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(Evan Vucci/AP)

Maybe that will be his undoing, I told myself after the president impulsively withdrew our troops from Syria. Maybe this will be enough, I thought, after he used murder for political distraction in the killing of General Suleimani. The revenge dismissal of Col. Vindman and his brother? No such luck! Waiting for the last straw to break the proverbial camel’s back has turned out to be, so far at least, like waiting for Godot!

While transmuting besmirchment into exoneration after the conclusion of his senate trial, the president did indeed learn a lesson, but not the one Senator Susan Collins, ever the keen judge of human behavior, naively and self-servingly intuited; the lesson he took away instead was that he no longer has to concern himself with repercussions for his actions—that he can now operate with impunity. Newly emboldened by the Senate Republicans colossal blunder in acquitting the president in a sham trial, he is acting like he received a “get out of jail” card.

It’s becomingly increasingly evident that no one in government in a position to do so intends to step up and put the brakes on this president’s lawless spree of offenses against the republic he promised to protect.

Currently, a debate is waging among those principled government servants yet in service in the Justice Department over what should be done next.

Torn between the dictates of their conscience and their guilt over the prospect of leaving the department in the hands of those who are more than willing to follow the president’s edicts without question, these loyal public servants can’t escape the knowledge that resigning their posts on principal would leave the department in the hands of people less inclined to try to slow the erosion of judicial norms currently underway.

Minus the interference of career personnel in possession of the means to resist this sad decline, the deconstruction of the Justice Department will proceed unabated, no matter how heinous and destructive the results. If the president told his sycophantic enablers to march off a cliff, they would presumably comply, for this is what they do, metaphorically each time they do his bidding.

If it all just seems too much to bear sometimes, if you, like me, find the steady onslaught of dreadful news emanating from trump-central too hard to take, solace can be found in the words of Pema Chodron, who reminds us that “things end, (and trump certainly qualifies as a ‘thing’), that things have no lasting substance (and this is true on several levels) and that everything is changing all the time.” Whether it’s from one too many hamburgers, long-overdue judicial action or electoral defeat, the president’s time in office will, sooner or later, like all “things,” end.

Tim Konrad