Donald Trump offers a stern warning about the political future of the West

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A year ago, it was as if the sunshine was erasing the memories of a bad dream. Donald Trumps malign grip on the Republican Party seems broken. In defeat, the president showed himself what he is: an overwhelming child whose fragile ego is undermining American democracy.

Throughout his life, Trump has shown a pathological inability to accept defeat. Whenever there was anything that went against him it was a court judgment, an awards ceremony, a round of golf he would accuse him of malpractice and claim he won. Should he take the same attitude in his highest office in the country is not surprising: in 2020, as in 2016, he declared before the first vote that the only way he could be defeated was through fraud. But hitting his supporters to march on the Capitol as soon as the result is confirmed is a step too far for almost all Republican Congressmen.

It takes a real effort, now that they are once again lowering themselves before their capo, to remember what they said 12 months ago. Republican Congressional leaders withdrew from the tawdry coup attempt. And they know who to blame.

The President is responsible for attacking rioters in Congress every Wednesday, said Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House of Representatives.

President Trump is responsible for provoking events today, his Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, declared.

The same line is taken by every senior Republican, including those who are now the most enslaved to their professions of allegiance. The President needs to understand that his actions are the problem and not the solution, said Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. The language and rhetoric of the Presidents crossed a line, it was reckless, Texas Ted Cruz agreed.

Sadly, their attachment to constitutional propriety did not last long. When Democrats moved to impeach the president, Republicans opposed them in the House by 197 to 10, and in the Senate by 35 to 5. Since then, they have fallen, pretending to believe the election was indeed stolen, stuttering the their loyalty. such as the broken victims of the Stalinist show-trials.

On Thursday, Senator Cruz went on Fox News to get angry over identifying the rioters who, let’s remember, wounded 138 police officers as terrorists. In repeatedly apologizing to patriots who protested the election result, he said the word terrorist was applied to BLM rioters, not to loyal citizens who stormed the government seat.

How do we explain this U-turn? After all, Republicans, as their name implies, are meant to defend the republic and its basic principles. Their first president, Abraham Lincoln, had no doubt as to which one was at the forefront of these principles: Let respect for the laws breathe every American mother into the strolling baby scratching her lap; teach it in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; write it in primers, spelling books, and almanacs; preach from the pulpit.

How could his party suddenly and completely lose touch? How reversed, not only the political mandates it held before the small Trump government, a balanced budget, free trade but its deepest and most fundamental belief, that republican offices are larger than the politicians occupying them ?

Part of the answer has to do with tribalism. It is often noticed that supporters of the two American parties increasingly live in different counties, watch different television stations and believe in different facts. The number of cross-party friendships is at its lowest of all, and absolutely 50 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Democrats admit to hating each other.

In this climate, people become reluctant to reject bad behavior from their own side; and their reluctance allows for the worst element. There were very few Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, very few jihadists in Syria in 2011. But, in both cases, the extremists garnered support from the same as their hostile social democrats who hated Tsarism, the non -violent sick Muslims. of secular dictatorship.

The same dynamic works on both sides of the American divide. Many liberal Left are uncomfortable with the culture of cancellation, but they keep quiet because they can’t bear to line up with Republicans who are its loudest critics. Similarly, many conservatives know in their bones that it is unpatriotic to challenge an election by force. But they are outraged at the way Democrats continue to punch bruises.

On Wednesday, which marked the first anniversary of the violence, Vice President Kamala Harris made an extraordinary statement in which he put the unrest in Washington at the same level as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the abominable Twin Towers. : Some dates resonate throughout history, including dates that instantly remind everyone who has lived with them where they are and what they were doing when our democracy was invaded: December 7 1941, September 11 2001 and January 6 2021.

Faced with such absurd histrionics 2,403 Americans were killed in Pearl Harbor, 2,657 in the 9/11 attacks would understand that Republicans have become defensive. Some dismissed the protesters as losers who dressed strangely with nothing to do with Trump. Others celebrate them as patriots who seek to prevent theft in an election.

According to an incredibly depressing poll in the Wall Street Journal, two-thirds of Republicans do not believe that the raid on the Capitol building, an raid openly intended to prevent Congress from verifying the election result, was a attack on democracy.

As a result of the violence, Trump’s approval rating among registered Republicans dropped slightly; but that of McConnell and vice president Mike Pence, who did their duty and approved the outcome, went downhill.

This is the water in which GOP politicians should swim. To have any chance of having a career in the party, even to hold their seats against a major Trump -backed challenger, they have to pretend to believe the election was stolen.

It is impossible to exaggerate how dangerous that claim is. A democracy depends on withholding the winners and consent from the losers. In essence, most Republican Congressmen understand this. But a year of having to keep the opposite in public has skewed their moral compass. Sometimes, as John F Kennedy said, party loyalty demands too much.

Things are not always like this. On January 6, 1961, following a presidential election in which there was truly credible evidence of vote fraud, it fell to the defeated candidate and outgoing vice president, Richard Nixon, to prove the result.

He preceded his declaration by noting that it showed the stability of our constitutional system, and offered his warm congratulations to JFK. On January 6, 2001, it fell to Al Gore as vice president to remove from order a series of protests brought by Democrats to the election he had just defeated.

This raising of rules to leaders is America’s greatest strength. When post-fascist countries turned to democracy in 1945, they generally copied America. When the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989 overthrew the Soviet occupation, they also demanded a system where those in power could not make policies as they went on.

Democrats from Cuba to Kazakhstan have the United States in mind when they protest against the dictatorship. Or, rather, they used to. Now their autocratic leaders are happily pointing to the American example as the justification for their own arbitrary rule.

I remember the way dissidents in the Soviet bloc used then to say democracy as normalization. But, over the years, I have come to the sad conclusion that there is nothing too normal about it. Yes, some Western countries have been able to elevate the process rather than the outcome. But until when?

Imagine the way in which, in the US and UK, BLM demonstrators were given a free pass because their declared purpose was thought to be more important than the letter of the law. Imagine the way our entire establishment, which was better than the rioters in the Capitol, but also more determined, tried to overthrow a referendum it had previously promised to respect.

I fear that our countries have been normalized, in the sense that we value more if our side wins than if the rules are followed. And that was the most depressing thing of all.

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