Like Lincoln, Donald Trump can’t unify the country by surrendering, but only by complete and total victory. Here’s my new column from RealClearPolitics.
By FRANK MIELE
It really happened. Donald Trump won convincingly, just as I predicted. So I don’t need to publish a retraction or correction today like we are due from so many liberals for their substitution of wishful thinking for reasoned analysis in the leadup to the election.
But, on the other hand, I don’t want to waste your time and mine rehashing all the reasons why Trump won, or more significantly, why Kamala Harris lost. In retrospect, the possibility of a Harris victory seems as remote as Trump winning the Hispanic male vote. Oh wait!
So instead, let’s look forward. In particular, the example of Rodney King seems appropriate. King was famously the victim of a televised police beating in Los Angeles in 1991. When four officers were found not guilty the following year, the city erupted in violence, leading King to make his appeal for calm: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?”
King was a victim who became a leader, a man who put aside his own pain and embraced the possibility of a better world – a world where we can all get along.
That world seems as distant as ever today, but maybe that’s because we haven’t fully understood what it means to get along. For Rodney King, it meant simply, can we stop killing each other? Can we stop spiraling out of control, looking for revenge and expecting perfection from others while we ourselves are less than perfect?
Those were big questions. But for us American citizens, in the wake of the 2024 election, it also means confronting just how far apart we are – in philosophy, in goals, in tactics – and then deciding if we want to stay together or get a divorce. The possibility of a shooting civil war is remote at best, but if we continue to move in opposite directions, it will be hard to achieve the unity that many of our leaders espouse.
And if this is a national crisis, it is also a personal one. I doubt I’m the only one who has been confronted with friends and family members who are so disheartened by the nation’s rejection of the Democratic presidential candidate – and particularly the elevation of Donald Trump – that they hold me personally responsible. This, despite the fact that I rarely talk politics except in my own home, or in my columns.
I believe those personal relationships can be healed by time because politics is only a small part of how we get along on an individual level. But when it comes to bringing together two political parties that are diametrically opposed on border policy, taxes, military readiness, spending, crime, abortion, lawfare and government expansionism, it is much harder to put aside our daggers.
So the question becomes, how do we restore normalcy to our civic discourse? How do we avoid recriminations and self-congratulation? And most importantly, how can President-elect Trump, with his MAGA mandate, govern in order to bring about the unity that he says he wants?
What exactly would that unity even look like? Is it possible to unify abortion-rights advocates with anti-abortion stalwarts? Proponents of globalism with America-first nationalism? Those who protect illegal immigrants with those who mourn the needless murders and rapes that an open border has caused?
The common idea of unity is bipartisanship or compromise. The winning side will generously surrender a portion of its power in order to let the losing side claim some victories as well. The idea is that the losers will repay the favor by giving the winners respect and honor. This is the fantasy version of unity. No party in power will surrender its ability to promote its agenda if it has true principles rather than duplicitous pragmatism. Nor should it.
A more realistic view of unity is the Civil War model. Two sides are diametrically opposed. One side will prevail. You fight like hell to make sure it is yours. President Lincoln’s goal wasn’t to crush the South, but that result was necessary in order to ensure that his vision of “one nation indivisible” would quash the secessionist movement and stop the spread of slavery. Unity was his goal, but compromise was not – at least until the war was decisively won and Reconstruction would begin.
So it must be for Donald Trump in the wake of his historic victory. The public has given him his marching orders, and he intends to follow them relentlessly – bringing real change to the way government works. His first term provided mostly ephemeral results, with the exception of three Supreme Court justices. The wall was built – and then unbuilt. American energy was unleashed – and then leashed again. Peace was on its way to the Middle East with the Abraham Accords – and then dashed into a million pieces by Hamas.
This time around, Trump knows he only has four years to fulfill his plans. So he’s moving with lightning speed to do exactly what Abraham Lincoln accomplished in his four years in the White House: unite the country by demonstrating strength, wisdom and patriotism.
This ambitious goal perhaps explains Trump’s seemingly antagonistic selection of Cabinet secretaries. Matt Gaetz for attorney general? Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services? Pete Hegseth for Defense? Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the intelligence agencies, including the CIA? There were other qualified candidates for all those positions, but would they have fought as fiercely as these picks to revolutionize the agencies they would helm?
Turning back to our Civil War model, after first selecting traditional generals who were consensus choices, Lincoln decided to go with his gut and promoted Ulysses S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant and “scorched earth” William Sherman to bring the enemy to their heels. Trump seems to be after the same kind of unsparing determination. Go big or go home.
To his enemies, that translates as Trump’s “authoritarian tendencies,” but leveraging one’s political capital to push the nation inexorably in one direction is not necessarily the act of a dictator. That kind of insistent progress is the very definition of unity as exemplified by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the force of his personality and his political vision to reshape politics for three decades and beyond.
Trump has certainly dominated the political conversation for the last decade. By not compromising with his enemies, I think it is safe to say he believes he can eventually persuade them to accept his unifying MAGA vision for America just as FDR convinced the nation to celebrate his transformative New Deal.
And any Republican senator who stands in Trump’s way had better be prepared to reap the whirlwind.
