The Washington Post is at it again, this time opining that the Trump presidency is ‘doomed’, which is a big call given that it hasn’t yet begun. The reasons are two; apparently there are ‘jarring similarities’ between Trump and Lyndon Johnson and, for reasons that are not really explained, both are said to be ‘illegitimate presidents’.
The first contention is that, in the estimation of the author, there are physical and behavioural similarities between Johnson and Trump:
‘… two big, fleshy men given to vulgarities and gauche behavior, boastful, thin-skinned, politically amoral, vengeful, unforgiving …’
It is quite the list of pejorative epitaphs, although each and every one is, of course, a value judgement based on entirely subjective personal assessments and, ultimately, opinion. The references to personal appearance are contemptible, since for most functioning adults, the idea that a person’s ability to do their work, or for that matter anything else about them, can judged from their appearance, is one that was jettisoned in childhood. The remaining characterizations of behaviour might find a place in the arguments of adults, and even a receptive audience inside the beltway, but out in the places where the people who voted for Trump live and work, the assessment is likely to be rather different.
The claim that the respective presidencies of Johnson and Trump are illegitimate isn’t developed in any meaningful way, and the reasons for the contention are largely inchoate.
Johnson was Vice-President when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and became President by operation of Cl. 6 of Article 2 of the US Constitution, as it then was, which provided that the powers and duties of the President devolve on the Vice President if the President dies, resigns or is removed from office. The original wording was latently ambiguous, and a debate erupted upon the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841, after a solitary month in office, concerning the true effect of Art. 2 Cl. 6, and whether the Vice-President became the President or alternatively was simply the repository of the powers and duties until the election of a new President. The controversy was resolved in 1967 by the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, that expressly provides that in the posited circumstances the Vice-President becomes the President. Art. 2 Cl. 6 was in its original form when Kennedy died, although there was no real controversy about his ascension to the presidency. Johnson faced the electorate and the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, and he won convincingly, although perhaps unexpectedly.
According to the article, and despite the fact that Johnson won a free and fair election, ‘an air of illegitimacy clung to him’, but we are not actually told why, which is a significant omission if the argument is to be taken in any way seriously. Rather than explain that contentious proposition, the article merely segues from a discussion of scandalous and unfounded allegations about Johnson to the unfounded and scandalous allegations about Trump, before claiming that Trump’s difficulties arise from shooting the media messenger – presumably CNN and BuzzFeed. It doesn’t seem to occur to the author that BuzzFeed and CNN delivered information that was unsubstantiated and now shown to be false, and which was rejected by other responsible news media. BuzzFeed and CNN were, a fortiori, assassins not messengers, and were deservedly treated as such.
The article then leaps again, this time to the controversy in progressive minds arising from the spat between President-elect Trump and Rep. John Lewis (D) from Georgia. Lewis, who is a genuine hero of the civil rights era, attacked Trump’s presidency as illegitimate and he is refusing to attend the inauguration. Lewis also never bothers to explain the basis of the claim of illegitimacy; and it is worth noting that he did exactly the same to George W. Bush.
According to the article, Trump should ‘pay attention to Lewis and what he represents’. Whatever Lewis may have been, now he seems to take the role of a spoiler, and his unexplained assessment of Trump’s presidency as illegitimate can only be judged on its terms. If Lewis cannot be bothered to at least articulate a rational argument in support of his contention, then why need anyone listen to him at all? Lewis’ past actions rightly demand respect, but that doesn’t mean that he is correct about the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. If Johnson, who is also a legitimate hero of the civil rights era, is rendered liable to post historical criticism because the left doesn’t like the position he took on Vietnam, then why is Lewis’ opinion, no matter how irrational, now sanctified?
In the end, all that really emerges is that, in the assessment of the Washington Post, Trump conducted a dishonest campaign, and Lyndon Johnson also behaved dishonestly concerning the emerging war in Vietnam. Reasonable minds will legitimately differ about those matters.
And even if all of those things were true (which they are not), there is a fair argument that the electorate could have been under no illusions about Trump but was nevertheless prepared to vote for him in preference to Clinton (which says an awful lot about the estimation of Clinton), and they foretell precisely nothing about Trump’s ability to succeed in the Oval Office. Moral and political vacuums aren’t exactly rare in political office, or in the DNC. Indeed the cynics among us would probably say, with some force, that they are necessary prerequisites to political success. If the object of the exercise is to convince the broader community that the Trump presidency cannot succeed, then the author will need to raise the standard and quality of his arguments rather higher; snide personal insults, unsubstantiated assertions and unjustified opinions are, at best, ad hominem attacks; and they are not interchangeable with objective facts and rational argument.