Our Institutions Were Tested. They Persevered.

And for the most part, the leaders of those institutions made the right decisions when it mattered the most.

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Just after Donald Trump took office in 2017, I wrote an essay for The Weekly Standard aiming to calm those worried that the new president was an existential threat to American governing. He might be a bull, I argued, but we should stop acting like our institutions are a china shop. 

The Founders understood the dark elements of human nature and created bodies and rules to handle them. Moreover, generations of American public servants have evolved a range of norms and customs, built from their collective experience in the practice of governing, attuned to our worst impulses and most dangerous habits. Our institutions aren’t made of porcelain, I argued. Not only are they robust, they are “antifragile,” capable of getting stronger after being tested.

And tested they were. During his tenure, Trump undercut intelligence officials, invited foreign meddling in his reelection campaign, aimed to undermine the Mueller investigation, and much more. After his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, he continuously lied about the results, lost dozens of court cases, and tried to bully state-level election officials. Near the end of his term, the New York Times reported last week, he considered ousting acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen in favor of a Justice Department attorney who was willing to advance Trump’s efforts to aggressively challenge Georgia’s election results. And although the nation awaits a full investigation of the appalling events of January 6, 2021, we can say at this point, at minimum, that his behavior was beneath the dignity and duty of his office. 

Nearly as disturbing has been the willingness of some of his allies to amplify his lies and provide political cover for his unpresidential behavior. As a result of all of this, there has been serious fretting about insurrection and the precarious state of American liberalism and democracy. 

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  1. Jason Wagner

    Just curious on people's thoughts...

    Is our system of Impeachment a good one?

    When we have explicitly political actors (i.e. members of Congress) make such determinations, they will always require political calculations, not just considerations of guilty/not guilty and constitutional/not constitutional. We can chide our political leaders, but the truth is that they are not leaders, they are parrots of their constituents (or at least the most vocal bunch of their constituents).

    I believe it is a good thing that it is REALLY hard to impeach someone, but in our current climate, could any President be impeached? Sadly, I believe the answer is no. It would always be "too costly" for a majority of either party's Reps and Senators. And if no one could be impeached, what ultimate guardrails exist to hem in any President outside of re-election?

    Joe Biden may not push the limits as Donald Trump did, but there is a strong likelihood that someone will push harder than Trump in the years ahead (it just may look different - our nation's past experiences with Impeachment has looked very different each time). How often do the majority (or even a significant minority) of either party break with the opinion of their voters to do what they deem to be right? It doesn't seem very often. After all, it's easy to be sanctimonious when it happens to be aimed at a President of the opposing party or when your next election is far away. In other circumstances, most everyone seems to look for cover.

    So I guess those are the two questions, I'm thinking about:
    Is our system of impeachment still a good one?
    Could anyone actually be impeached?

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    Phil H

    If I were defending the 2020 US Presidential election to non-Americans, these are the types of arguments I would make. And they are valid arguments.

    But as an American, I expect better from my country. It's not enough that our election procedures were tested. They were needlessly and shamlessly tested, by Donald Trump and all those who had the "luxury of posturing".

    And while most officials in decisive roles make the right decisions, sobered by the "gravity of their authority", like Vice-President Mike Pence, one very key official showed absolutely no such sobriety commensurate with his position. That was, of course the President of the United State, Donald J. Trump.

    Donald Trump is the kind of President a third-world banana republic might deserve, but not the United States of America.

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    BrettH

    This isn’t a persuasive argument. The guardrails held, sure, but the GOP is doubling down on their very special brand of paranoid crazy moving forward. They’re going to hide behind procedural arguments to not impeach the guy who, you know, incited a deadly insurrection at the seat of the federal government—that’s not an institution acting responsibly. It seems to me that they will be all too happy to unintentionally help the political left shred remaining cultural and institutional norms. The guard rails are still there but man have they been seriously dented from the train wreck of the past few years.

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  4. Boatbody


    Boatbodyjust now

    You miss the point, Andy. Our institutions should never have been tested this way. With the January 6th debacle, we are sewing the seeds of government going after domestic terrorists, and who knows how many dolphins will be netted with the tuna? Free speech and association will be the first targets.

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    VladimusPrime

    This has to be the dumbest take on the whole Trump presidency I have yet read, not counting the obviously hagiographic and insane ones published by Trump supporters. Those institutions that "survived" and those institutional leaders that in the moment chose the right thing, are now in the process of being defenestrated by the Republican party to make sure that such courage is never again displayed. The next time Republicans falsely claim a fake election and demand the legal vote be tossed out by secretaries of state, or that it not be certified by state legislatures, and state officials everyone will be ready to take the plunge rather than be caught off guard. Does the author really think that if the Republicans had had a majority in the House they would not have voted to throw out the Biden Electoral votes, illegally? Forcing some sort of unprecedented legal battle?

    America may have survived, and our institutions were strong enough to withstand the halfassed coup orchestrated by Trump and made up on the fly. But next time the plotter won't wing it they will have built up to it for four years. Even now Trumps naked lies about the election have found no repudiation in the Republican Party. Nor has the man.

    American institutions are like steel, steel that has now been heated and bent. Far from being tempered it is now more fragile and prone to failure then ever. What has nearly killed us has not left us stronger, our body politic is riddled with the disease of Trumpism. I see no action being taken by anyone to purge us of this infection, and until it is cleared it spreads and stands ready to once again flare up and overwhelm what is left of our Democratic immune system. And opinions like the one in this article are at best whistling past the graveyard, and at worst a concerted effort to laugh off and minimize what has happened, to give cover to the perpetrators.

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    1. Boatbody

      Here's one GOP that repudiates both Trump and his lies.

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    Khal Spencer

    My question to those 140+ GOP House members: if the GOP had been the majority party and your vote not simply symbolic, would you have still tried to overthrow the election?

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      Pat Riot

      Before 1/6 they probably would have chickened out. Now that they see there was zero political price to pay for doing it, they would have. This is how things ratchet up.

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    Zach Larsen

    I can think of one institution that is currently in ruins. The Republican party.

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      Pat Riot

      As of yesterday it's as unified as it's ever been. The anti-Trump rebellion has been put down. Kevin McCarthy is meeting with Trump now to receive orders (I guess Trump has to go back to the old fashioned way now that he can't use Twitter):

      https://thehill.com/homenews/house/536148-mccarthy-to-meet-with-trump-in-florida

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        Zach Larsen

        Yep its little more than a club for a cult of personality.

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        VladimusPrime

        And those of us who have called for the thing to be burned down are putting on our "I told you so" shoes. The Republican party is a bastion and vehicle of insanity. It needs to be destroyed and never allowed to hold power or influence again. Shameless and shameful.

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    Wayner

    This example of insidious denialism will only serve to keep GOP establishment types selectively blinded to how their own failures will push America over the brink, unless they wise up relatively soon.

    For starters, their political malfeasance around the subject of the 2nd Amendment can be linked directly to today's circumstances, where no small number of angry, rightwing obsessives have armed themselves -- heavily -- in anticipation of civil war. How long before owning the libs is no longer enough?

    And how long before the lunatics start coming for sensible Republicans? Oh right, it's already happening.

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      Pat Riot

      What "sensible Republicans"? You mean the 5 out of 45 who did not vote to exonerate Trump? You know, they 5 who have *no* future in the Republican party now...

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        Wayner

        Point taken. But I am also thinking about state officials who performed their duties admirably in the face of serious threats to themselves and their families.

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          Pat Riot

          They were brave indeed, but they too likely punched their own tickets out of office.

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  9. CW

    I'm not at all optimistic that our institutions will persevere. There were already too many appointees that corrupted almost every institution. Trump just didn't have enough time to finish the job. And now that Republicans are normalizing violent extremists and Fox is defending QAnon, whose adherents believe Democrats and other enemies should be rounded up and executed, extremist violence is only going to become more common.

    The barbarians are no longer just at the gate, they have breached the inner sanctum of Congress, paid for and embraced by Republicans. The newly seated blonde Q barbarian in the House believes Hillary and Huma tortured and killed children, fileted their faces and used them as masks, among other grotesque delusions (I can't believe I had to write that). Here she is harassing David Hogg just weeks after he survived the Parkland shooting.

    https://twitter.com/fred_guttenberg/status/1354420542678441986

    She is a monster. But Kevin McCarthy is going to have a "conversation" with her. What will he do? If she is not expelled, if the party continues to coddle terrorists and crazies and incite violence with their lies about a stolen election and refuse to convict the one person most responsible for the attack on 1/6 then we are screwed as a nation.

    Read this warning to America from a counterterrorism expert: "Republicans are appeasing extremists the same way Saudi leaders do."

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/26/republican-extremists-saudi-terrorism/?utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

    She writes, "after decades of sacrifice by the U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence officers working to fight terrorism — too many of them living and dying far from home — Trump brazenly built his own extremist faction and incited them to conduct terrorism in America."
    ...
    "Homegrown extremism, fostered by political leaders, is even more horrific and longer lasting [than 9/11]. Just look to Saudi Arabia when its political leaders stray from the deal they made with radicals there. When the Saudi government does not heel to its homegrown extremists, bombs go off in the kingdom. People die."

    We are at a crossroads in this country and the moral collapse of the Republican Party at the local, state, and federal level has left me in despair. Democracy is still fragile and only one party is protecting it.

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    Mudskipper

    And if Trump had won a second term? Our institutions are as good as the people in them, and Trump was clearly gearing up to replace as many of our civil servants with loyalists as he could. In a second term, he could have gone a long way in subverting the executive branch. And if congress had been in Republican hands, what then? Would they have held him to account? The indications so far don't look good in that regard.

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