To start the year with a clean slate, let me make a confession: My problems with our incoming president, Donald Trump, are at least as much personal as political.
Just to be clear, our paths have never crossed. By personal, I’m referring to matters of style, character and values, to basic understandings of what our country is and should attempt to be. Policies aside, the America that Trump embodies is not the America in which I thought I lived.
That America nourished a small-d democratic culture that judged a person not by their bank account but by the way that he or she treated others, a culture in which someone who pushed himself to the front of the line at the expense of others was not deemed worthy of respect. Bullies were people to be despised and confronted, not emulated as heroes.
You didn’t publicly berate or belittle people. If you held a position of authority, it came with a sense of obligation, not license. Concepts of right and wrong set boundaries that could not be easily smudged, and certainly could not be rewritten to mean whatever you could get away with. You didn’t tell lies about other people or yourself, and again, people who did seek profit or advancement by such means were people to be avoided.
People being people, we of course fell short of those standards much too often, but that failure heightened rather than diminished the importance of the standards themselves. They explained what we aspired to be, how we as individuals and as a nation would at least attempt to define ourselves.
Trump is not a man bound by such niceties. He is a braggart and a bully — “The world was gloomy before I won - there was no hope,” he tweeted earlier this week. “Now the market is up nearly 10 percent and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!” He defines himself by his refusal to live by standards of behavior once considered essential, and our country — my country — has validated his worldview by giving him the highest honor in its possession. By doing so, it has validated that behavior in others as well. That’s a big part of what makes it feel so personal.
In fact, it’s been disillusioning to watch people who once spoke loftily of the dignity and honor inherent in the presidency now eagerly set aside those concerns to make room for Trump. Our incoming president may be crude and crass, but he has given them something more important in compensation, which is victory over their enemies and in some cases the chance to acquire a degree of power that they could not otherwise achieve.
They do not yet know the price they will pay for that victory, or in what coin they will be forced to pay it. But so far, it also doesn’t seem to worry them.
We’ll see how long that lasts. When historians write of 2016, they will write of it as a transformational year in American politics. The year ahead promises to be equally transformational in American governance, a year in which institutions and understandings that have stood two centuries will face a test unlike any previously.
In Trump, we have a man who has found fame, wealth and success by not abiding by the rules. By character, he can no more cease to thirst for power than he can cease breathing. Conversely, in the presidency, we have an office that was designed expressly by the Founding Fathers to limit such a man.
Something is going to have to give. Either Trump will defeat the system, or the system will defeat him. I’m curious to see which it will be, and am eager to get on with it.
