The danger in so many Republicans missing the point

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

“That,” of course, refers to John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln while he was watching the popular play, “Our American Cousin,” at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C. on April 14, 1865.  The joke, whose origin is uncertain, satirizes people who miss the point because they equate commonplace occurrences and transformational events.

Alas, Americans who are considering putting Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024 have fallen prey to the same false equivalence. 

Paul Boyer, who represents a swing district north of Phoenix in the Arizona state senate, is a case in point. One of the only Republicans in the state’s legislature who opposes restrictions on voting, Boyer laments that his colleagues view everything “through the lens that, well, the [2020 presidential] election was stolen, so therefore we need x, y, or z bill that’ll fix everything … I guess what troubles me the most is, it’s not true.” Troubled as well by the cult of personality by which Trump “gets to determine who the ‘real’ Republicans are,” Boyer is also convinced that the then president “started an insurrection on Jan. 6.”

However, setting “that” aside, Boyer says he voted for Trump in 2020 “and I would do it again … I think he did a lot of good things while he was in office.”

During an interview on ABC TV in late January 2022, George Stephanopoulos asked U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who voted to impeach Trump because instead of “defending the constitutional transfer of power, he incited an insurrection,” why she could not “rule out supporting him in 2024.” Without referring to “that,” Collins replied, “Well, it’s certainly not likely given the many other qualified candidates that have expressed interest in running.”

In a recent poll of rank-and-file Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 50 percent want Trump to run again. Of those who did not want him on the ticket, only 39 percent said it was because they did not believe he should be president; the rest doubted he could win, expressed concerns about his personality, preferred a fresher or less polarizing candidate. The poll did not reveal how many respondents agree with Boyer and Collins about the groundless allegations about election fraud and the Jan. 6 assault on the United States Capitol but would vote for Trump anyway. In all likelihood, the number is not small.

Several factors, of course, account for the behavior of voters. Party identification and ideological orientation are, perhaps, the most important. Also significant are Americans’ evaluation of the personal characteristics of candidates and orientation on public policy issues, which, unfortunately, are now hyped, distorted, or ignored by partisan media echo chambers. 

And voters often place undue emphasis on short-term issues, including those over which presidents have little or no control, especially when they affect those that affect their pocketbooks. In 1992, for example, lingering concerns about a recession that had already officially ended and an “out of touch” president “amazed” by a barcode scanner at a grocers’ convention in Florida, contributed to the defeat of President George H.W. Bush, who had brilliantly managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by a large international military “coalition of the willing.”

Every politician who undermines the integrity of elections and encouraged a mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol to prevent the vice president and Congress from exercising their duty to certify the Electoral College results has betrayed his or her oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Especially when then-Attorney General Bill Barr and other Trump administration officials affirmed that their investigations revealed no evidence of widespread fraud; Republican and Democratic governors endorsed their state’s election results, which were confirmed by recounts and audits in closely contested states; and dozens of judges, many of them appointed by Trump, threw out every legal challenge.

The 45^th president’s “that” constitutes a clear and present danger to our democracy. All Americans, especially conservatives, should conclude that it trumps domestic and foreign policies they approve.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”