Trump shows his true colors
“We have no democracy,” Donald Trump said a few days prior to last week’s final debate of the presidential campaign.
He then told debate moderator Chris Wallace on Wednesday night that he might refuse to honor the will of the American people, as expressed by their votes, on Nov. 8.
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said, before adding, “I will keep you in suspense.”
He sounded for all the world like his worst self, the one who wormed his way out of paying the architect who designed a clubhouse for one of his golf courses.
At the second debate with his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, he responded to his refusal to pay up this way: “Maybe (the architect) didn’t do a good job.”
Just maybe Donald will decide the American people didn’t do a good job on election day.
The last time a presidential election was rejected out of hand was in 1860. The most immediate cause of the Civil War was the South’s refusal to honor the votes that sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
The consequences were profound.
Electoral success and democratic majorities can be, and are, fleeting. But they have large meanings. Lincoln himself called an American election a “great tribunal,” the process itself the very “jewel of liberty.”
Trump acts as if elections are transactional business deals. They are not; they are sacred, hallowed by blood and the sacrifices of millions. Duty imposes its will on winners and losers alike.
The salient fact for both sides is this: the beauty of the democratic process is that someday losers will be winners, with nary a shot being fired. Democracy represents a preference for ballots over bullets.
Trump’s pronouncement concerning the election outcome was not out of the blue.
“This whole process is being rigged,” he has been telling his supporters at campaign rallies. Of late he has been urging them to venture out on election day to voting precincts perhaps far from their homes where voter fraud, sure to be going on, was stealing the White House from their, and his, grasp.
The candidate’s continual harping on the charade of election day cheating is an affront to every honest voter, 99.9 percent of all of those who cast ballots.
Moreover, his charge that elections are rigged by an establishment elite in partnership with its media brethren is fundamentally dishonest.
That would be some conspiracy, all right, and in his case, pretty much of a dud: the last thing most Republican leaders wanted way back when this whole thing started was a Donald Trump candidacy.
Trump’s cynicism is monumental. It rivals his ego. All presidents, and would-be presidents, are highly driven individuals. “The presidency is not a normal object of ambition,” John Kennedy once said. But Trump’s ego is a peculiar kind. He wears it on his sleeve. You can see it on his face. It is fragile. It craves the limelight. Always the limelight.
Maybe all of this is a play to stay center-stage, post-election.
Donald Trump shouldered his way to the Republican nomination, rising to the top of the heap, at least partially, on the strength of his bluntness and blunderbuss.
But does he give a whit about the GOP and its future? He has done and said things that have undermined the party and corroded the reputations and futures of party leaders.
Trump is a man largely without a party. For all those folks who have wailed over the years against party politics, hoping for national leadership without the encumbrances of party, he is your guy.
Still in all, as nominal party chief, Trump is able to stir the embers of party loyalty, especially among the vast number of people who despise the former secretary of state.
Shortly after the third debate came to a close, Kim Ward, a state senator from Westmoreland County, engaged on Twitter with the mayor of New Stanton, Nick DeSantis, who took exception to Trump’s refusal to commit to the election results.
Ward: “And if someone doesn’t accept the results, what disaster do you think will ensue?”
DeSantis: “Disaster? What are you talking about? Respect our democratic process.”
Ward: “And that’s more important than not respecting, by not answering, the requests for help by Americans under attack in Benghazi?”
Elsewhere on Twitter, Ward refers to Clinton as a “criminal.”
Finally, a word about Clinton, abortion and western Pennsylvania.
The first woman-president-to-be gave a full-throated endorsement to the right to choose an abortion at the final debate, telling Trump:
“You should meet with some of the women that I’ve met with — women I’ve known over the course of my life. This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make. And I do not believe the government should be making it.
“I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions or forced women to bear children. And I can tell you the government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, (and) with medical advice, and I will stand up for that right.”
Her words, both passionate and blunt, probably sealed her fate in our part of the state, where the pro-life creed runs deep.
Yet, many anti-abortion voters must have a queasy feeling in their stomachs at the prospect of casting their lot with Donald Trump, a man of negligible ethics.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.