So much for American exceptionalism

As a retired journalist pondering impressions of American carnage in recent years, some impressions prompt more reflection than others. Among them: an encounter in August 2017 in the wake of deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, involving white supremacists, KKK disciples and neo-Nazis protesting removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. This clash over escalating racism and old memorials to the heroism of Confederate leaders dotting town squares across the American South prompted me to visit Waco's historic Oakwood Cemetery to ponder the towering statue marking the remains of iron-willed Texas Gov. Richard Coke. I wanted to see how that monument acknowledged his military service in the cause of the Confederacy.

I arrived at Gov. Coke's imposing memorial at the same time an aging couple from neighboring Bell County did. They were there to visit the grave of Texas governor and Baylor University president Pat Neff, to whom they were related. But the man – his sympathies clearly conveyed by his "Make America Great Again" cap — wanted to first take photos of the statues of Gov. Coke and other former Confederates before they were "desecrated." As we talked, he said he feared the nation was headed for another civil war. We discussed how this might play out, given that divisions today seem more rural/urban in nature than North/South. At one point, I said I regretted that President Obama, for all his obvious powers of oratory and intellect, had not brought Americans together — and that the current occupant of the White House most certainly had not.

"Oh, c'mon," the old gentleman erupted. "He's only been in there six months! Give the man a chance!"

I've long remembered this response — common from Trump supporters at the time — because it acknowledged that, for all his claims to the contrary, real estate promoter and reality-TV star Donald Trump was not ready for primetime when he narrowly won the presidency in November 2016. He didn’t even cut it as an earnest, dutiful apprentice. On the campaign trail, he fumbled basic knowledge about not only the Constitution, which a president swears to preserve, protect and defend, but the Bible, which should have been a warning sign to all the white evangelicals who nonetheless flocked to him in what one could argue constituted the biggest display of mass blasphemy in American history. His knowledge of pressing issues seemed drawn from New York Post headlines and peeling bumper stickers, not policy papers and think tanks. And, besides, how much experience in the Oval Office, let alone in life, does a 70-year-old business entrepreneur so confident of his own abilities need to calm and reassure a divided and confused nation?

Sadly, when he had a chance to do otherwise after Charlottesville, President Trump only aggravated matters, famously equating racists and civils right demonstrators as “very fine people.” In terms of preparedness, one by now must question whether Trump was ever fit for duty as an American leader, whether he ever fully appreciated the checks and balances inserted into the Constitution by the Founders; whether he ever fully understood that the art of the deal — at least in politics — involves both sides walking away with something; whether he ever fully understood that governing is more than holding campaign rallies appealing to your adoring base while alienating others you ironically might need to get re-elected, let alone improve and unify the country on your watch; whether he ever fully understood that Americans — at least some Americans — look to their presidents to demonstrate integrity, discipline, inspiration and strength, to be the adult in the room, not the child disposed to temper tantrums, rants and lies. The irony amid the tumult and bloodshed of Charlottesville: Many Trump supporters, in letters to the Waco Tribune-Herald that I published as opinion editor that spring and summer, stressed we should put our differences aside and rally behind this man. But did he rally and unite us when it mattered?

Even now, I hear crestfallen Trump supporters say the mainstream news media never gave him a chance. First off, that’s not our job. Second, in both 2016 and 2020 he ran for a job where the bar is set high, not low, and great things are expected, especially from someone who boasts unendingly of his greatness.

As a seasoned political observer, I've long believed a president determines the overall success or failure of his administration in the first six months. Republican President George W. Bush's team early on bungled its handling of Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont over legitimate tax-cut differences, pivoting on whether federal budget surpluses generated in the late 1990s should be used to fund steep tax cuts (the Bush administration position) or paying down the national debt (Jeffords’ stance). The Bush White House unnecessarily poisoned relations by, among other miscalculations, stupidly snubbing Jeffords from a National Teacher of the Year award ceremony at the White House honoring a Vermont high school educator, despite Jefford's prominence in education issues. For this and other White House slights, Jeffords reportedly fumed and switched political parties, tipping the Senate to Democratic control — an utterly avoidable development. This happened at least partially because a too-full-of-itself Bush administration demonstrated immaturity and lack of judgment and foresight about one of its very own party members. Is it any wonder this administration then failed so spectacularly to fully grasp the volatile and intricately interwoven religious and sectional differences it needlessly aggravated by invading Iraq in 2003? 

President Obama demonstrated a similarly tone-deaf approach early on. Only a month after his 2009 inauguration on the theme of hope and change, during a White House fiscal summit, the Democratic president huddled with Republican lawmakers. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, acknowledging that Democrats ran both chambers on Capitol Hill, humbly asked the president to persuade Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to include Republicans in the decision-making process. Obama’s response was disappointingly aloof and non-committal. Result: Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, passed without Republican input or even a single Republican vote. Similarly, the economic stimulus bill of 2009 passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate. And Republicans paid back Obama’s indifference when they gained control of Congress. As Barton said at the time to the president, “I think the House Republicans have shown that, when we’re not included in the decision-making, we’re disinclined to sign off on the solution.”

One wonders what the Obama administration might have been capable of over eight long years had it demonstrated more inclusiveness when this golden opportunity presented itself. Instead, the president — confronted with Republican obstruction later in his tenure — eventually retreated into policy by executive order.

In going through papers and periodicals to sort out what to keep and what to toss the other day, I came across a copy of Time magazine's 2016 Person of the Year issue, headlined "Donald Trump: President of the Divided States of America," complete with a color portrait of a stern president-elect seated in an ornate chair and leaning to one side to look over his shoulder into the camera. Editor Nancy Gibbs' introductory "Behind the Scenes" column — illustrated with a photograph of Trump during the Nov. 28 photo shoot at the president-elect's residence at Trump Tower — is written in what I would describe as an optimistic, even celebratory tone:

"Four years ago it was Barack Obama, fresh off his re-election; this time, Donald Trump, who spoke with Obama the night before our cover shoot. There’s a unique bond between presidents and their successors, and Trump talked about the surprising chemistry he felt with Obama both when they met at the White House two days after the election and in their conversations since. As [photographer] Nadav [Kander] and his team set up lights and equipment in the Trump Tower penthouse, the president-elect looked at Nadav's portfolio, particularly his striking 2013 portrait of Prince Charles that was taken for a Time cover. In the hours that followed, Nadav photographed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus, senior counselor Steve Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, whose portraits accompany Michael Scherer's profile."

A few pages later, the magazine chronicled 2016 in quotes, beginning with Candidate Trump's comment on the fealty of supporters in January: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." There was President Obama's insistence in April that political considerations would not affect the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state: "Nobody is above the law." And, yes, there was Trump's boastful, boys-will-be-boys, “locker-room” remark about his sexual hold over women from a leaked 2005 video that Americans heard for the first time in October 2016, weeks before Election Day: "Grab them by the pussy." And the cavalcade of quotes from the famous, infamous and obscure came to an end with an upbeat quote from Obama at the December White House Christmas tree lighting: "After eight years as your president, I still believe there is so much more that unites us than divides us."

In her own essay further into the issue, Gibbs captures the moment of Trump's presidency in waiting:

"For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump's victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change — broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name. The revolution he stirred feels fully American, with its echoes of populists past, of Andrew Jackson and Huey Long and, at its most sinister, Joe McCarthy and Charles Coughlin. Trump's assault on truth and logic, far from hurting him, made him stronger. His appeal — part hope, part snarl — dissolved party lines and dispatched the two reigning dynasties of U.S. politics. Yet his victory mirrors the ascent of nationalists across the world, from Britain to the Philippines, and taps forces far more powerful than one man's message."

And there's a brief essay by American historian Jon Meacham for those (including Trump) who argued Trumpian parallels with President Andrew Jackson, with the Jackson biographer noting Old Hickory’s rise from the ranks of the common people rather than from a realm of wealth, privilege and entitlement. Meacham, however, worried about another seeming difference, given Trump’s scandalous behavior on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016:

"There is, however, an essential difference, one that will tell us much about the coming years in U.S. life and politics. For all his bombast, Jackson was an experienced public figure — he had served as a judge, a senator and a general — who understood his weaknesses and took care to compensate for them. He could thunder and storm; he was prone to fits of rage and temper. Yet he was self-aware, and with that came a kind of self-restraint. He was, as [a] visitor to the Hermitage noted, as at home with a chessboard as he was with charging blindly forward. We simply don't yet know whether Trump possesses the kind of discipline that Jackson brought to the presidency. Jackson's character and worldview reflected a genuine conviction in the ultimate wisdom of the people. He was no opportunist. He came to his populism not as a political device but as a result of his experience."

I found this Time "Person of the Year" issue illuminating: First, its tone was realistic but open-minded, fair. The page devoted to quotes offered critical context involving Trump and the world around him. Journalism is nothing without context, and democracy is nothing without reliable, relevant, accurate information and critical, balanced, scene-setting context. Gibbs' thoughtful essay honestly highlighted the hopes and fears a Trump presidency roused in different Americans, offering the balance so many Trump supporters often wrongly insist is missing in mainstream news media coverage. Meacham's essay provided historical assessments on what populism looks like when genuine, mindful, informed and coming direct from the people, not channeled through Trump Tower prisms. One could well argue that not only many in the news media but many in society were open to the promise and potential of a Trump administration, even if some of us were understandably guarded. For weeks ahead of inauguration some of us were lulled into optimism that Ivanka Trump might temper her father’s rasher pronouncements, particularly regarding social issues and the environment. A friend of mine — a Muslim, if it’s relevant — who served in the military abroad as well as at the Pentagon assured me the republic was safe so long as retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, revered in military circles, arguably one of the best-read scholars to serve in uniform, was part of the Trump administration as secretary of defense. (Some of Mattis’ recommended reading: Ulysses S. Grant’s “Memoirs,” H.R. McMaster’s “Dereliction of Duty,” Robert Gates’ “Duty,” Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom,” Viscount Slim’s “Defeat Into Victory” and, one of my favorites, Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”) Even I reassured wary friends and anxious readers that, whatever else, veteran Republican lawmakers who swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and valued their reputations in society and history more than that of this renegade in the party would surely keep President Trump on a tight leash, safeguarding the country from his worst excesses and impulses, restraining him through their Article I powers and possibly even rendering him a serviceable president in the final analysis.

The problem is Trump not only showed less and less inclination to heed well-informed advisers and well-intentioned, tempering influences, he also never gave as good as he very often got. Certainly, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton showed far more respect for Trump than he showed her during the 2016 campaign, encouraging mob chants of "Lock her up" to packed auditoriums — the sort of thing one might expect of a totalitarian government that locks up its political opponents. Clinton nonetheless magnanimously conceded defeat within hours of Election Night. Even though she won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, she understood and accepted the controversial system of how we pick our presidents and she bowed to that system, even if her supporters lamented and groused about the Electoral College. What's more, President Obama invited President-elect Trump to the White House right after the election, even though Trump spent years trying to delegitimize Obama as foreign-born and possibly Muslim and thus not a U.S. citizen. Again, Obama showed far more respect for Trump than Trump showed for Obama. Indeed, Trump’s pre-presidential impulsiveness and vilification and lies previewed what soon engulfed the White House: the audacious victimhood and personal grievance he claimed throughout his tenure alongside the bullying brand of demagogy he deployed against enemies real and imagined, complete with more lies, more conspiracy theories, more falsehoods.

Indeed, no sooner was the Jan. 20, 2017, Trump inauguration over than he was whining about news media estimates supposedly lowballing his inaugural crowd size. And so off we were on a wild, four-year ride well beyond any of the early stumbles and pratfalls of his predecessors. Off we were with a strutting, narcissistic, dishonest president who, unlike Jackson and other presidents, showed little to no interest in serious policy beyond what his considerable gut told him, who had little to no interest in building consensus or demonstrating his own "Art of the Deal" in working with earnest legislators. Early on we were treated to Muslim travel bans; censorship of the Environmental Protection Agency; repeated labeling of the inquiring and justifiably skeptical press as "the enemy of the American people"; terming what the press knew to be lies as merely "alternative facts"; allegations of some 3 million illegal votes in the 2016 presidential election (conveniently explaining away Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin); attacks on the flagging star power of Trump's successor on "The Apprentice" (muscleman and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger); a federal judge's suggestion that Trump might well have incited violence against protesters during a 2016 campaign rally in Kentucky; elimination of ethics training for incoming White House staffers; and Trump's reference to constitutional checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches as "archaic" and in need of revision. By midsummer 2017, many Americans had seen enough chaos and impetuosity in the Trump administration to realize the adjective "unprecedented" would be invoked regularly over the remaining three and a half years. Many wondered, more seriously, if constitutional guardrails on their own would allow the republic to survive, given that many Republican lawmakers seemed more subservient to Trump's whims and wishes than their supposedly sacred oaths of office. How they might look in the history books mattered far less than being targeted by one of President Trump's stinging tweets, wielded like Jovian thunderbolts from on high to the delight of followers who admired his direct and unvarnished communication.

Judging from a 2020 election tally that involved many independents and many former Republicans, a lot of us who voted against him had a particular line in the sand that Trump crossed during his four years in power: For me, it was his caging of desperate migrant mothers and children in what appeared to be kennels, sometimes in squalid conditions, and his separating of migrant parents from their children, a policy executed so effectively and so cruelly that, even under subsequent court orders, the administration’s incompetence and utter disregard for human life are such that many migrant families still can't be reunited. Another line crossed for me was Trump’s contempt for the Constitution, which he violated by hijacking powers of the purse specifically reserved and relegated to Congress by Article I — and all to fund construction of a border wall that he long claimed Mexico would fund. His haughty insistence, too, that he was above the law is truly the stuff of Old World monarchies and corrupt dictatorships and papal states — not a 21^st century democracy in which every man and woman, high or low, is supposed to abide by rule of law.

For me, Trump’s efforts to enlist foreign agents and leaders, including our adversaries, to help him win elections in America is beyond question. I’ve read the entire Mueller Report, and while evidence of concerted and strategic collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election is indeed sketchy, there’s absolutely no doubting Citizen Trump’s bumbling efforts to entertain such possibilities, including a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. And a fair reading of the White House’s own transcript of the president’s July 25, 2019, phone conversation with the newly elected president of Ukraine makes plain to all with eyes to see and brains to deduce that President Trump clearly sought to employ foreign resources for his gain in the 2020 presidential election (and, worse, by using a congressionally approved, taxpayer-funded $391 million aid package to Ukraine as his leverage). His use of pardon powers have absolved and freed from punishment everyone from corrupt political allies (including a Republican congressman who spent campaign funds on extramarital affairs, then had the gall to blame his wife for campaign finance violations) to U.S. mercenaries convicted in the 2007 mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians (and who worked for the brother of Trump’s education secretary). These and other Trump pardons prove once and for all that Trump’s vow to drain “the swamp” was meant only for those entrenched who showed no fealty to him; indeed, he didn’t drain the swamp, he restocked it. And his squeezing divisive political motives and bizarre conspiracy theories out of public safety measures painstakingly designed by his own administration to save American lives during a pandemic ought to condemn this president to a deep circle of everlasting COVID-19 hell. He did plenty of damage, not only contributing to more hospitalizations and more deaths than we might have seen under a competent administration free of conflicting aims but devastating the U.S. economy far more than was necessary. In doing so, Trump ironically lost his one ace in the 2020 re-election cards. Granted, a pandemic of the present scope would have tested any American president, but Trump’s decision to needlessly exacerbate matters makes President Woodrow Wilson’s general neglect of the 1918 pandemic look positively benign, especially given Wilson’s focus on World War I and its aftermath.

Possibly to his credit, Trump also showed Americans for the fickle, gullible and treacherous lot many of us really are. He revealed during his campaign and presidential tenure how some of us simply veer toward destruction and anarchy if our constitutional framework and traditions of self-governance don’t favor or pamper us sufficiently on a regular basis. In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, a longtime friend of Waco Tribune-Herald Editor Steve Boggs explained her decision to vote for Trump: “I just want to burn it all down.” And electing Donald Trump seemed the best way to do so, ensuring America was effectively dismantled and then overhauled by someone who paid no heed to constitutional or political or societal niceties. Trump also revealed, time and again, our robust all-American hypocrisies, including Republicans’ abrupt dismissal of runaway deficit spending as a significant concern during Trump’s years in power, to the degree nearly $8 trillion has been added to our national debt during his four years in office. The issue received lip service at best from Trump and the GOP. As a Trump-supporting dentist responded in spring 2019 at Ridgewood Country Club after I raised the looming fiscal crisis and insisted such reckless spending was neither conservative nor Republican by any stretch of principle: “Let it ride!” Trump also revealed the fundamental xenophobia and racism and hatred lurking in some of our neighbors, co-workers, friends and family members. Tribune-Herald publisher Jim Wilson remarked that whatever malevolent impulses had been locked away in some of us for years had now been unleashed by Trump’s rhetoric, tweets and clear contempt for truth, decency and what only a few years earlier passed for traditional American values. The situation unfolding over the past five years, complete with once unimaginable political idolatry deifying Trump and far-fetched QAnon fabrications about devil-worshipping, cannibalistic Democrats, reminds me of that British science fiction movie from the 1960s, “Quatermass and the Pit,” in which genetic engineering conducted on early-day man by meddlesome Martian forces eons ago one day kicks in, transforming some human descendants into obedient, destructive and unquestioning agents on Earth, even as others among us somehow remain immune to these influences, free to resist and confound Martian skullduggery. If this analogy seems over the top, so is what I’ve witnessed, endured and resisted in recent years.

Given the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and the installing of troops to ensure an orderly (if not exactly peaceful) transfer of power to his successor, President Trump will go down in history as an intoxicating and malicious figure who for four years peddled lie after lie to his passionate followers, themselves either in sustained denial of truth or simply content to live under his powerful spell. He will go down in history as a president who for his own political purposes divided constituents during a plague to the point he leaves office with 400,000 dead fellow Americans and stunning revelations in just recent days that promised federal vaccine reserves don’t actually exist, complicating crisis management for his presidential successor as well as governors of states desperately trying to reach herd immunity of 70 percent before even more dangerously transmissible viral variants strike. He will go down in history as a president who in his final months in office whipped up conspiracy theories and falsehoods that his re-election had been “stolen” through massive election fraud, despite abundant evidence to the contrary scrutinized and adjudicated in courtroom after courtroom, state after state, and despite his otherwise dutiful attorney general’s estimation (after widespread Department of Justice investigations) that Trump’s allegations were “bullshit.” He will go down in history as a president who encouraged thousands of conspiracy-nourished supporters to march on the Capitol to halt the lawful tallying of Electoral College votes — rhetoric sufficient to incite some of these "patriots" to storm the building, sending his own vice president (threatened by the mob with hanging) and even supportive, seditious Republican lawmakers into hiding and resulting in the death of a police officer, reportedly beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. He will go down in history as the only president impeached twice, both times for conspiring to crookedly ensure his re-election — once by trying to sway a foreign government to aid him in serving up dirt on a Democratic opponent, once by using faithful stooges and willing lackeys to actively disrupt Congress in pursuit of its constitutional duties, an incendiary move that backfired on the president in ways that a wiser politician, even one of Machiavellian disciplines, would have surely anticipated. But then that’s the thing about Donald Trump — he just isn’t as smart as he thinks. And the fact his followers can’t see through him says something about their smarts. He’s all about immediate gains and gratification, not what might later explode in his face once the fuse burns down.

Up till Election Day, Trump and his supporters might have been able to argue for certain accomplishments such as the economy, even in defeat. However, in spreading misinformation and lies about election fraud (and with the full complicity of Waco’s newly elected congressman, Pete Sessions), in vigorously resisting and impeding the peaceful transfer of power established by not only the U.S. Constitution but American tradition (to the degree post-insurrection Washington, D.C., looked more like a war zone or military state, necessary to ensure his successor’s inauguration without assassination or further violence), Trump has earned sufficient infamy in future history books and American culture to stamp him as our worst president. Warren Harding and James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson have at last been eclipsed. One ultimate irony is that, even as Trump squirmed to free himself of all accountability in his final days, some of the rioters and insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, were explaining to FBI agents and other law enforcement that, well, they only rallied in Washington and marched on the Capitol at the president’s behest.

As one who left the Republican Party as it surrendered all principles, all honor and all scruples (in other words, well before 2016), I have largely viewed the Trump administration with a dismay ricocheting between intense sadness and aching dread. Sadness in the sense that, like Time magazine editors four years ago, many of us actually wanted to see the new president succeed if his leadership somehow brought us together and bettered the nation, even if we hadn’t voted for him (and I sure didn’t). What a colossal opportunity lost for a man to do good that might have not only led his followers into closer union with the rest of us but perhaps done something to address the burdens of income inequality and health care that sideline so many struggling Americans. (For all his vows, Trump never even delivered a comprehensive health-care proposal.) Dread in the realization that this president demonstrated time and again he could not or would not learn from his failures, from citizen pushback, from perennially dismal popularity ratings. Instead, he corrupted not only an entire political party but way too many everyday Americans to the point of their no longer being able to tell right from wrong, to the point of their no longer assuming personal responsibility, to the point of their no longer understanding the principle of individual liberty alongside the Christian and communal concept of shared sacrifice and the public good. Trump led his party and his disciples into radicalization, delusion and madness, betraying everything from the U.S. Constitution to the Sermon on the Mount, everything from George Washington’s Farewell Address, to Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, to Hamilton, Madison and Jay’s bedrock Federalist Papers, to FDR’s Four Freedoms to, for good measure, the Ten Commandments that so many of the Trump faithful pretend to cherish, even as they swore by “The Big Lie” to the very end. “American exceptionalism” — that uniqueness credited us by astute observers and political theorists ranging from Thomas Paine to Alexis de Tocqueville to Josef Stalin and signaling liberty, equality before the law and individual responsibility — no longer readily defines us. When tested, too many of us were willing to give it all up for the very sort of authoritarianism that extinguished so many budding democracies elsewhere in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Too many of us were ready to simply shelve democracy for four more years of Donald Trump, complete with loony hopes for and feverish dreams of martial law and divine intervention to save his presidency, right up till Inauguration Day 2021. Too many of us – some in Congress, some in the news media, some in state governments, some in law enforcement, some even in the military — were willing to overthrow an election and snuff out the will of the people. Today I better understand how the culture that gave the world Goethe and Humboldt and Beethoven and Schiller also gave us Hitler and Nazis and extermination camps and global conflagration. I know now it can happen here, certainly under a mesmerizing figure with more savvy, more calculation and more knowledge than some egotistical, uninformed, blundering charlatan who gained too much fame for our own good on NBC's "The Apprentice."   

After many of Trump’s supporters swarmed and occupied the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 (and in numbers that reportedly pleased crowd-obsessed Trump), my feelings of dread and melancholy and heartbreak turned to outright anger, vented not only at this president and his party for allowing this disgrace to happen but at the white supremacists, self-styled militias, patriotic thugs, closet subversives and gullible camp followers who smashed windows, battered doors, trashed offices, looted desks and hauled Trump and Confederate battle flags into what some of us regard as a cathedral of democracy. A U.S. flag was even employed to pummel a fallen police officer on the steps of the building. The Rubion has been crossed. Democracy has been assaulted, and not by all those socialists that Republicans have long warned would commit the dirty deed if allowed. In capping an administration that prided itself on keeping us out of further wars abroad, even as it weakened global alliances and coddled dictators and made the world less safe, Trump ironically and knowingly ignited war here at home, neatly living up to that 2016 Time magazine Person of the Year issue in ways so many journalists then could not have imagined: "Donald Trump: President of the Divided States of America." Showman that he is, Trump clearly saved his tumultuous best for the final act of his presidency. In the days after a successfully invigorated riot, he displayed no remorse, no personal responsibility. He continued to entertain darkly undemocratic thoughts, whipping up reality-TV suspense over whispers of martial law encouraged by everyone from former Army general-turned-foreign agent-turned-traitor Michael Flynn to radicalized pillow manufacturer Mike Lindell. This left just enough time to depart the presidential stage with a flood of additional pardons — tellingly, none at all for his army of faithful insurrectionists of Jan. 6, some by Jan. 20 pleading for such pardons to save them from convictions and prison sentences, but fittingly one for his shrewd political architect Steve Bannon, charged with fleecing other Trump loyalists by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” campaign, then using those donations for personal pleasures and pursuits. Roll credits. By all means, roll credits.