Trump’s legacy, in three posts

Feb. 10, 2020

For some time I’ve been keeping a list of institutions that have been attacked, politicized or undermined by Donald Trump.

The list started before the first day of his presidency, when Trump tried to bully the National Park Service into inflating its estimates of the size of the crowd at his inauguration, purely to soothe the new president’s fragile ego.

Other agencies associated with nonpartisan public service followed. Trump tried to twist the Census to his political ends. Scientists throughout the federal government have been muzzled, threatened and driven from public service for citing facts that disagree with White House talking points. Trump took a Sharpie to a National Weather Service map when the official forecast differed from his own. The dishonor he brought to the Navy SEALS by pardoning and embracing a man disciplined by his superiors for war crimes prompted both the head of the SEALS and the Secretary of the Navy to resign.

Trump has threatened big institutions – the independence of the judiciary, the Federal Reserve, the Justice Department and the FBI; birthright citizenship and the Constitution’s impeachment clause. He’s also assaulted unofficial institutions that traditionally have been sources of unity. Because he can’t take a joke, Trump refuses to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner. Because the guests might not like him, he doesn’t attend Kennedy Center Honors programs. He tried to politicize the Fourth of July.

Last week I added no fewer than four institutions to my list:

1. The State of the Union Address: The SOTU has always been political and has long had some show biz elements. But Trump turned it into a reality TV show so self-serving it does more to divide the union than unite it. Up until Woodrow Wilson, presidents just submitted a written report. Let’s go back to that.

2. The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Now that Rush Limbaugh has one, no one else should want one.

3. The architectural standards for new federal buildings, which since 1962 have encouraged innovation, diversity and appreciation of context: A new executive order will require classic designs, with pediments and stone columns. The order’s title: “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.”

4. The National Prayer Breakfast: Mixing politics and piety has always been problematic, but mere hypocrisy is preferable to the whiny, hateful speech Trump gave last week, in which he went out of his way to dissent from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies? No way, said the president.

The list of threatened institutions continues to grow. Ethical norms have been trashed. Behavioral norms carry no weight. This week the president also called concerns raised by his opponents “bullshit” – in a midday White House speech, on live TV – yet another affront to the standards traditionally expected of national leaders.

Once we get rid of this man, there’s a lot of rebuilding to do.

Jan. 19, 2021

Donald Trump’s most corrosive and dangerous legacy is the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

Two-thirds of Americans agree that Joe Biden won, but the remaining third – which includes 70 percent of Republicans – are infected with a malignancy that must be removed from the body politic.

Most of the 30,000 lies Trump told as president will soon be forgotten. But the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen is the kind of myth that can poison politics for a generation. At first, the lie seemed like just something to salve Trump’s hurt feelings. Anytime he loses, he says the game was rigged. But then he weaponized the lie, using it to attack the credibility of elected officials and judges in a dozen states.

When that didn’t work, Trump and his allies used the lie in an attempt to stop the transfer of power. They argued that Congress and the vice-president can throw out the electoral votes of any state they don’t like – tossing a hand-grenade into the heart of the Constitutional machinery.

Then mob attacked the Congress, and the Constitution.

It could have been worse, and maybe it was. Liz Cheney’s surprising anti-Trump stance followed her father’s striking intervention. On Jan. 3, The Washington Post published an oped essay, organized by Dick Cheney and signed by every living former secretary of defense, that warned against any military involvement in settling election disputes or obstructing the transfer of power. Last week, Gen. Mark Milley and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did something even more unusual, sending a letter to all military personnel that condemned the Jan. 6 assault, reaffirmed the military’s commitment to defend the Constitution and explicitly disavowed Trump’s Big Lie about the election.

Actions like theirs don’t happen in a vacuum. The Cheneys and their allies in the defense establishment apparently had reason to fear Trump might use the military to keep himself in power. Ex-Gen. Michael Flynn had advised Trump to impose martial law, both publicly and privately. As Trump revved up the crowd for their assault on the Capitol, he asked the police and soldiers on duty to join the march to the Capitol, where they would “stop the steal.”

Think about what it meant to tell thousands of Trump supporters “stop the steal” on Jan. 6. It was two months too late to stop the steal by winning at the ballot box. It was too late to stop it in the courts, which had rejected one lame challenge after another, or to stop the states from certifying the results. All that was left was to bully Republicans and Vice-President Pence into overturning the election results during Congress’ ceremony accepting the Electoral College results, or to stop Congress from completing its task, by force if necessary.

We’ve seen attempted coups in foreign capitals, where troops loyal to one side surround the national legislature with tanks to stop it from carrying out its constitutional duties. Trump couldn’t send the tanks, so he sent a mob, which is something we’ve also seen in the kind of countries we’ve always looked down on. He told the crowd to go up to the Capitol and stop the steal, and they took him both literally and seriously.

They failed, thank God. Congress did its duty and we have a new president. Democracy and the rule of law prevailed, but they came out of the battle badly bruised.

Much as we’d love to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror, we cannot let the Big Lie be baked into our national narrative. We must tell the truth about the 2020 election, and we must get those who have been promoting the lie, whether out of cynicism or delusion, to disavow it.

Trump’s second impeachment trial, whenever it happens, should be dedicated to telling the true story of Biden’s victory in November, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 coup attempt. The impeachment vote will tell us something about which senators will admit the truth and which still cling to Trump’s alternate reality. Other Republicans must be forced to make the same choice. Media, colleagues and constituents must ask each of them two questions: Was the election stolen? Did Biden win? If they can’t give a straight answer, or are still repeating Trump’s Big Lie, I’d stop the interview right there.

Trump’s Big Lie won’t be his last, and the conspiracy theorists will keep coming up with more. But the reality-based community has to take a stand. From now on, the price of admission to serious political discussion should be acknowledging that Joe Biden was elected president, fair and square.

Feb. 11, 2021

A year ago I wrote a post listing some of the institutions, major and minor, that had been degraded or undermined by Donald Trump. They included the National Park Service and the National Weather Service, the White House Correspondents Dinner and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A year later, a friend asked if I was interested in updating the list. I won’t do a comprehensive list (I’ve got to get Trump out of my head), but here are a few institutions Trump trashed in his last year before 81 million voters showed him the door:

- U.S. Postal Service: Trump often does the worst things for the silliest of reasons. He hobbled the USPS on purpose – disrupting countless lives through delayed delivery of medication, packages, checks and legal correspondence – in order to delay by a few days the arrival of mail-in ballots in a few swing states that might be marginally more favorable to his opponent.

- Centers for Disease Control: Formerly the world’s most respected public health organization, the CDC was muzzled and its decisions distorted by politics because Trump makes everything political and takes everything personally. Historians will count the many reasons America failed in its response to Covid-19, but I can’t help thinking Trump’s vanity played an ugly part: He didn’t like how he looked in a mask, so he refused to wear one, which turned the most important tool for managing a pandemic into a political symbol.

- Presidential pardons: Good presidents use pardon powers to correct injustices, acting on the recommendations of DOJ professionals who carefully weigh each application’s merits. Trump used those powers, based only on his whims, to bribe witnesses into withholding evidence against him, and to reward cronies, in-laws and influence-peddlers.

- The Peaceful Transfer of Power: It is the linchpin of our democracy, on which the Constitutional Republic depends. Donald Trump spit in the face of that principle. His final assault on the electoral system and the Constitution will stain his legacy forever, and his continuing refusal to publicly accept the results of last November’s election remains a threat to the republic.