Two days after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, a friend attempted to persuade me that he had stolen the election. He argued, as Congressman John Conyers later did, that there was political hanky-panky in Ohio.
I sharply disagreed. I had worked in Ohio for years, and knew its politics. Bush really had carried the state, by more than a hundred thousand votes. Now, I really did not want Bush to be reelected. I disagreed strongly with many of his policies,especially when it came to pushing an unjust war in Iraq. I thought John Kerry was far more qualified.
But the people chose Bush. He had won the popular andelectoral vote, and that was that. Later, people wanted me to agree that Bush should be impeached and removed from office.
Again, I disagreed. I hated some of his policies and strongly disliked the rest. Yet he was a legitimate President of the United States of America. He knew how important the job was.
He knew the President has to be both head of government and head of state, filling the roles of king and prime minister combined. He understood what being President entailed.
Donald Trump does not. He has proven that, over and over.
He has no more respect for the dignity and awful responsibility of the job than a toddler would, or than he does for the truth,and this is having a corrosive effect on this nation.
We should not forget that his election, more than any otherin our history, was an accident, the result of the Electoral College malfunctioning as it has never done.
Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes, but they weren’t distributed evenly, and as a result, Trump ended up with a majority of the electoral votes.
That wouldn’t have necessarily doomed his presidency. Woodrow Wilson got an evens smaller percentage of the popular vote a century ago, and so did Bill Clinton in 1992.
But both men had been governors themselves, and each knew how government worked. They knew it was completely different from running a family business.
Richard Nixon did in fact lie, and cover up, and obstruct justice when he was President. Yet even he never forgot that he sat where Abraham Lincoln and the Roosevelts once did.
He had a sense of decorum. Nixon never would have sent a tweet claiming someone he had appointed Secretary of State was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.” For one thing, Nixon would have known what that would have revealed to the world about him and his judgment.
That’s the background to the situation now, which is,that even though the Mueller investigation is not yet complete, Trump, aka“Individual 1,” has essentially been named, or fingered, as an unindicted co-conspirator, which is what happened to Nixon.
What this will mean in the end we don’t know, but we do know that for the foreseeable future, Congress and the public’s attention will be taken up by Trump’s legal woes.
This, at a time when there are so many other things that desperately need attention. But I am now going to say something politically incorrect, which is that this whole sordid mess is at least partly the fault of voters who decided to entrust the most important job in the world to a man who had shown absolutely no capacity or qualifications for it.
Nearly sixty-five years ago, Edward R. Murrow said this about the turmoil and fear created by demagogue Joe McCarthy: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully … The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
You might want to think about that. Goodbye for now, and good luck.
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