It would have been so easy to avoid

 

It's long overdue, but Twitter has permanently suspended President Trump's account. Google is threatening to remove the Parler ap from its webstore unless the right-wing Twitter clone comes up with a plan to moderate its extreme content. Officials of the Trump administration are resigning right and left, erstwhile supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham (!) are jumping ship, and administration officials who remain are vowing to disobey any illegal or dangerous orders from a man who it was apparent even four years ago shouldn't have been allowed into the White House on a guided tour.

Donald Trump's unfitness was manifest long ago. Granted, he was running against the abrasive and almost equally obnoxious Hillary Clinton. Granted, issues like respect for human life (the right's hypocrisy concerning which has been made manifest in its amazingly callous response to the COVID pandemic) and the growing extremism and intolerance of the "woke" left polarized the nation and caused many- not without cause- alarm. But Donald Trump's instability, emotional immaturity, lack of ethics, and profound narcissism have been on display his entire adult life. Nobody has any excuse for having supported him.

Trump was elected by accident. In four years, he destroyed America's reputation and leadership in the world. He made the trade deficit worse, not better. He divided the nation and fostered racism and repression. He revived the un-American agenda of the Know-Nothing Party. Far from "Making America Great Again," he made us petty, small, vindictive, and contemptible. He virtually destroyed the Republican Party and the reputations of boot-licking political leaders and journalists who can never be taken seriously again. It will probably take decades to reverse the damage this small, weak, and cowardly man has done to our nation, if it even can be changed.

And it was all unnecessary. The danger was so obvious. It could so easily have been avoided. Only a few years ago, it would have quickly and readily been avoided.

What went wrong? Have we grown so selfish and so short-sided in the last few years? Or has an increasingly complicated world in which social change is proceeding more rapidly than we can assimilate it or even comprehend it causing us to lose our intellectual and moral equilibrium? One thing is sure: we have become tribalized to the point that even truth has become so subjective in our minds that a spokesman for the outgoing administration could speak early on of "alternative facts." We lack common sources of information that we can mutually rely on and which we all can trust, making it impossible for us to meaningfully even discuss our disagreements.

Donald Trump is, in many ways, a symptom rather than a sickness. He would have been impossible only a few years ago. Now, a man whose unfitness for the most powerful office in the world has fostered and encouraged and bears ultimate responsibility for the first outright insurrection against the Federal government's authority since the Civil War. Followers of Jefferson Davis were never able to carry the Confederate battle flag through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, but those loyal to Donald Trump have.

The rank-and-file of Lincoln and Reagan's party actually seems to approve of an armed insurrection against the Constitution. It's hard to believe.

I believe that Donald Trump- who apparently will not be removed from office via the 25th Amendment, since Vice-President Pence opposes the step- should resign or be disqualified from ever holding Federal office again through impeachment. The trial would take place after he has actually left office. There is precedent for that; the point would be both to put his conviction for fomenting an open and violent insurrection against the government on the historical record and to disqualify him from seeking the presidency again. It would be a poor substitute for recognizing the threat he posed and forestalling it, but at least it would be something.

The task of undoing the damage of the last four years is a daunting one, especially since such a large minority of us refuses even now to acknowledge it. But a great deal rests on our undertaking it. If the American experiment is, as Lincoln suggested, the last, best hope of our kind, it faces the most significant challenge since Lincoln's day. Donald Trump is only partly the cause of that threat; much more than the reason, he's an effect, a symptom. The life of the world's last, best hope depends on our finding a cure and somehow undoing the damage that might have so easily been avoided four short years ago.