A former adviser to President George W. Bush explained on Sunday why the subsequent Republican president, Donald Trump, has failed to live up to the ideals of America’s founding fathers, arguing that his “wretchedness is timeless.”
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Quoting pamphleteer Thomas Paine, Steve Schmidt observed that during the Revolutionary War, many Americans refused to behave courageously and instead capitulated to the British monarch because it was the path of least resistance.
“Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt,” Paine wrote. “Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.”
Paine added, “In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.”
After quoting Paine, Schmidt opined that there were “no truer words. The ignominy of men like Trump and his enablers is novel only in that their crimes are unique to them. The character of the players and their wretchedness is timeless.”
The ex-Republican later singled out Trump and his supporters for refusing to follow the Constitution.
“Freedom and a shared fidelity to the US Constitution was the common ground. It’s been breached, and there’s no place to meet in the middle,” Schmidt wrote. “The threat comes from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that controls the institutional structures of the GOP — lock, stock and barrel.”
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The political adviser then, once again, quoted Paine’s literature as diagnosing “the nitwittery that flows freely now as it did then.” On that occasion, Paine said that “there are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.”
Schmidt further argued that this is relevant because “all Americans who love freedom should feel the deepest contempt for the hustlers, charlatans, cynics and opportunists who have attacked the Constitution in recent years under the MAGA banner. All American patriots should have a special contempt for the weakness and cynicism of the politicians who so easily, effortlessly and willingly got on their knees to service Trump.”
Speaking with AlterNet, Dean Caivano — a professor of political science at Lehigh University (where this author studied for his PhD in history until his dissertation adviser died, leaving him ABD) — elaborated on Washington’s skepticism toward power when speaking to AlterNet.
“At several key moments, Washington accepted limits,” Caivano told AlterNet. “He resigned his military commission after the revolution. He accepted constitutional authority. He left the presidency after two terms. Those decisions helped establish the idea that public office is temporary and that military authority must be subordinate to civilian rule.”
He continued, “That lesson is very relevant in the Trump era. Contrary to his actions and rhetoric, the presidency is not personal property. The military is not a private instrument. Law enforcement is not supposed to function as an extension of personal loyalty. A constitutional republic depends on the refusal to collapse public authority into the will of one person.”
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