Page 62 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

THE
N I G H T
THE
C A P I TO L
DID NOT SLEEP
Each night, the U. S. Capitol becomes a tomb where
another day’s events are laid to rest. But on
S E P T E M B E R 2 4, 2 0 1 9, rest never came—and
it never has since.
THE END OF A WORKING day in the U.S.
Capitol can come at any time. If it comes at
the customary time, which is to say in the
early evening, the place takes on a crepus-
cular feeling, as though you can hear the
figures in the frescoes breathing sighs of
relief and feel the marble in the floors and
staircases soften beneath your feet. What
was a particularly ornate office building at
the height of the day passes through chang-
es by which it becomes a not overly popu-
lar museum and then, as night truly falls, a
kind of tomb in which the day’s events are
interred, one after another after another,
year after year.
September 24, 2019, was an odd kind of
day, in that this softening night never fell.
The frescoes remained silent. The marble
never gave way. The very air in the place
was charged even though there were few
people left in the halls to charge it. After
three years in which each nightmarish news
cycle followed another, on September 24,
it became obvious there were not succes-
sive news cycles but one continuous rush
that began on Inauguration Day in 2017.
The corruption in the United States gov-
ernment was revealed to be a single foul
organism, like one of those giant, three-
thousand-year-old fungi that spread over
a square mile or two. On the surface, you
see only the mushrooms that pop from the
ground. The immense scale of the organ-
ism is hidden underground. It feeds itself
54 Winter 2020_Esquire
by tapping into the roots of trees, which it
then drains of their nutrients until the trees
are consumed by a dry rot.
September 24, 2019, was the day that
the deadliest poison mushroom emerged,
but the sweeping subterranean organism
had been hollowing out the government
for three years. It was all one great creature
made of greed and crime and psychological
death juice, and now everybody could see
how far and how deep it had spread. Over
the next two days, we all got a sweeping look
at the malignant growth that is the corrupt
administration of Donald J. Trump. It was
the day the whistleblower entered the eco-
system, and the earth opened up, and the
sheer scale of it was revealed.
The whistleblower revealed that, in es-
sence, the president was trying to shake
down poor Volodymyr Zelensky, the pres-
ident of Ukraine—who had been feeling
the hot breath of Vladimir Putin on the
back of his neck from the moment he took
office—for the purpose of ratfucking the
2020 election. It was all there: the con-
tempt for the rule of law and for constitu-
tional barriers, the personalization of for-
eign policy for private gain, the narcissistic
insistence that he alone can run the govern-
B y
CHARLES P. PIERCE
ment and turn a buck on the deal, the tai-
loring of foreign policy to the benefit of his
friends (at best) in many lands, and the pure
authoritarian bullying tied up in all of the
above. Those were all the surface blooms.
But this event gave us a look at the vast or-
ganism beneath the ground that subsists
on the rot of living things.
of the Capitol. It lurked in the committee
A new emotion ran through the halls
rooms. It ran as a dark countermelody un-
der all the careful quotes given out in a sud-
denly electric media environment. It has
been a shadow over all the days since. What
you began to feel around the government
in those days was horror. After the 2016
election, there was a closed briefing given
to members of Congress about the extent of
the Russian ratfucking, and emerging from
that meeting, many of the participants ap-
peared to have looked down into their own
graves. That is the feeling that has crept in
through the widening gaps in a rotting de-
mocracy ever since this past September.
Nobody knows the whole thing, but every-
thing they’ve learned has been worse than
everything they thought they knew. Ev-
ery day suddenly has become fraught with
unexpected monsters, real and imagined.
And that has become the permanent state
of things in Washington.
On September 24, somebody rustled up
six American flags and a podium and lined
them up in a long corridor of the Capitol,
just outside the office of the Speaker of the
House. The only light in the hallway was
the sunlight slipping in through an arched
window at the other end of the hall. Nan-
cy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, who
had been reluctant to move on impeach-
ment until she was sure of her footing, stood
behind the podium in a blue dress with a
large American-flag pin. She summoned
the power that, of all the powers inherent
in the government, belongs to her and her
alone, the power to open the proceedings
to decide if a president should be removed:
Therefore, today, I’m announcing the
House of Representatives is moving for-
ward with an official impeachment in-
quiry. I’m directing our six committees
to proceed with their investigations un-
der that umbrella of impeachment inqui-
ry. The president must be held account-
able. No one is above the law.
By the next day, they’d all read the com-
plaint, all of them in the House of Represen-
tatives, the place (continued on page 117)