Sidebar: Sunday School 12/13/20

Often, over the past few months, Jake Tapper's parting thoughts on CNN's State of the Union have struck a nerve.  That was the case this week, when he closed the hour with the commentary below. The italicized comments are mine.

Paraphrase and flip William Shakespeare, I come to you at the end of the show today to praise Donald Trump, not to bury him. 

Outgoing president Trump deserves our thanks for approving Operation Warp Speed, which helped to bring us the COVID vaccine. He has rethought trade deals. He has re-imagined peace in the Middle East. He has pushed foreign policy consensus to put more of a priority on bringing U.S. service members home, even if his follow-through has been rather wanting. These are legitimate achievements.

There are other ways outgoing president Trump, perhaps inadvertently, has done us a service. The relationship between the news media and the U.S. government should not be anywhere near as antagonistic as it's been under president Trump, but it should be adversarial. Maybe Trump has been right to not attend the dinners where politicians and reporters cozy up to each other. Maybe he exposed as unseemly something that should not return to normal. (I couldn't agree more.)

The president has also exposed the problem that so many of our standards and norms in the U.S. seem to be based upon the honor system. There isn't, for instance, an explicit law against a U.S. president trying to extort a foreign country to provide dirt on a domestic political opponent. A government upheld upon the honor system only works if everyone involved has honor. This seems something that legislators should re- examine. (That we even have to talk about this is something I still can't wrap my arms around. In the past, I would have called this kind of thing a solution in search of a problem. Now? Not so much...)

And then, finally, let us look at the events of the last week, where the president pushed an insane lawsuit. The big one, he called it, from the attorney general of Texas. It was a clownish legal brief based on conspiracy theories and outright lies. And 18 - 18 - state attorneys general, some U.S. senators, and a majority of the House Republican Caucus, 126 members, supported it. (Embarrassing. Frightening. Insulting. Culting.)

President Trump did us a favor by exposing these elected officials. They are definitionally people who signed on to a desperate desire to subvert the will of the American people, to disenfranchise voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan based on lies and conspiracy theories, putting an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy. (They should be forever identified as people "who put an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy," when we say their names.)

President Trump did us a favor by revealing to us that those individuals are who they are, and that's important as we go forward because the business of this nation continues - the pandemic, the economy, foreign policy, immigration. And now we know clearly how much these individuals care about facts or truth, how much they care about democracy, or the principles that make this country great, which is to say not at all. (They cannot be trusted, because they put Trump's personal interests ahead of everything else. They have no principles.)

Since Election Day, we've seen Republican officials at great professional and personal risk refuse to go along with these lies about the election, from CISA head Chris Krebs to Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Michigan Board of State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde, members of the Maricopa Arizona County Board of Supervisors; from local judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, we saw honorable American officials look at these nonsense allegations and kick them to the curb. But not Republicans on Capitol Hill. (Those who stood up to their colleagues, who stood up to their party, who stood up for the rules, who stood up and did their jobs, deserve our gratitude. And that 'his' judges, 'his' justices, didn't do 'his' bidding, didn't follow 'his' wishes, is at least slightly encouraging.)

Now, many Americans hoped that most Republican officials, while they agreed with Trump's policies, did not like the uglier parts of his style, his willingness to lie or smear to achieve his ends. And the cowardly silence of Senate Republicans, most of whom still refuse to acknowledge that President-Elect Biden won, their silence allows that hope to continue, however misguidedly. (My hope is those who have been deathly afraid of losing their careers to Trump's tweeted wrath will stand up now, apologize for their silence, and beg for forgiveness. That, too, is misguided hoping, I know.)

But president Trump made House Republicans go on the record. He made them stand and be counted and 126 of them, including Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, they actually signed their names to this, this unconservative, un-Democratic, un-American mendacious joke of a lawsuit that would disenfranchise millions of their fellow Americans. (I expect very little from most of the Rs; my expectations are usually met, or, as in this case, exceeded -  that congressional leaders would find a way to justify this is appalling.)

These House Republicans raised their hands. They said sign me up. The hope that most Republicans in the House were better than this - that has been destroyed. For those of us who believe in standards and norms and the US Constitution, we need to thank President Trump for bringing this fact to light.

I don't usually wake up in the morning thinking how thankful I am for Donald Trump and his seriously bizarre approach to the presidency, but I surely can be thankful he has exposed, for all to see, the worst of us. 

Our collective job? Finding the best of us.