[This piece is appearing as an op/ed in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) in which I ran as the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2011-12. The title under which the piece is running in the papers is “What Kind of Person?”
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What Kind of Person?
Imagine an assemblage of Republican voters from the era when Ronald Reagan was President.
Imagine someone – visiting from the future -- presenting them with a portrait of a person who, having been President, would be a presidential candidate again. That portrait would consist of a few concrete vignettes to show the character of the man.
Concerning such vignettes, imagine these Reagan-era Republicans being asked, “How suitable would such a man be to be given the powers of the American presidency?”
Vignettes
For the first vignette, these Reagan Republicans are told that a jury of average Americans determined unanimously that this presidential candidate sexually assaulted – by some legal definitions “raped” -- an innocent and unsuspecting woman.
If those conservatives of the Reagan era were asked, “Would you consider voting for such a person?” what do you think they’d say?
The second vignette concerns how this man, when he was President, treated his Vice President.
Up until the very end of that President’s term, that Vice President had shown a level of loyalty so extreme that many regarded it as groveling. But after the election -- in which that President had failed to win a second term -- that President commanded his loyal Vice President to do something that – according to the respected authorities that Veep consulted – would violate the Constitution.
So this Vice President chose to honor the oath he’d taken, rather than commit a crime for the President.
The stunning revelation of that President’s character came with what he did next.
Not tolerating the Vice President’s unwillingness to violate his oath of office, that President sent word to a mob -- that was already calling for that Vice President to be hanged -- to stoke the mob’s rage still further against him. Even after four years of extraordinary loyalty, that President could not forgive his VP when that loyalty stopped short of acting against his sacred oath.
Do you think those Reagan-era Republicans would think it appropriate to give a man of such character the powers of the Presidency again?
The third vignette – drawing on what a major homeland-security aide in that President’s White House publicly reported – concerns how that President responded to a deadly pandemic.
This President, this high-level staffer told the country, had shown no concern for protecting the American people, but instead focused his attention on how he might play the pandemic for his own political benefit.
(That extraordinary selfishness, these Reagan-era Republicans would be told, caused 200,000 additional Americans to die than would have if the President had put the nation above his own self-interest.)
What do you think those Reagan-era Republicans would say if, after being told that these vignettes truthfully characterized a Republican leader, they were asked, “Do you think your party’s voters would want him to be President again?”
Dark Transformation
I would wager that such a time-travel experiment – if it could be conducted -- would show that the Republican electorate has undergone a very dark transformation. (Never before could it have been correctly said of a Republican leader, as Donald Trump rightly said of himself, that he could “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” and not lose support.)
Except now, it seems that a substantial – albeit minority -- portion of Republican voters are reluctant to vote for Trump again.
That reluctance might not just be about the Trump’s appalling character (an “adjudicated rapist,” who sicced a mob against a loyal ally to punish him for refusing to commit a crime to help him hold onto power, and whose selfishness was so extreme that he put his own interests ahead of protecting the American people from a once-in-a-century pandemic).
Matters of policy might also weigh in here:
- Republicans who still revere the Constitution might reject Trump for the increasingly authoritarian and lawless vision he has been presenting for what he plans to do if he gets the powers of the Presidency again.
- Republican patriots who have been proud of America’s generations-long role as “leader of the free world” might repudiate Trump and his MAGA allies for the way they’re siding with Russia’s fascist dictator in his unprovoked aggression against democratic Ukraine.
(Except – as a serious student of the past century would recognize – Trump’s fascistic policies are deeply connected in spirit with those demonstrated defects of his character.)
Some Republicans now repelled by Trump, however, seem hesitant to break with him because of how they regard the only real alternative: President Biden.
But, if voters give weight to the issue of “What kind of person?,” those Republicans who entertain a demonized view of Joe Biden might remember what a Republican Senator long acquainted with Biden – Lindsey Graham – said about Biden in 2015, declaring him “as good a man as God ever created.”
It’s most unlikely that anyone ever said such a thing about the man who raped E. Jean Carroll, endangered the life of Mike Pence, and didn’t concern himself with protecting the American people in the face of a historic pestilence.
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Afterward:
In one of the newspapers in which this is appearing — the NORTHERN VIRGINIA DAILY — a (frequent) rightward commenter posted online (concerning the reluctance of people repelled by Trump to break with him):
That is because the same Republicans are looking beyond the morality of the candidate and looking at the good or bad they do for the country. That makes DJT the better choice by far. It would be nice to have a good moral person as POTUS, but it appears that is not an option this time around.
To which I posted this reply online beneath his comment:
That sounds like a reasonable response to my "what kind of person" argument-- i.e. when you say you're "looking beyond the morality of the candidate and looking at the good or bad they do for the country." After all, I made a point of focusing on the character of the man and leaving out anything about the good or bad they do for the country. (Except for the "bad" of Trump's selfishness resulting in the excess deaths of 200,000 Americans.)
The problem with that reasonable sounding argument -- saying what matters is what they achieve with the powers of the presidency -- is that I am at a loss what people have in mind when they talk about all that Trump achieved. WHAT EXACTLY IS THE GOOD THAT HE DID?
He signed a tax cut that transferred $2 trillion from average Americans to the billionaire class and the corporate system. Is there any other legislation he passed? He undermined America's leadership role in the world, spurning our friends and embracing the fascist dictator (and war criminal) in Moscow. He talked repeatedly about "Infrastructure" but never would agree to anything. He disgraced us at the border by separating parents from children without any care to see that they could be reunited.....
I could go on.
This whole idea that he somehow achieved a lot of "good" for the nation -- which I've heard people say the last few years -- seems to me just one more instance of there being a portion of the American population that's in thrall to a whole set of falsehoods, dangerously out of contact with reality.
I could go on.