“This impeachment effort reeks of revenge...,” Rep. Bill Posey said in a speech on the House floor a week after the Donald Trump’s Capitol insurrection.

Posey’s words epitomize the Orwellian attitude of Trump defenders and QAnon wackos within the Republican Party. The Florida Republican has swallowed Trump’s victim act whole, but somehow, he’s not choking on it.

He declared, with a straight face, that the Donald’s victims have “harassed, harassed, and slandered the president.”

Somehow Posey has overlooked Trump’s well-earned reputation as harasser-in-chief on Twitter — before he was banned from the platform, that is.

Trump’s the one who’s being sued for slander (or defamation). He’s the one who promised that his own ambassador to Ukraine was “going to go through some things” — before firing her. And he’s the one who forced a respected officer out of the Army with what Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s lawyer called a “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation.”

Turning the tables

Posey reminds me of those self-righteous parents who storm into the principal’s office and demand an apology after her bratty kid got detention for socking a classmate in the nose. He would be a caricature if he weren’t actually, well, in power.

But Posey’s charge that Trump’s opponents are out for vengeance is what really takes the cake.

Vengeance is Trump’s stock-in-trade, but Posey wants to turn the tables and blame the victim so Trump can play the victim.

Trump’s victims don’t want vengeance. Well, maybe some of them do, but most of us just want Trump to leave us the hell alone.

But Posey’s clearly never been stalked by a jealous ex — the kind of deranged abuser who declares, “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” Those who’ve endured this kind of abuse just want out. They don’t want revenge. They want protection from their abuser’s vengeance. His wrath. They take out restraining orders and take cover in shelters.

This is what Trump’s victims are doing these days. They want protection. That’s why they impeached him: They’re so scared of what he might do. It’s no accident that they wanted to be sure he couldn’t press the nuclear button after his Jan. 6 insurrection.

They want him out of office because they have no idea what he’s capable of. This is why they want him convicted in the Senate: Even though his term will have ended by the time a trial gets under way, they want to disqualify him from ever holding office in the future. Impeachment and conviction is their version of a restraining order.

Yes, they want him held accountable, but justice is different than revenge. Vengeance makes abusers the center of attention; justice focuses on the innocent, and the need to shield them from future abuse.

Anxiety and trauma

If you’ve ever been stalked, or the victim of sustained physical or emotional abuse, you know that the only thing that matters is to get away. To feel safe again. It doesn’t matter whether your abuser is in jail, on a desert island, or on the moon. The only thing that matters is you never have to deal with that person ever again. The only thing that matters is that they leave you alone.

Donald Trump refuses to just go away and let us live our lives in peace. His chaos has left us in a continual state of anxiety that metastasized into trauma. Then he heightened that trauma by threatening to silence our voice — by assaulting our democracy, and putting both the symbol and the instrument of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” in the crosshairs of racists and madmen.

We want that trauma to end. If Trump just retired to a quiet life at Mar-a-Lago and played golf every day for the rest of his life, we might not feel that justice was done, but at least we might be able to start feeling safe again.

It’s not about vengeance, at least not for me.

I just want him to leave us the hell alone.

Stephen H. Provost has written about the Trump phenomenon in his series “Trumpism on Trial,” available on Amazon at www.amazon.com/Trumpism-Trial-2-Book/dp/B08RC7NLSZ/.