Rewind the clock back almost a year. Trump was fucking guilty. Everyone knew he had done what the articles of impeachment had accused him of, which was attempting to coerce the president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden for some poorly-specified allegations of corruption in the country, despite both having already been cleared.
Former Alabama Senator Doug Jones knew it. Jones won on kind of a fluke in a 2017 special election to serve out the rest of the six-year term Jeff Sessions had vacated so he could serve as Trump’s first Attorney General, faced with an extraordinarily weak Republican opponent, twice-impeached racist child molester, Roy Moore. Jones, from the second he won, had to know he was almost certainly doomed in 2020. As a Democrat representing a deep Red State, he faced a choice: Vote to acquit Trump in the hopes that MAGA voters in the state would remember it on election day and maybe reelect him, or stick with his conscience and principles and do the right thing.
Doug Jones did the right thing. Now former Senators Martha McSally, Cory Gardner, David Perdue, and soon-to-be former Senator Kelly Loeffler did not. They put party over country, even though anyone with a functioning brain knew Trump was unworthy of office, they knew he was dangerous, they knew he was incompetent, they knew that Mike Pence would be a much better leader for their party in contrast to the Donald. They voted to acquit so they could get reelected, making the calculation that MAGA voters would immediately destroy them in the primaries. And then they lost.
These four fucking assholes. Maybe it was a safer assumption for Perdue and Loeffler, while the same could certainly not be said for McSally and Gardner (Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, and Steve Daines by rights should also be in the picture above, but shit happens). They knowingly voted to acquit an unhinged tyrant, just as the warning signs of a massive pandemic that he was not even remotely mentally equipped to deal with were starting to surface.
So for those keeping score at home, here’s where things stand: Loeffler, Gardner, McSally, and Perdue’s careers in the Senate are over, in part because of their subservience to a president who had no business being in office, in part because they sustained it, willingly, by not speaking out against what they knew was wrong. Trump lost anyway after that. They lost too, costing Mitch McConnell his treasured GOP Senate majority. They have a net negative 3 election wins between the four of them. For the rest of their comfortable, miserable lives they can walk around knowing that their public service was a net negative on themselves, their president, their party, and most of all their country. Fucking losers.
Doug Jones is meanwhile considered a leading candidate for Biden’s Attorney General.