By Chris Satullo

Civil dialogue is a core value to me. I abhor the hypocrisies of hyper-partisanship. I try to respond to fellow citizens whose views differ from mine with respectful listening, not insults. That’s why, when a first draft of this piece surged out of me last Tuesday over my first cup of caffeine, my initial thought was to put it aside as too angry. But this is a moment of extraordinary crisis when our nation is being led extraordinarily badly.  Valuing civility does not remove the right or the need to speak truth to power.  So…

Impeach him again.

Donald Trump, through official actions as president of the United States, has been responsible for the deaths of more of his followers than Jim Jones was. As well as the deaths of many others who would never have voted for him even if he’d had Michael Cohen hand deliver them a check for $130,000.

If these are not high crimes and misdemeanors, the phrase is without meaning.

Impeach him. Again.

Bring in the witnesses, one after another, to testify to the damage done by his lies, negligence and selfish deeds. Shine the spotlight on how, with a duty to protect American lives, our president instead focused on punishing critics while benefiting donors, family members and himself.

Lay it all out, how this unfit man’s oceanic self-regard, corrupt values and toxic inability to admit error have killed thousands and devastated the livelihoods of millions more. 

Bring ‘em all in to testify, every federal employee with a Ph.D or M.D. after their names whose timely, informed advice was ignored at the crossroads moments – and still is to this day. Let average Americans consider how “disgruntled” they might themselves become if their sound advice in a crisis were dismissed with sneers, shouts and insults by a boss of such lethal ignorance.

Bring ‘em in, the governors, red and blue, whose frantic efforts to protect their state’s citizens and economies have been undermined by this corrupt incompetent, his idiot son-in-law, and the crew of venal mediocrities he calls a Cabinet.

Bring ‘em in, the doctors and nurses who risked their lives amid exploding chaos to bring healing and comfort where they could, even as the bodies piled up and their souls sagged under a mounting weight of exhaustion and grief.  

Bring in those who survived the ventilator and the mourners of those who did not.

The cable networks would cover this searing testimony live, I’d guess, given they did the same for the egomaniac’s dangerous daily ramblings, even at a moment when what the nation needed was sober, clear, factual advice.

Impeach him again.  New crimes, new charges. 

Where is the crime?

That’s what his shrill defenders (Judgment Day will prove interesting for them) will cry, just as they did when the impeachment topic was an admittedly arcane shakedown of a foreign leader for political benefit. 

Well, this time I can tell you crisply what the crime is: negligent homicide.   

Perhaps 36,000 counts of it, at least according to a recent Columbia University study of how many fewer people might have died if, in March of this year, we’d had a president who instituted social distancing and economic shutdown just one week earlier.

And the counts will keep rising – with each splash in a crowded pool, each Cuervo shot in a sweaty bar that this president now recklessly encourages, once gain putting his political survival and stock portfolio ahead of the nation’s health and his constitutional duty.

All those lives not yet lost but now at risk…they are what make this task so urgent.

Impeach him. Again.

Sure, Mitch McConnell and his Senate confederacy of dunces would thwart conviction. But the gesture would not be empty.

This time, at least, McConnell’s smug inaction amid pandemic and meltdown would expose him as a billionaires’ errand boy in a way the Ukraine indictment, with its 87 moving parts and foreign names full of consonants, never could.

Impeachment hearings would offer an incomparable spotlight to those public servants whose efforts to stave off calamity get undermined by the relentless presidential smoke machine. Hearings would create a sworn, imperishable record of what really happened at the key junctures last winter. And they might even help live-saving information get through to some people whose grasp of needed precautions has been fuddled by the president’s lies.

And, yes, sure, an impeachment now, in the middle of a presidential campaign, would be political.

Damn straight it would be.

Politics is the term for how a democracy decides who it wants to be, what it wants to value and what it wants to do to meet its tomorrow. 

An impeachment of Donald Trump now, for the high crimes and misdemeanors by which he has killed thousands and savaged millions of livelihoods, would be political in this highest and best sense. 

It would be the best angels of America rising up to say:  Enough. No more. Before it’s too late. Before anyone else dies needlessly.

Political? You bet – and nothing less what this whiny, selfish, lethal bully deserves.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.