In the wake of Saturday evening’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on the former president, there has been, not surprisingly, a lot of talk about “unity”, cooling down the temperature and changing the rhetoric employed in political discourse. The problem with this discussion is that there is only one we to truly achieve anything resembling unity in this country — and, as you will be able to gleam why, when I explain what is necessary to reach it — it ain’t gonna happen.
The only way there can be some reconciliation in this country of the massive political tensions we face and have experienced now for years is for Donald Trump to admit that he lost the 2020 election, that months before he was concerned that he would lose the 2020 election, that he began earlier that year to claim the election was going to be rigged (as he had done in 2016 and as he had specifically claimed after he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz that year), that he was never going to concede and that the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 was the last play that he could use after losing 60 court challenges and after all the recounts confirmed the initial outcomes.
I expect all of you right now who are reading this are having the same reaction: Hell will freeze over before Donald Trump would ever make such a truthful declaration and admission of guilt. And therein lies the problem. Not only has his relentless firehose of lies polluted the minds of his cult followers, the large majority of whom are rational, good people in other aspects of their lives, but Trump’s remarkable shamelessness is so vast that those members of the media who will call out the most minor transgression of any other political candidate or politician relying on standards that formerly applied to everyone from Richard Nixon to John Edwards, abdicate any sense that such standards should apply to Trump. (They even go further and try to make comparisons between Biden’s age and Trump’s mendacity ignoring the fact Trump is old and makes age-related gaffes frequently.)
This phenomenon started during the 2016 campaign. When the media saw that pronouncements by Trump which would have buried any other candidate only made him stronger with his base, the media concocted this almost invisible sleight of hand: if the voters don’t care that he is lying to them constantly, the fact he is doing so does not matter. The result, of course, is that Trump can and has fraudulently caused his supporters to believe ridiculous nonsense not limited to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen but that Covid will disappear in a few weeks, that climate change is a Chinese hoax, that “they” want to take your guns from you, that crime rates are up and the economy is in the toilet.
The problem is we can never have unity in a country where a large percentage of the country and the base of what was once the Republican Party believes their candidate in 2020 won the presidential election. It is no surprise that that lie caused thousands of violent people to storm the Capitol on January 6.
This should not stop Democrats from publicly calling on Trump to come forward and admit he lied. Of course, he will not do that. Of course he won’t. But by demanding he does so, Democrats would reinforce their respect for the truth, demonstrate that the violent rhetoric in this country has almost completely come from one side and force the media to reckon with their role in giving Trump the ongoing permission slips to continue lying to his supporters on a daily basis. Democrats must wed that call with a statement that the fact he constantly lies to them demonstrates his absolute and complete contempt for them and the country.
During NPR’s coverage of the RNC last night, Mara Liasson stated matter-of-factly that Trump and the Republicans will certainly not accept the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The fact that we have reached a point where this inevitability is baked in to the cake is a sign of how far the character of this country has fallen since Trump descended that escalator back in 2015.