Trump will never bow out
Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board's bold suggestion strains credulity
A recent unsigned editorial from The Philadelphia Inquirer floated a preposterous idea and call to action: that Donald Trump should willingly leave the race and give up his bid to become the 47th president of the United States.
Now, I’m all for provocative op-ed pieces that compel readers to think outside the box and challenge the public’s perceptions about what is and what ought to be, but this particular opinion piece fails from the start because it is built on a shaky, if not altogether rotted, foundation.
On the surface, the editorial appears to be situated on solid ground. While the public’s focus has been on President Joe Biden’s cognitive acuity and mounting support for him to step down after the “halting” performance during the June 27 debate against Trump — to use the same adjective that almost every news outlet has parroted on the topic — The Inquirer took the conversation in an unexpected direction, and again, normally that’s a good thing.
But in this instance, as I said on social media in my immediate reaction to the piece, I couldn’t believe that this was presented as a serious editorial.
The critical and obvious flaw is this: while no sane person would disagree that Trump should withdraw from the race on principle alone, a candidate would have to have principles in the first place in order to have a sense of contrition and guilt about his past misdeeds, of which, The Inquirer spends most of the editorial running down Trump’s greatest hits.
If Trump was a self-aware and introspective person, if he was truly contrite and repentant about his past behavior — endless lies and wholecloth fabrications, distortions, insults and various other imbroglios — perhaps the sheer weight of guilt might compel him, or any person with some thread of a moral framework, to withdraw.
To build himself up, Trump constantly tears the country down. There is no shining city on the hill. It’s just mourning in America. — The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board
But a sociopath feels no guilt or remorse, and to suggest that a man who is clearly so bent on vindication and retribution against his enemies, who can't accept loss whatsoever, would just step aside on purpose and on principle is high comedy.
The headline of the editorial, “To serve his country, Trump should leave the race,” misfires because Trump doesn’t have a traditional view of public service. In the most ideal scenario, a person becomes a public servant to improve the lives of their constituents via whatever political philosophy they have adopted. In this way, they sacrifice a lot of time and sweat equity over the course of four or six years to, in essence, give back to their community or country, not for money necessarily, but because they want to make a real difference. Trump, on the other hand, saw an opportunity in 2016 to hold the highest public office in the world and to essentially command almost unlimited power. We saw how he used and abused that power and how he stretched our democracy almost to the breaking point. So the typical rules of engagement don’t work with him, which is why it’s a fool’s errand to ask such a person to withdraw.
Bowing out of the election would be akin to losing in his mind, and as we saw from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the various frenzied yet unsuccessful efforts by Trump and his attorneys to throw doubt on the validity of Biden’s win, Trump is a very sore loser, the biggest loser, even. Withdrawing would be out of the question, nor even a consideration. It would be so far out of the question, in fact, that the suggestion might as well have been beamed down from Mars because I can guarantee you that it has never, not once, entered Trump’s mind.
How many more times does it need to be said that the man doesn't care about America or rural America or his own voters? He doesn't care about decorum and ethics. He doesn't care about his followers’ religion or god or abortion or stem cells or gay people or anti-gay people. He doesn’t care about jobs or the climate or inflation or education or immigration or Covid-19 (unless he gets it). He doesn't care about justice and the rule of law. He doesn't care about fair elections, and he doesn't care about democracy.
He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.
It's impossible to compel a person who cares only for himself to sacrifice power, prestige and validation for the better good.