By Chuck Hobbs, Columnist

It is finished…
Last night in the early hours Congress–at last–certified Joseph R. Biden as the next President of the United States and Kamala D. Harris as the next Vice President of the United States.
Kudos to both!

The Biden-Harris victory, long certain for every rational soul in America, came hours after a defiant President Donald Trump continued his eight-week old fallacious narrative that the election was “rigged” and “stolen” from his clutches during a rally where he encouraged his loyal followers to march on the Capitol. Much like the mindless zombie “White Walkers” from the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones,” the mindless MAGA minions marched in unison to a Capitol Complex where they met little resistance from police forces who seemingly rolled out the red carpet for the red hatters to desecrate and loot the very halls of political power in our nation. Trump loyalists stole art and artifacts, posed for selfies in the Senate chambers, and one even had the audacity to sit his meth and Marlboro ingesting, Wild Turkey and Milwaukee’s Best imbibing disheveled hide in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s personal chair–and prop his feet up on the desk like an abusive husband who is yelling at his wife to bring his dinner and some more beer from the icebox; the optics were disgusting.

But unlike the “wights” that were led by a powerful and bellicose Night King in Game of Thrones, the MAGA (mostly) whites were dispatched by a feeble old man with well-manicured (tiny) hands and child-bearing hips who talks tough, but according to his own kinfolks, has been a coward since he was a child. There he was, their beloved Trump, pressing them onwards to the Capitol with a promise to lead the charge himself but, in his pusillanimity, when it all went down yesterday, he was somewhere holed up in the White House–hiding and Tweeting–like the coward that rational people know and loathe. Indeed, the very fact that one MAGA “wight” woman was killed barely 24 hours after boasting on social media that she was preparing to invade the Capitol for her President–only to die without her President even caring to consider that her death is squarely on his little hands–underscores how very far this nation has fallen in four years under Mr. Trump.

It did not have to be this way…

Back in 2015, then-Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, the early perceived front-runner, presciently warned that “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he will be a chaos president.” There were any number of conservatives that ran in that primary that other Democrats and I may have battled on policy and ideology that would NOT have been the clownish, chaotic, village idiot that Donald Trump has proven to be during his tenure. But no, the great unwashed, the mindless MAGA minions, were drawn to Trump’s celebrity, his “perceived wealth,” and his penchant to “own the Libs,” a euphemism for being a bigot who defends systemic racism and white supremacy. These loyal MAGAs propelled him to a resounding primary win and elped him to eke out a close Electoral College win over Democrat Hillary Clinton–even after the latter soundly beat him in the popular vote.

However, what was worse than the mindless MAGA minions was how many intelligent Republicans fell in line back in 2016 and have stayed in line–until yesterday. I have always sensed that Senators like Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and even Lindsay Graham knew that Trump was a gauche and unenlightened man who reveled in his ignorance while mocking intelligence and defying convention. But these more intelligent Republicans not only remained mute but supported him with raucous applause and praise because they decided that Trump’s stoking of the “culture wars” that fomented division was not as important as seeing their conservative agenda advanced–and conservative judges appointed and confirmed. For those reasons, these more intelligent Republicans remained mute even when Trump attacked fellow conservatives! They remained mute when he attacked veterans! They remained mute when he attacked Gold Star families! They remained mute when he called American service personnel “suckers and losers” for dying in combat! They remained mute when reports surfaced that Russia had placed bounties on American military personnel! They remained silent when the five-time draft dodger claimed to know more than his generals about warfare! They remained mute when he mocked their colleague, Vietnam war hero, and former presidential nominee John McCain! They remained silent as Trump always undermined and threw his own Cabinet members and advisers like Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, and John Kelly under the bus! They remained mute when he praised Neo-Nazis and white supremacists after the Charlottesville riots! They remained silent as he called Black NFL players like Colin Kaepernick “ungrateful SOB’s!” They remained mute as he implemented a bigoted and illegal travel ban on Muslims! They remained silent as he often described Mexicans in the most stereotypical and racist terms he could muster with his limited vocabulary! They remained mute despite all of these red flags because he was useful to their political ideals!

Lest we forget…

But may we also remember that if history has shown nothing else, it has shown that appeasing a fool–and the madding crowd–will yield disastrous results. Whether it was President James Buchanan showing his feckless ineptitude on slavery and allowing South Carolina to secede in 1860–thus setting the stage for other states to follow; whether it was Rutherford B. Hayes compromising with the south to get elected in 1876, thus ending Reconstruction and ushering in the Jim Crow era; whether it was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain prematurely heralding “peace in our time” with Adolf Hitler at Munich regarding the Sudentenland crisis in 1938–only to find Hitler breaking his promises and annexing the entirety of Czechoslovakia months later, the simple truth is that a madman and madmen should never be bargained with or appeased.

But bargain, appease, extol and uphold is precisely what the Mitch McConnells and the Lindsay Grahams of the Senate–and even Trump’s loyal former Attorney General Bill Barr and Vice President Mike Pence have done by normalizing Trump’s monstrous behavior for four long years. That was until the monster turned on them, a reality that was crystal clear yesterday as these Republicans realized that their “leader” had led his mindless MAGA minions to their office doorsteps and, because of it, placed their own lives in jeopardy.

Yep, it took the lives of Congressional Republicans being imperiled for them to finally resolve to push back against a Gollum of their own making–one that should have been checked from the get-go but who was embraced with open arms. So as we move closer to a return of normalcy of sorts with the inauguration of the 46th President, lest we forget all of the pernicious predilections of the 45th–or the men and women who aided and abetted him while he presided over the Divided States of America.