoulders, shouts for all to hear “God bless us everyone!”

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