The March for Life was canceled this year due to the coronavirus, but the March for Death has already taken place. The riot led and cheered on by Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and other Republican members of Congress resulted in five deaths, dozens of injuries, and the end of any chance President Trump had to be remembered as a leader.
Trump will go down as the worst president — worse than those who failed to deal with slavery and the Depression, worse than President Richard Nixon and his break-in and cover-up, and worse than President Bill Clinton and all of his interns.
A president swears to defend the country against all dangers, domestic and foreign, not to become one of those dangers. When Trump unleashed the melee that nearly killed his vice president, the prospect of this didn’t even seem to distress him. What did distress him was that, in losing the election last year to “Sleepy Joe” Biden, he became a “loser.”
Fear of the very word “loser,” which Trump used all the time to describe his detractors, appears to have forced him to all his dark deeds. It’s what he called the late Sen. John McCain, who lost a presidential primary to former President George W. Bush in 2000 and a general election in 2008 to former President Barack Obama, and Sen. Mitt Romney, who in 2008 lost a primary to McCain and a presidential election to Obama four years after that. But facing an incumbent as Romney did in 2012 is harder than facing another contender, and McCain’s run was torpedoed by a stock market crash. There was no disgrace in a loss to a political star such as Obama. A win eked out over a clunky campaigner such as Hillary Clinton is much less impressive.
Trump even lost the popular vote when he won in 2016 against Clinton. This time, he lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote to someone who had hardly left his basement all year. Even a conservative who doesn’t welcome a liberal government has to beam just a little at the thought of Loud Donald being decked by Slow Joe.
Had Trump simply faced the facts when the votes were counted, made a brief call to concede, and started packing his bags to return to Florida, he might have done much better. His loss, though decisive, was not embarrassingly large and could be blamed on the pandemic. He would have remained the head of his party, perhaps destined to mount a Grover Cleveland-like comeback for a second nonconsecutive term. He would have been a kingmaker, if not quite a king.
Now, he is nothing, if not an embarrassment, and he will be that for quite a long time.
