I’m glad Democrats are finally hitting back at Trump. Enough with the “high road”.
They’re calling him “weird”.
They’re mocking him. “Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial,” Hillary Clinton sneered at the Democratic convention. “When he woke up, he’d made his own kind of history – the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”
Barack Obama noted Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.
Michelle Obama asked: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
Trump hates to be laughed at. He cannot abide ridicule. So, keep it up.
But in addition to the mockery, we must not forget Trump’s treachery.
The values a president enunciates and demonstrates ricochet through society, strengthening or undermining the common good.
George Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, noted that by June 1775, when Congress appointed him to command the nation’s army, Washington had already “become a moral rallying post”.
In the 2016 presidential campaign, 240 years later, candidate Donald Trump’s moral squalor was on full display. When accused of failing to pay his income taxes he responded: “That makes me smart.”
He thereby signaled to millions of Americans that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.
Trump also boasted about giving money to politicians so they would do whatever he wanted. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”
In other words, it’s perfectly OK for business leaders to pay off politicians, regardless of the effect on our democracy.
After Trump launched an attack on NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem, Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, explained that the players were trying to protect a core American value. “They’re protesting excessive police violence and racial inequality,” said Kerr. “Those are really good things to fight against. And they’re doing it in a nonviolent way. Which is everything that Martin Luther King preached, right?”
Before Trump, the peaceful transfer of power was assumed to be a central feature of American democracy.
As the Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has noted, when losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to the democratic system over the result they fought to achieve – an important means of reaffirming the common good.
Think of Al Gore’s gracious concession speech to George W Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the US supreme court ruled in favor of Bush:
“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country … Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
Consider what might have occurred had Gore bitterly accused Bush of winning fraudulently and blamed the five Republican appointees on the supreme court for siding with Bush for partisan reasons. Or if, during his campaign, Bush had promised to put Gore in jail for various alleged improprieties, and then, after he won, accused Gore of spying on him during the campaign and trying to use the FBI and CIA to bring his downfall.
These statements – close to ones Trump actually made – might have imperiled the political stability of the nation.
Instead, Gore made the same moral choice his predecessors made at the end of every previous American presidential election, and for the same reason: he understood that the peaceful transition of power confirmed the nation’s commitment to the constitution, which was far more important than his own loss.
Trump has had no such qualms. When he lost, he embarked on a coup against the United States and instigated an assault on the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths.
At this moment, Trump and his lackeys are installing loyalists in state and county election offices to deny certification to the Harris-Walz ticket and other Democrats down the ballot.
The essence of Trump’s failure as president – and the fundamental reason he doesn’t merit a second term – is not that he has behaved in childish and vindictive ways or is “weird”.
It is that he sacrificed – and continues to sacrifice – the processes and institutions that undergird America to achieve his own selfish aims.
He abused the trust we place in a president to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.
Trump is a traitor.
He and the Republican party – now a personality cult based on Trump’s “big lie” – violate everything America stands for.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
