OPINION | On his way out, Trump salts the earth behind him

"No president in American history has ever before spent the end of his time in office trying to discredit our democracy, degrade the federal government and set Americans against each other. And what of the Republican Party? They, too, are finishing the Trump presidency the way they started it, with a show of complicity and cowardice," - Paul Waldman 

This was probably the way we should have expected President Trump to finish his time in the White House: whining, lying, ignoring the duties of his office, desperate to keep his scam going and focused only on himself. But that Trump is being Trump should not for one second blind us to what is happening right now and how damaging it is. The destruction of the past four years was apparently not enough for him. So on his way out the door, Trump is salting the earth behind him.

It has been nearly two weeks since the election. President-elect Joe Biden won the electoral college by 306-to-232. His lead in the popular vote is 5.6 million and growing. Republican efforts to get courts to shut down counting and invalidate huge numbers of votes are being laughed out of court. This is over.

And what is the president doing? Complaining on Twitter.

He will not prevail, and everyone knows it. The White House staffers desperately spinning on his behalf know it. The Fox News hosts propagating conspiracy theories about stolen votes know it. Every elected Republican knows it. The only ones who don’t know it are the millions of Trump voters who are the targets of this noxious propaganda campaign, the ones being told that American democracy is worthy of nothing but contempt.

Trump tells them that our system of elections is impossibly corrupt, that only the Republican Party can legitimately claim power no matter what the will of the public actually is, and even that street violence is not only justified but should be celebrated when committed by the far right.Meanwhile, his White House instructs civil servants across the federal government to refuse to cooperate or even communicate with representatives of the incoming Biden administration, making the already complex task of the transition vastly more difficult. And while the coronavirus pandemic is positively exploding across the country — we’re now averaging more than 150,000 new cases and a thousand deaths per day — his administration has stopped even pretending it cares.

At the current pace, by the time Trump leaves office, more than 300,000 Americans will have died of covid-19. And even after he departs, every day more will die because Trump politicized simple public health measures, convincing his supporters that refusing to wear a mask to protect yourself and those around you is a great way to own the libs.

No president in American history has ever before spent the end of his time in office trying to discredit our democracy, degrade the federal government and set Americans against each other. And what of the Republican Party? They, too, are finishing the Trump presidency the way they started it, with a show of complicity and cowardice.

There are some Republicans, the most repugnant, who are enthusiastically whipping up anger and spreading lies about voter fraud, trying to convince their base that Biden will be an illegitimate usurper. At the other end, there are a few who have grudgingly acknowledged reality, admitting that yes, Biden won the election and will become president in January. But there are so few of the latter group that when one says, “I expect Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States,” it makes the new.

The rest of them are hiding, too craven to even answer that simple question. “We invited every single Republican senator to appear on Meet the Press this morning,” said NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday. “They all declined.” The reason was clear: They can’t defend Trump and don’t have the guts to tell the truth about what he’s doing.

So please, let’s not hear anyone praise those few Republicans willing to say that Biden is going to be president and the transition should proceed with some measure of professionalism. That’s nothing to be proud of. What we deserve is to hear Republicans say to Trump, “Stop this right now. You are hurting the country.”

But there are none who will do so. So to them we should say: The leader of your party is pouring poison into our national bloodstream, and if you can’t find the courage to say it’s wrong, don’t ever try to tell us again how patriotic you are.

Over the past four years, I’ve thought often about how just a few days after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama welcomed Trump into the Oval Office. Trump had turned himself from a reality show buffoon into a political figure by becoming the country’s foremost advocate of the racist “birther” lie, accusing Obama of not being a real American, then ran a campaign of fear and hatred to win the presidency.

Yet Obama was polite and gracious. Like every American president who came before him, he knew that what mattered at that moment was not the disgust he surely felt for his successor nor his fear of what the future might bring. What mattered was showing Americans that democracy is about all of us, a shared enterprise we have to work to sustain.

Later, Obama would leave Trump a letter welcoming him to the Oval Office, just as George W. Bush did for him and other presidents had done in the past. Here’s part of what it said:

We are just temporary occupants of this office. That makes us guardians of those democratic institutions and traditions — like rule of law, separation of powers, equal protection and civil liberties — that our forebears fought and bled for. Regardless of the push and pull of daily politics, it’s up to us to leave those instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them.

No president amasses a perfect record of protecting those democratic institutions and traditions. But at the moment their presidencies ended, every one — even those who left in disgrace — remembered that there are principles and commitments more important than their own petty grievances and wounded egos.

Until now.

Paul Waldman