When I hear supporters of Donald Trump complain about the street protests following his victory and the unwillingness of Democrats to rally around our president-elect, I smile. And no, it’s not a happy smile. It’s more of a tight little “you have got to be kidding me” smile.
Barely a week ago, many of the people now preaching unity and patriotism were eager to greet Hillary Clinton at the White House door with articles of impeachment. They were promising to turn her administration into one endless string of ugly, bitter congressional investigations and talked openly of tossing her in prison. Some still do. Trump himself refused to commit to accepting the outcome of the election, and he stoked angry crowds with suggestions that the election that they believed was theirs by birthright might be stolen from them.
So if current roles were reversed, if Trump had won the popular vote by more than a million votes but lost the presidency, I suspect we’d be in a lot more dangerous place right now.
And let’s not fool ourselves. While a majority of electoral votes may have made Trump president, they have not changed who and what he is. He’s still the man whom Ted Cruz described as “utterly amoral” and “a pathological liar,” warning that “we are staring at the abyss.” John Kasich was so appalled that he ran campaign ads drawing parallels between Trump and the Nazi Party, and Marco Rubio called Trump a “con artist”, concluding that he is “wholly unprepared” and point-blank accused him of fomenting violence as a political tool.
We’ve all heard heated political rhetoric; we all know that candidates can get carried away. But those warnings about Trump’s character and the danger that he posed to the republic were extraordinary not just for their harshness or the fact that they came from his own party, but because of the heartfelt sincerity with which they were delivered.
Remember, our two previous Republican presidents were so disgusted with Trump that they made it publicly known that they could not stomach casting a ballot for him, which is extraordinary. Most of the GOP foreign-policy establishment signed a public letter warning that their nominee lacked the judgment, temperament, knowledge and self control to be trusted with the nuclear arsenal. Again, extraordinary. When Trump attacked a Mexican-American judge, House Speaker Paul Ryan had no choice but to admit that that “claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Since then, tribal loyalty, rank opportunism and the allure of power have caused many of those Republicans to conveniently forget what they know about Trump, just as they have somehow ignored the reality that he has come to office with the clear assistance of a foreign power, a situation without parallel in American history.
However, I and many other Americans have not forgotten. We have seen who Trump really is and what he represents. Loyalty to our country and its principles requires that we continue in strong but peaceful, and I stress peaceful, opposition, if for no other reason than to remind him that we are still out here watching and we still have a voice.
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