“We waited in vain for a repudiation that never came,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times last Friday, as the election results sank in.
But that isn’t quite true. A repudiation most certainly came, just not quite in the way the “Resistance” had wanted or expected. For one thing, voters set President Trump quite aside from the rest of his party, which the Left had called “complicit.” The result is the best of all worlds for the Republican Party. Trump was displaced, but his party lost only one Senate seat and might have gained a dozen or more House seats. No great cleansing tide swept over the nation — just the precise extraction of an unusual president, who hadn’t been right for the job.
This was not nearly enough for some of his critics. According to them, anyone who acknowledged that he was the president and worked with him on issues was somehow “complicit” in all that he did, or more likely had said in a fit of rage, irritation, or simply bad temper. These said that they should have “called him out” when he said anything vile, ignoring that all of the other Republicans who had once run against him in the eight or so months of the primary process had been calling him out at the tops of their lungs to no effect whatsoever. In fact, it appeared to enhance their allegiance.
All his Republican foes had most likely thought or hoped that he would lose, go back to his tower, his golf clubs, and billions of dollars so that they could go back to their status quo ante. One can picture their horror and shock and complete consternation when it turned out he had won.
Imagine yourself in a car with a very bad driver, and other people (the public) in the back seat behind you, as the driver speeds, brakes unexpectedly, and veers wildly in between the center divider and the perilous side of the road. What can you do but to attempt to calm him, try to keep him as close as you can to the straight and the narrow, and keep one hand on the wheel at all times?
In a case such as this, you might be called Mitch McConnell. The dangers on hand might be called “children in cages,” “Charlottesville rally,” and the driver’s ignorance of the concept of “collective security,” the concept adopted by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston S. Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and a vast cast of thousands after 40 million-plus people had died as a result of the Second World War.
The Democrats were right when they said Trump didn’t belong in the White House, but as he was freely elected and did nothing illegal, the Republicans spoke the truth when they said that Democrats had been wrong to impeach him. The voters put Trump in office, reluctantly deciding that they preferred him to former first lady Hillary Clinton. They turned him out when they decided that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden would be better than he was. And that’s the American way.
