It’s easier to shoot an ostrich in the ass when his head is in the sand.
Hiding doesn’t change anything. He attacks anyway — friends, allies, members of his own party, people who have given him everything he asked for and more. That isn’t strategy or politics. That’s just who he is. You have exactly as much control over that as you think you do, which is none. What you do have control over is what happens when he does. Or better yet, whether it happens at all.
You took an oath. Thirty eight words. You said them out loud, probably with your hand raised and people you love watching. They weren’t complicated words. They didn’t leave much room for interpretation. They asked one thing of you — that you defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Not your party. Not your president. Not your seat.
Six of your colleagues said the same words and then actually meant them. You watched what happened to them. And you learned the wrong lesson.
What you are protecting today is no longer a political ideology, however you felt about it. It is no longer a movement, whatever you believed it stood for. What sits in the Oval Office today is a sick, confused, aging man who is being carefully managed and manipulated by people you did not elect, whose names most Americans couldn’t tell you, and whose interests have never once aligned with the people who sent you to Washington.
They need his signature. They need his office. They need his name on things they could never have accomplished through a democracy that was functioning the way it was designed to. And they need you to keep your head in the sand while they get it done.
The people paying for this are not abstractions. They are the people who pulled a lever with your name on it. They are paying it in healthcare they can’t afford, in sons and daughters being sent to wars that serve other nations’ interests, in votes that are being systematically made harder to cast, in rights that are quietly being converted from guarantees into privileges. They are paying for it every single day while the deliberate looking away continues.
There is a version of this moment that history will record with something close to understanding. People were afraid. The pressure was real. The threats were not empty. It was a difficult time and some people made difficult choices.
But that version requires that someone, eventually, did something. That the fear had a limit. That the oath turned out to mean something after all.
Right now that version is not being written.
You came to Washington for a reason. Maybe it was noble. Maybe it was ambition. Maybe somewhere in between, which is honest enough. But the benefits of the office, the security, the pension, the car, the title — none of that was the reason the job exists.
The job exists because somebody has to stand between the people and the abuse of power.
That’s it. That’s the whole job.
Thirty eight words.
So far, for most of you, it turns out that was just something you said out loud while people you love were watching.
History is watching too. And unlike your constituents, it doesn’t forget and it doesn’t forgive.
The only question left is what you do tomorrow morning.
