January 10: How Presidents Ought to Behave
Watching Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9 was a sad and sometimes inspiring experience. But given what’s about to happen on January 20, it also served as a reminder about presidential conduct, as I explained at New York:
The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama amiably chitchatting with Donald Trump as they sat next to each other in the pews. Among the many eulogies to the Georgian, one that definitely stood out was one written before his own death by the 38th president, Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent in 1976, who wrote movingly of the partnership and friendship the two men formed during their long post–White House years. It was both sad and touching that the current chief executive, Joe Biden, reached back nearly a half-century to his own endorsement of Carter’s presidential candidacy in the year he defeated Ford.
But it was impossible to forget for a moment that the solemn event that brought this disparate audience together was occurring just 11 days before the re-inauguration of Donal Trump. The incoming president differs in so many respects from Jimmy Carter, and his return to power is a living repudiation of so much of what Carter believed in.
In his own view, Carter’s inveterate truthfulness was his most important personal virtue; “I’ll never lie to you,” he often said when running for president in a country anguished by Tricky Dick Nixon’s administration. Whether or not Carter was able to live up to this lofty commitment to honesty, it contrasts dramatically with Trump’s extremely flexible attitude toward facts and refusal to take personal responsibility for the consequences of his sins (on one infamous occasion, he could not come up with a single thing he had ever done that required divine forgiveness).
Carter’s great legacy in international affairs was his effort to anchor U.S. foreign policy in universal human rights. Trump rejects any standard for foreign policy other than the most naked national self-interest and has gone out of his way to dismiss global standards banning the torture of prisoners of war and military strikes on civilian populations.
Carter had a wonk’s passion for tinkering with government operations to make them more efficient and responsive. Trump is indifferent to the minutiae of governing, and his big reform initiative is to give tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy license to blow up whole agencies and radically reduce spending as ends in themselves.
In the long arc of political history, Carter is renowned for leading his own southern region out of the darkness of Jim Crow and building a mind-blowing coalition of civil-rights activists and ex-segregationists. Even if you believe Trump is without personal prejudice, he has very clearly made politics safe for a resurgence of racism and has made the pursuit of racial justice and equality a target of legal action and mockery.
As every eulogist at Carter’s funeral emphasized, he was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith, teaching Sunday school back in Plains for many decades. He wasn’t transactional in his religiosity; he took positions on social and cultural issues that led his fellow evangelical Protestants to abandon him and his party, and he led his own congregation out of its traditional denomination when that larger church refused to treat women equally. If Trump has any personal religious convictions, they are largely a secret, and he has formed a highly transactional relationship with conservative Christians, who are forever rationalizing his manifest impiety. Until his wife’s death, Jimmy Carter closed every day reading the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn. Trump’s relationship with Holy Scripture (other than misquoting it) is mostly limited to hustling expensive Bibles to his devoted followers.
The American presidency is a collection of men with all sorts of varying personalities and backgrounds, and it’s entirely possible someone wildly different from Jimmy Carter is what this country needs. But it’s hard to undertake comparisons of the ex-president who just died and the ex-president who is about to re-enter the White House and see anything other than a devolution in integrity, fidelity to civic and religious traditions, and willingness to work with others peacefully. As Biden succinctly said in his eulogy, Carter’s “enduring attribute” was “character. Character. Character.” What sort of character is Donald Trump?
As a religious believer, Jimmy Carter undoubtedly had faith in the power of a beneficent God to regenerate souls and administer justice, so he’d be the first to pray for the success of Trump’s second administration. But the signs aren’t great. Indeed, the soon-to-be 47th president spoiled any grace note he might have struck by attending his predecessor’s funeral when he
openly whined that the half-staff flags honoring Carter would ruin the vibe at his own inauguration. Perhaps he will acquire the decency to think less of himself and more of the people whose lives he is about to change in ways that terrify many of them. Jimmy Carter’s first book was titled
Why Not the Best?, and it treated self-improvement as personal and national goal. The self-styled champion of American greatness could take a page from that book and emulate Carter’s understated (and imperfect) greatness in asking himself and his country to live up to its most enduring values.
McConnell and Trump said it was a bump for them and they did so with authority and great strength so it must be true!
The only bump I was aware of was after Helsinki which happened to be a couple weeks after 8 Republican Senators spent the 4th of July in Russia. Right, because before that everyone Trump endorsed lost. I guess that was the same kind of situation though. What everyone thought would be a disaster for Trump’s GOP turned out to be great for them. How do they work their magic?
Stranger still, Trump’s Republicans are overflowing with offerings to help Democrats target them in the election and they are either ignored and become “wins” because the GOP is playing a game of destroying the hearts and minds of Americans while Democrats try to find the best economic policies for people who are known to vote against their own economic interests.
Are Republicans trying to help Democrats so they can impeach Trump because theyre too afraid to do it?
They become more and more extreme because the Democrats arent noticing now Republicans are trying to help them?
Or is it just that they believe that if you can communicate a lie with force and conviction, you win
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/mcconnell-calls-deficit-very-disturbing-blames-federal-spending-dismisses-criticism-of-tax-cut/2018/10/16/a5b93da0-d15c-11e8-8c22-fa2ef74bd6d6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9465a672e731
Will Democrats grab this and go after Republicans with it, or will Helsinki strike again?
Democrats were already on track to win the House before all the Kavanaugh posturing.
Now we are assured to make it even more difficult for those Red State Democrats to remain in the Senate for 6 more years.
Sacrificing 6 year terms for 2 year terms is not smart.
Also, the hearings have created a backlash for sexual assault survivors all over the country. The standard of proof for rape has actually gone up again and has become part of the partisan culture wars.
This is not a win for Metoo or for Democrats.
Both long term Senators like Feinstein and new candidates like Kamala Harris completely mishandled the hearings allowing them and even making them part of partisan politics.
This proves that Democrats’ leadership problems going forward are not a matter of age or identity. The problem is ideology and an almost total inability to communicate with non-liberals in common sense plain language.
We can’t have complex policy issues and moral discussions be reduced to hashtags and catchphrases like Believesurvivors.
The electorate deserves and expects better.
The leftwing consultant and activist apparatus with its narrow liberal coastal views has proven time and again incapable of speaking to the rest of the country.
We need to have accountability for the consultant/activist class. After disasters like this nomination heads should roll. People shouldn’t be allowed to define defeat as success. This was nowhere near even a moral victory.
We should have 55-65% opposition to Kavanaugh, not a completely irrelevant 46%. We should be above the 50s in almost all states.
Instead people like Harris and Booker who want to be President are pandering already to primary voters and donors. They are catering to polarize audiences in Blue States further yet even there are not able to get to the upper 60s.
The United States doesn’t have national elections. Even when issues are nationalized the consequences are always filtered via the States and congressional districts.
The strategy of not having national strategies and not having national calls for liberals in the cities to restrain themselves and at least try to appeal to non-PC activists is not working.
We should not have lost in 2016. We should be in line not only for gains in the House but also for unequivocal victories in the Senate and Electoral College.
Instead we are just muddling through.
If Trump can get away with murder it is because Democrat’s discourse is still overwhelmingly disliked.