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Martin Schram, an opinion columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.
Last week was a week like none other. Twice we ended up staring at iconic images that filled our news screens and seemed freeze-framed forever in our mind’s eye.
They seemed to be marking the end of America’s most globally revered icons of politics and governance: America’s proudly conservative law-and-order Republican Party; and America’s globally revered and imitated presidency and democracy.
One freeze-framed image shows eight people; it requires a word caption to be fully understood. The other shows just one man’s face; it requires no words at all.
Image One: Eight people are standing side by side behind lecterns that stretch across a grand stage: Six, from left-center to far right, have one hand raised. The two at the far left don’t. We’ll explain all that shortly.
Image Two: It is just an angry man’s face: Yup, Donald Trump.
Now we can explain that first freeze-frame. This was Wednesday night’s first debate of Republican Party’s candidates for president in the 2024 campaign. But the overwhelmingly frontrunner in all polls, former President Trump, has stayed away. And halfway through the two-hour debate in Milwaukee, the Fox News debate moderators finally mention what anchor Bret Baier calls “the elephant not in the room.”
That’s Trump, of course. Fox’s Martha MacCallum explains that Trump has been indicted in four different states on 91 counts and will be processed the next day at Georgia’s grimy Fulton County Jail on charges “relating to the 2020 election loss.” She is referring to Trump’s frantic, failed efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Baier then asks what history may record as perhaps the most inconceivable yet also the most revealing question ever asked at a presidential debate: “You all signed a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee. If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would.”
Six Republicans are raising their hands, some hesitantly. After all, they are signaling, yes, they would vote to elect as president a convicted felon who sat in the Oval Office and repeatedly desecrated the presidency by trying to overthrow America’s 2020 election. If they saw that in a Third World country, they’d call it a coup.
Only the two on the left, former governors Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, kept their hands down. “Look, here’s the bottom line,” Christie said. “Someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct. OK?”
When many in the audience booed lustily, Christie told them: “Now whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States.” Indeed.
That brings us to Image Two: The angry man. You saw it on your news screens Thursday evening — and readers of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post saw it staring at them from page one Friday, without a single word. It was Trump’s Georgia jail mug shot, fiercely scowling, famously glaring, forever historic. He’d been fingerprinted and paid a bondsman $20,000 to post his $200,000 bond.
We heard Trump’s recorded words pleading with Georgia officials to “find” him 11,780 votes, one more than he needed to flip Georgia from Joe Biden to him. Recorded words — the undoing of yet another former president. In August 1974, Arizona’s conservative icon U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater led fellow Republicans to the White House to affirm their law-and-order beliefs by telling President Richard Nixon he faced certain impeachment and conviction. They’d just heard Nixon’s recorded ordering of the criminal cover-up of the Watergate burglary and bugging.
Goldwater, the original “Conscience of the Conservatives,” would be enraged to see his hand-raising conservative successors deep-sixing their principles after swearing they would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Today I wish Nixon, never a fan of my investigative inquiries, could come back just once more — so I could show him that tabloid mugshot and how Trump has put it on “Never Surrender” T-shirts he’s selling. I can hear my old nemesis asking if that dark-haired kid from the Queens or any of the Republicans who are making America grate again even heard his rather remarkable final farewell to his staff just before leaving his White House after resigning: “Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”
Sadly, Trump and his hand-raising Republicans may end up destroying not just themselves and their party — but our democracy — as he enflames his supporters with his never-surrender scheme. His last vain hope, and theirs, is that he can use his mugshot to save face. No words.
