By Rich Lowry
Friday, January 08, 2021
There’s a reason we expect presidents of the United
States to say that they support the peaceful transfer of power.
Donald Trump has never committed to it, and we saw the
bitter fruit on Wednesday afternoon when, shockingly, pro-Trump rioters stormed
the U.S. Capitol and disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes.
The breaching of the building during one of the
longest-running ceremonies under our system of government is the starkest
domestic assault on our democracy in memory and means that in 2021, we indeed
failed to have a peaceful transfer of power.
The rioters themselves bear ultimate responsibility for
their acts, but Trump egged them on.
He fed them poisonous lies about the election, including
lunatic conspiracy theories worthy of QAnon that, if true, would justify
violent revolution.
He encouraged them to come to Washington and said they
wouldn’t stand for his “landslide” victory getting taken away.
He whipped them up on Wednesday with one of his typically
high-octane speeches about how the election was stolen from them and urged them
to march on the Capitol to give “weak” Republicans the “pride and boldness they
need to take back our country.”
When the mob overwhelmed security and made its way on to
the Senate and House floors, sending Vice President Pence and lawmakers
fleeing, Trump tweeted about how he’d been wronged by Pence’s entirely correct
view that he lacked the power as vice president to unilaterally declare him the
winner of the election.
It was only a couple of hours later that Trump, clearly
under duress, released a pro forma video calling on his supporters to go home,
but, of course, repeating all of his same attacks on the integrity of American
democracy that motivated the rioters in the first place.
Trump has been engaged in a grotesque, but utterly
characteristic, display of failed leadership since he insisted late on Election
Night that he’d won big.
As a matter of sheer ego, he hasn’t been able to admit
that he lost.
He hasn’t looked beyond his personal interest, or made
even rudimentary gestures toward public-spiritedness.
He has misled his supporters, whom he has long told
politically convenient fables, whether it was that Mexico would pay for the
wall or that the election would be overturned if only Republicans fought hard
enough.
He has shown an ignorance of the American constitutional
system that would be remarkable in a first-year law student, let alone a
president of the United States.
He hasn’t been able or willing to distinguish between
reliable information and blatantly false information, and in fact, has been
much more inclined toward the latter.
He has used his extraordinary communication skills in the
cause of rank demagoguery, meant to inflame and embitter rather than to edify
or soothe.
And his interest in acting how we expect presidents to
conduct themselves since George Washington put his stamp on the office at the
outset of the American republic has been exactly nil.
The story of the Trump presidency has been, by and large,
one of the proverbial guardrails holding. It’s been notable how, despite
Trump’s flailing attempts to overturn the election, no Republican officeholder
or judge with the direct ability to affect the outcome has budged, despite
Trump’s importuning and bullying.
Yet, for all of that, our institutions are fragile
things. They need people who honor and respect them, who allow those
institutions to form and constrain them, who realize their jobs are bigger than
themselves.
It was a painful contrast Wednesday afternoon when
outgoing Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, an institutionalist to his
core, gave a compelling, carefully crafted, deeply felt speech on why it’d be
wrong to reject Biden electors — just as the rabble was preparing to roust him
and his colleagues from their work.
McConnell’s speech was the handiwork of someone who cares
about our system enough to, when appropriate, admit defeat. The mob was not.
No comments:
Post a Comment