Editor’s Note: Jeff Flake served 12 years in the US House of Representatives and 6 years in the US Senate representing the State of Arizona. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion on CNN.
It was the morning of June 14, 2017. I stood near the first base dugout that just moments before had been our refuge from the gunfire of a madman. First responders had by now swarmed the field, tending to the wounded and marking off a crime scene.
My batting glove, which I had just used to staunch the bleeding from Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise’s hip, was soaked in blood. My baseball uniform bore stains resulting from applying a tourniquet to the leg of an injured staff member while crouching on the dugout floor to avoid gunfire raging above us.
My cell phone rang. I answered to hear a familiar voice. A concerned voice. It was then Vice President Mike Pence. He wanted to make sure I was okay. To be sure, our friendship had been strained since Mike had accepted the vice presidential nomination, but my life was at risk, and Mike felt the need to check on his friend.
I thought of that phone call on January 6, when the Vice President, while presiding over the counting of electoral votes, was rushed off the Senate floor to a more secure room while a mob roamed the capitol shouting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
While huddled in the secure room with his family, surely the Vice President would be handed a phone where he would hear a familiar voice – the concerned voice of the President, the man to whom Pence had by then been unfailingly loyal for more than four years.
But that call from the President didn’t come. Not in that room off the Senate chamber. Not later that day. Not that night. Not the next day. Or the next day. In those intense moments, instead of using his phone to call and check on his Vice President, President Trump used his phone to encourage the mob by tweet, attacking his Vice President for lacking the “courage” to overturn the election. He later deleted the tweet, but not soon enough.
Just who was this peaceable President that defense counsel Michael van der Veen was talking about in his closing arguments on behalf of Donald Trump? Who was this man, who in measured language, according to his lawyer, was urging his followers to act patriotically, who was merely engaging in political speech totally within the bounds drawn for us by history and by precedent? Who was this man who, Mr. van der Veen would have us believe, reacted in horror as violent hooligans overran the US Capitol, hunting members of congress and his own Vice President? Who was this thoroughly normal President, engaging in thoroughly presidential behavior?
Well, that man does not and never did exist, and Mr. van der Veen’s claims are of course an utter fiction, a desperate counter-reality invented by counsel. We all know this. And the vote to acquit him is the final act in the normalization of a President whose behavior was not normal, can never be acceptable, and culminated in a monstrous assault on American democracy.
My fellow Republicans, to make our way back from this four-year detour will require a dose of honest self-reflection. We were once the conservative party. Our party chose to vacate any claim to that mantle when we gave ourselves over to a reality TV figure whose commitment to anything other than his own self-interest has always been hard to discern. He cared so little about anyone or anything other than himself that we now know that he couldn’t even be stirred to defend his own Vice President when his life was in danger.
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We didn’t convict him. We should have, but we didn’t. Let’s not compound the grievous injury to the country and our party by continuing to embrace him, for Trumpism is the opposite of conservatism. We all know that, too. There is nothing to gain by making a pilgrimage to Florida. There is no enlightened mystic at Mar-a-Lago – just a diminished man who lost an election and couldn’t accept it.
There is no redeeming his behavior. And let’s not continue this tragic charade by further humiliating and debasing ourselves.
History always knows the truth. Let’s learn the lessons of this experience, admit our failings and move on. This is what our country deserves.