Why We Should Be Profoundly Grateful to Donald Trump and Never Elect Him Again

Liberal heads are still exploding because, in the Term just concluded, the Supreme Court decided, for the first time in a long time, to follow the Constitution as written, and to base its judgments on what the Founding Charter says rather than what the governing elite would like it to say. Hence this anguished piece in the New York Times:

The Supreme Court moved relentlessly to the right in its first full term with a six-justice conservative majority, issuing far-reaching decisions that will transform American life. It eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, recognized a Second Amendment right to carry guns outside the home, made it harder to address climate change and expanded the role of religion in public life.

But those blockbusters, significant though they were, only began to tell the story of the conservative juggernaut the court has become. By one standard measurement used by political scientists, the term that ended on Thursday was the most conservative since 1931….

“Every year since John Roberts became chief justice, the court’s results at the end of the term have been less conservative than many court watchers feared they would be at the term’s outset,” said David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This time, the doomsayers got it exactly right, as the court traded caution for raw power.”

And you know who’s to blame.

That can only be the consequence of the three justices President Donald J. Trump named to the court and particularly of his appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court after the death in 2020 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In this at least the Times is correct. The addition of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett has made possible the most Constitution-respecting Supreme Court Term of my lifetime. It wasn’t that Trump himself knew the most promising candidates for Court vacancies, or even that his appointments were necessarily the very best available. It was that Trump listened to people who knew a range of excellent possibilities, in particular White House Counsel Don McGhan and veteran conservative lawyer Leonard Leo.

And the Times is right about this too: The Court’s opinions concern issues the electorate feels deeply about, and that are likely to have an impact on the culture beyond even their very considerable portent for how the Court will approach constitutional interpretation for the foreseeable future.

In other words, Trump delivered on his most important campaign promise. One can energetically debate whether he made America great again, but he made the Constitution great again the way the Founders wrote it rather than the way the Left has spent roughly 70 years rewriting it.

This is a mind-bending accomplishment, and America will be fortunate indeed if the next Republican President does as well. It is thus not without regret, but without hesitation either, that I have concluded that Trump should not be returned to the Oval Office.

The first obligation of the President is to see that “the laws be faithfully executed” — in other words, that the rule of law and the unwavering discipline it commands come before anything else.

By every institution legitimately empowered to act in deciding the matter, in particular the courts, duly constituted state election officials, and ultimately the electoral college, Trump lost the 2020 election. Indeed, he almost surely lost it more decisively than Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election. But unlike Nixon — not exactly a model of good character — Trump never accepted his loss. Instead, he was, at the minimum (and I won’t go into the dozens of other details, which have been recycled ad infinitum) a cheerleader for a sizable mob that swarmed the Capitol on the day the winner was to be certified. For whatever else might be true or later be shown to be true about Trump, that degree of self-involved contempt for legal process, and active encouragement of trying to disrupt it, is disqualifying per se.

Many of us have thought this for a long time, before the House hearings ever got started. But it was recently brought home to me in bold relief by two friends. One is a Facebook friend — a diehard, conservative Republican — who wrote this:

The tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that has evolved over the past 224+ years has become the hallmark of American democracy. On every Inauguration Day until he died, no matter where I was, no matter if he despised the son of a gun being inaugurated, my father made sure I noted and appreciated that there were no tanks in the streets. He carried the scars of flak wounds received in the skies over Germany so that I could grow up where the transfer of power took place without tanks in the streets.

There have been close elections in the past. There have been contentious elections in the past. There have been accusations of election fraud in the past. But there has always been the peaceful transfer of power because the candidates understood its powerful significance to democracy. Nixon understood it in 1960. Gore understood it in 2000. Hillary Clinton understood it in 2016.

The events of January 6 resulted from Trump’s failure to understand it — to this day. It is said that all politicians are narcissists. But all the dismissed indicators of lack of character turned out to be the indicators of malignant narcissism that rendered Trump incapable of understanding what constituted the best interests of this nation, of understanding the good faith commitment required to continue the traditions of the peaceful transfer of power.

Growing up a child of the Cold War — with images of Khrushchev pounding on the desk with his shoe at the UN and the occasion of his shouting “We will bury you!” conflated in my memory — the notion that the threat to our democracy could come from anywhere but the Left was incomprehensible to me. That is, incomprehensible until the events of January 6, 2021, played out before my eyes.

I doubt I have ever seen it put in a way more compelling than that.

I received one other lesson that hit home, from an acquaintance of mine who was all of 23 in January 2021. He was working at the White House on detail from one of the cabinet agencies (his first job out of college). On January 6, his White House colleagues, all of them more senior and higher on the totem pole than he, were watching on TV and cheering on the Trump-inspired mob as it made its way into the Capitol. He stood up alone and asked them something like (he doesn’t recall his exact words), “Do you not understand why this is so wrong?” He left the White House the next day. He didn’t have another job to go to and was unemployed for months afterward (but, I’m happy to report, is now working to advance principles of constitutional government).

If I get really lucky, I will be like him when I grow up.

Donald Trump did something for the law that has needed doing in this country for decades, and we are likely to benefit from it for a long time to come. No other President, including even Reagan, was able to do it. But his character flaws are too deep and too dangerous for the country to return him to power.