(RNS) — “The framers of our Constitution knew that our republic would endure only if our presidents have the character and honor to put duty ahead of self interest,” Liz Cheney posted on X after Joe Biden announced he would not be running for a second term. “President Biden deserves our gratitude for his decades of service to our nation and for his courageous decision today.”
Actually, the framers knew no such thing. They planned for the republic to endure in case a corrupt and dishonorable president put self-interest ahead of duty.
This is how Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 69, explained why the strong chief executive proposed by the Constitution would not be equivalent to the British monarch: “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” (Note that, Supreme Court.)
Cheney’s assertion deserves, rather, to be included in the dreamworld of the American civil religion, that congeries of hopeful ideas and rhetoric, of patriotic places and customs, that elevates the mundane business of governance and citizenship into something sacred and inclusive.
Which is to say that when presidents do put duty over self-interest, American civil religion is strengthened. And when they don’t, it’s undermined.
Half a century ago, Theodore H. White wrote in his book on the Watergate scandal, “Breach of Faith,” that Richard Nixon had destroyed a binding national political myth that held that the American people would choose the best man to lead them, and that, for its part, the presidency “would make noble any man who held its responsibility.”
In the spring of 1973, I worked for White doing such research on Watergate as was possible via existing news coverage as he struggled to write “The Making of the President 1972,” the last in his series of four books on America’s presidential elections. I can well imagine what he would have thought of Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Dec. 3, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Forget about the major breaches of faith that made Trump the first president to be impeached twice. Forget that where George Washington, in his Farewell Address, called the Constitution “sacredly obligatory upon all,” Trump, two years ago, asserted that what he claimed to be a revelation of “Massive Fraud” in the 2020 election results “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
In American civil religion, national holidays are occasions for presidents to step back from political combat and avow our common purpose as Americans. Biden, like presidents from Washington to Obama, has done that. Trump does nothing of the sort.
Celebrating July 4 on the south lawn of the White House four years ago, he said, “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing.” Last Thanksgiving, he used his holiday greeting to denounce one domestic enemy after another along with “all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”
Where Biden denounced the recent assassination attempt on Trump and reached out to express sympathy for his political adversary, Trump mocked the hammer assault on Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband.
And in response to Biden’s withdrawal of his candidacy, Trump could not offer the slightest appreciation for his years of public service. “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!” began his post on Truth Social.
As disgusting as such behavior is, the greater evil is that, throughout the political world that Trump has created, it is destroying what has been a fundamental norm of public discourse in this country. With the exception of Mitt Romney, who is himself retiring, no one in Republican national politics had a kind or appreciative word for the president.
After the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, Brent Leatherwood, expressed “appreciation that President Biden has put the needs of the nation above his personal ambition,” he was roundly attacked on social media by co-religionists and fired from his position (though the firing was retracted when it turned out to have taken place without an authorized vote of the group’s executive committee).
Wrapped as it is in the flag and “America First” exceptionalism, MAGA has no use for the piety of American civil religion. Its religion is something else.
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