IS THIS WHO WE ARE?
“This is not who we are.”
How many times have we heard these six words in the Trump era?
Joe Biden has used them often to describe the former president’s harshest policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as after the deadly 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville he says was the “epiphany” that made him decide to run for president, and again in speeches he has given about our damaged democracy.
We’ve heard the same words from Republicans who refuse to stand up against the MAGA movement and then try to distance themselves from its predictable consequences. Such as Kevin McCarthy, who, as Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, told CBS News: “What we’re currently watching unfold is unAmerican. I’m disappointed, I’m sad, this is not what our country should look like. This is not who we are.”
McCarthy, who was then House minority leader, soon after showed who he was. Just two weeks after declaring that Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot, he made a pilgrimage to Mar-aLago to kiss the ring, asking absolution for telling the truth in public.
So “This is not who we are” can be an affirmation, a reprimand, an inoculation. What is worth questioning is whether those words are now the truth about Americans, or ever were.
An answer will come in November. No election in memory will have provided such a clear delineation of what American values really are.
In 2016, it was still possible to believe that Trump would grow and change under the enormity of the office. For all his flagrancy as an entertainer, he was also a businessman and dealmaker; surely, even some of his adversaries assumed, those were skills he could bring to bear in Washington.
Within four years, most voters knew differently.
In a resounding rejection of his agenda, they trounced congressional Republicans in the 2018 midterms. Yet with Trump himself back on the ballot two years later, the outcome was far closer. Though Trump lost the popular vote both times he ran, in 2020 he increased his totals, both in the number and the share he received. Were it not for about 45,000 voters in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, he would still be president.
Elections should be — and often have been — clarifying.
In 1964, when the radical right John Birch Society was near the peak of its influence, renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had launched her career covering the Spanish civil war three decades earlier, wrote a friend: “Unless there’s a Johnson landslide, the country and world will know how many incipient and energetic homegrown Fascists we have. I never for a moment feared Communism in the U.S. but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait.”
That year’s GOP nominee, Barry Goldwater, did a delicate dance, as many Republicans do today, trying to distance himself from the extremists without alienating them. Voters weren’t having it. Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Goldwater, as Gellhorn had hoped, in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history.
No such purgative outcome appears possible in today’s closely divided country, however. In 2012, amid the rise of the tea party, President Barack Obama promised that if he were re-elected, it would “break the fever” of political dysfunction that had overtaken Washington.
Obama won, but the virus had taken hold. And in 2015, a new variant emerged off an escalator in Trump Tower.
If, knowing everything Americans now know about him, they reelect him — or even come close to doing so — it will be time for all of us to quit lying to ourselves.
This is who we are.