Finally, Donald Trump has gone too far. For the last four years, he has committed one political atrocity after another and either wriggled or bullied or bribed his way out of being punished for it. Like the mafia boss he so resembles he has summoned up his army of lawyers and apologists and enablers and stooges to protect himself from harm.

It took a knuckle-dragging mob of armed insurrectionists invading and trashing the U.S. Capitol to force a jittery majority of his Republican backers in the Senate and House to grow enough backbone to abandon him. And still, there were many eager to do his dictatorial bidding even as the coup he ordered and endorsed raged outside, and even inside, the very chambers in which they were meeting. Let their names be remembered forever as traitors! If there is any justice in this world, they would all be expelled from the U.S. Congress. But justice has been in short supply lately. No justice at all detectable in the Trump administration.

A knuckle-dragging mob and a Capitol Police force that looked suspiciously like the Keystone Cops. I have seen police forces that did a better job of protecting a gas station than they did of protecting the U.S. Capitol. Yet another demonstration of the seemingly bottomless incompetence of the Trump administration. While Christopher C. Miller, Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense was not to be found, perhaps he was hiding under his desk, the governor of Maryland’s offer of police and National Guard troops to help quell the uprising was kept on hold until the Secretary of the Army, who is not in the chain of command, requested them. And it could have been worse, much worse. If the riotous play-acting insurgents hadn’t been so busy shooting off their mouths, waving their Trump and Confederate flags, and posing for heroic selfies it could have been a bloodbath. Luckily for the Republic, this noisy rabble would never be mistaken for a real revolutionary force, like say the Viet Cong.

What now? A quick impeachment and removal from office? That would be nice, if possible. It would be encouraging to see Trump leave office branded as a criminal, which he most certainly is. Might also be useful when future charges are brought against him as a civilian crook. It should not be that hard to nail the most disgusting of the insurrectionists. Especially the smirking goons who posed for pictures. Charge them with the maximum sentences available, without parole. Maybe there are some open cells at Guantanamo Bay to house them in. I don’t know if they can be stripped of U.S. citizenship, but if they can be, they should be. Time to send a chilling message to Trump’s Proud Boys and other assorted creeps that they’ll no longer be praised and treated with kid gloves.

But lighten up America. There is light at the end of this ghastly four-year tunnel. Joe Biden may not be the most exciting guy in the world, but he is the best guy for the work that must be done. America needs a workhorse, not a show horse. And he knows more about how to handle inside-the-beltway politics than any person living. And a strong smart vigorous Kamala Harris will be a much-deserved slap in the face to Trump’s racist MAGA folks. America will remain deeply divided for the foreseeable future, but there is a good prospect that the dividing line between the two Americas can be gradually shifted so that perhaps 60 or 65% of Americans are living in the real world of diverse modern America and not the fantasy, conspiracy theory-riddled world that has been so skillfully manipulated by Trump and his fellow Mussolini-ist associates. That would be enough to make the United States of America a functioning democracy again.

And speaking of functioning democracies…it is now time to praise some famous men and women. They are not famous now, but they should be. The men and women, especially the Black men and women, of the State of Georgia. The men and women who have brought us the Miracle of Georgia. While most of the political experts were busy looking to Florida and North Carolina to break the Republican chokehold on the Solid South they were organizing and working their butts off trying to turn Georgia blue. Surely an impossible task you say. The state whose Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown was an early, loud, and bellicose proponent of Secession. The home of Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy and silver-tongued orator who declared slavery to be “the natural condition of Blacks.” And how can we forget Margaret Mitchell, the best-selling author of that door-stopping compendium of historical fiction hogwash titled Gone with The Wind.

The descendants of slaves have finally made good on the promise of Reconstruction that was cynically snuffed out 145 years ago. The offspring of slaves have finally freed themselves, and freed America, from Trump and his reptilian scum, not once but twice. First, they carried their state for President-elect Joe Biden. Then they gave the Democratic Party control of the U.S. Senate without which Biden’s chances of repairing the damage done by the Trump administration would have been almost impossibly difficult.

The future that lies ahead of us will not be easy. There is much damage to be repaired. Even four years may not be enough to repair it all. There will continue to be opposition. It will be weak and disorganized but likely desperate. There will be violence. We must shift our resources from fighting Islamist terrorism, which has become minimal of late, to fighting domestic terrorism which will surely be on the rise. There will be many problems, but there is now justified hope that those problems can be solved.