ROYAL OAK, MI – Years ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in tough and tense arms control negotiations, both sides agreed on this bottom line: A nuclear war “cannot be won, and must never be fought.”
Those were the exact words Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said, and that basic truth was the reason both sides were able to work together to make the world safer.
Today, however, the greatest threat America faces may well be domestic, not foreign. Our democracy has been a success largely because of two key principles that were so embedded in our fabric that we seldom thought about them:
We accepted the results of our elections, whether we liked them or not, and any idea of inciting an uprising to try to overturn an election died with the Confederacy in 1865.
But that has now changed. When Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush lost their bids for reelection, they conceded defeat within hours, and helped with the transition.
But Donald Trump, whose defeat over a year ago was not particularly close, refused to concede, attend President Biden’s inauguration, and worse, demands that all Republicans agree. What is worse is that, with a few notable exceptions, most apparently have.
Marty Knollenberg, the son of a former congressman, Joe Knollenberg, is an example. He served one term in the Michigan State Senate, then lost his seat after blaming minorities for failing schools and lamenting “We can’t make an African-American white.”
Last week, after he complained that I was not writing about President Biden’s “policy failures,” specifically Knollenberg’s (false) claim that the President allows “illegals with COVID to cross the border and also (allows) human traffickers, rapists, murderers and drug dealers to crossover undetected,” I asked a simple question:
Did he accept that President Biden had legitimately won the last election –and did he condemn the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by people who wanted to overturn the result of that election?
Knollenberg repeatedly refused to answer either question. He knows, of course, that the election was not stolen; in addition to winning by seven million popular votes, repeated recounts and audits in various states found no irregularities whatsoever.
But he also knows that if he says that the election was fair, he will be immediately attacked by Trump or his followers, who would then do their best to sabotage any attempt he might make to run for office again. Earlier this month, the former President called U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) a “jerk” and “crazy or just stupid” for acknowledging that President Biden won the election.
Not all Republicans feel that way. Jeff Timmer, who for years was the Michigan Republican Party’s senior executive director, has left the party over this issue and has gone to work as a senior advisor to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a very progressive Democrat. Timmer told Susan Demas of the Michigan Advance that he still considered himself a “Reagan-Bush conservative” and has many policy disagreements with his new boss.
“I don’t think my ideology has changed much,” he said, adding that “my opposition doesn’t have anything really to do with ideology or policy. It has everything to do with democracy. And one party is completely, from head to toe, anti-democracy, and that’s the Republicans … Republicans have to lose, or America will lose. Democracy as we know it will cease to exist.”
What matters most to him, he said, was protecting the citizens’ right to vote, and making sure elections mean something.
Oddly enough, Donald Trump, and those who support his lies about the election could learn an ethical lesson from an unusual source — Richard Nixon, not one famed for his virtue.
Nixon had far more reason to contest his defeat to John F. Kennedy in 1960 than Trump did to Joe Biden sixty years later.
In that case the popular vote margin between the two candidates was barely 112,000, not seven million. Nixon actually won more states than Kennedy, and would have been president had he carried Texas and Illinois. Nixon had actually held a slim lead in Illinois, till a last-minute batch of votes from Chicago gave the state to Kennedy by less than 9,000.
The margin in Texas was larger, but smaller than President Biden’s margins in Michigan or Pennsylvania. There were clearly irregularities in both states; one Texas precinct, for example, officially had 86 registered voters, but reported 147 votes for Kennedy to 24 for Nixon.
Many Republicans urged Nixon to contest the result, but he flatly refused. “The bitterness that would be engendered by such a maneuver on my part would, in my opinion, have done incalculable and lasting damage throughout the country,” he later wrote.
Ironically, Nixon had to swallow an extra cup of bitterness. As he was the vice president at the time, he had to preside over the official counting of the electoral votes, the same role Mike Pence played last year. Did the man they called Tricky Dick try to pull a fast one or refuse to certify electors?
Not at all. In fact, the state of Hawaii, which had been extremely close, sent two sets of electoral votes — one from electors pledged to Nixon, the other Kennedy. Nixon gallantly suggested to Congress that they accept the Democratic ones, and they did.
The moral of this story? When it comes to accepting defeat, Donald Trump, and those who support him, should ask themselves, WWND — What Would Nixon Do?
