I am taking the advice of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Russell Nelson and making a tangible expression of gratitude this holiday season. I am grateful to Donald J. Trump — as his time in office runs down far too slowly — for these things he has done for us, his countrymen:
• Thank you, Mr. President, for showing your fellow Americans who we really are: That among other things we are the kind of people who could be persuaded to elect a moderately successful New York real estate developer and reality TV character based on his own unsupported boasts of genius — and 15 years of boob-tube scripts written to make him look infallible — and that we could somehow conjure a hope that such a person was capable of leading the largest, most complex governmental system ever devised without so much as ever having serving on a school board or a planning commission.
• Thank you, sir, for giving the lie to that wizened old chestnut of “American Exceptionalism.” Because of you, Mr. President, we can no longer delude ourselves into thinking that because of our native freedom-loving instincts/the genius of the framers/America’s higher ethical and intellectual attainments, there is a special providence that will keep our America safe from autocracy and tyranny. That was always a crock, and we have you to thank for showing us that we can’t just put our political system on autopilot and not expect to eventually fly into the side of a mountain. You have shown us that we have to stay engaged and focused on maintaining the precious liberties we have inherited or we will lose them, even if 40-odd percent of us are perfectly willing to surrender them to a cheap carnival barker like you.
• Thank you for the valuable lesson, in how easily the leaders of the Grand Old Party can purchased, cowed, and intimidated, and how terrified they are to lose offices whose powers they apparently have no intention of ever deploying for the good of the people who elected them.
• Thank you for providing America with needed instruction, that comfort, security, liberty, and justice are guaranteed to no one. These are not, after all is said and done, the common portion of humankind, but are hard-won and transitory; they can be threatened in myriad ways, subtle and not. Aspirational language — we have learned — without determined, concrete action, is just a lot of pretty words.
• Thank you for reminding us of the exquisite fragility of the Madisonian system of checks and balances, and how much that system depends on small centers of limited power willing to assert their prerogatives against the centralization of authority. A crystal goblet will shatter into a thousand pieces if you hit it with a hammer, and can last a thousand years if you don’t. So, ultimately, the goblet’s fate — like Our Fair Republic — depends on the goodwill of everyone who could break it, but decides to defend it instead. This was always a GOP talking point, one that I fervently believed as the Republican I once was. However, now we see that it was really true. We know that it was even true when most of the GOP elected officials mouthing it never believed it, or believed more in keeping their jobs than their oaths.
• Thank you for teaching us that impiety (political and spiritual), aggressive ignorance, intellectual laziness, and a vicious and relentless narcissism, are not qualities of character and deportment likely to advance the success of a presidency.
• Thank you for concept-testing some policy notions that at first blush might sound appealing to some — such as laying tariffs, antipathy toward immigrants and repealing Obamacare — but in practice turned out to be stupid and cruel.
• And speaking of cruelty, let us not forget the valuable lesson you gave us, that having an explicit policy of tearing small children from the arms of their parents and then deporting mom and dad and losing track of them, leaving hundreds of little kids orphaned in a foreign land, might just be a bad political look. Who knew? [Hint: Everyone but you and Stephen Miller, apparently].
• Thank you for putting on a master class to show aspiring authoritarians who come after you that a president can thoroughly botch his or her response to a national crisis, including the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, and still successfully sell that same executive performance to millions of supporters as an epoch-shattering triumph. Lincoln did, after all, remind us that it is possible to fool some of the people all of the time.
• And finally, President Trump, allow me to express my gratitude in a very personal way: In only four short years, you were able to teach me that after practicing law for 40 years, it is still possible to have a completely intact gag reflex.
Rick Knuth
Rick Knuth is an attorney practicing in Salt Lake City.