The Trump redo: ‘I do solemnly swear’
Donald Trump will appear outside the Capitol on Monday when, around noon, he will swear allegiance to the Constitution for a second time.
The last time he spoke in the open air in Washington, D.C., was Jan. 6, 2021. On that occasion, he implicitly denied the presidential oath’s clear directive to see that the laws of the United States be “faithfully executed.” As for the pledge contained in the oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution … so help me God,” that too was cast aside.
If past is prologue, that gives us plenty to worry about; to his critics, Donald Trump’s second coming evokes fear, trepidation, and the highest of high anxiety.
That 2021 speech on the Ellipse just prior to the Capitol riot naturally drew the attention of Jack Smith, the special counsel charged with looking into President Trump’s actions on the day set aside by the Constitution for the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress.
“Throughout the speech,” Smith wrote in a final report to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland released last Monday, “Mr. Trump gave his supporters false hope that … they could cause [Vice President Mike] Pence to overturn the election results….”
And afterward, at 2:24 p.m., as a mob of Trump supporters fought with Capitol police, President Trump tweeted (as Smith recounts), “The Vice President didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution…. USA demands the truth.”
A minute later, with the Capitol under siege, the Secret Service moved the vice president to a secure location. When an aide told Trump, who was watching the Capitol riot on television in a room just off the Oval Office, he replied, “So what?”
Smith reports that throughout the afternoon of Jan. 6, “crowds hunted … for Mr. Pence and others, with some shouting, ‘Hang Mike Pence.'”
Smith, a former international prosecutor at The Hague, resigned his position last week rather than waiting to be fired by Donald Trump on day one of the new administration. The president-elect has threatened Smith and called him “deranged” and “lamebrained,” a word that was probably last used in 1965 by some “lamebrained” high schooler.
Smith, who formerly worked for the Department of Justice, was appointed special counsel in November 2022.
Smith’s report states that Donald Trump’s assertions of bad faith directed at the DOJ and himself are “laughable.” He called Trump’s actions before, on, and after Jan. 6 in trying to “retain power … unprecedented.”
Borrowing from a past Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, Smith writes, “Indeed, Mr. Trump’s cases represented ones ‘which the offense [was] the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain.”
The decision to file charges against Trump was his alone, Smith says. “To have done otherwise” he insisted, “on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant.”
“Public service is a privilege,” he said in his cover letter to Garland, especially as it relates to “seeking to uphold the rule of law.”
The failure to bring Donald Trump to trial represents a historic misstep, not because the soon-to-be 47th president would necessarily have been found guilty, although the Smith report makes a strong case, but because it was the right thing to do, given everything we know about the Jan. 6 plot on American institutions of self-government.
There is barely a sliver of silver lining here. The Supreme Court decision walling off a sitting president from the normal processes of legal accountability heightens the dangers. Trump’s habits, frame of mind, and reference points appear unchanged. His recent attacks on Gov. Gavin Newsom, for instance, even as the California wildfires continued to burn, suggest further attempts to undermine the legitimacy of all elected officials. Trump’s comments are less keyed to partisan advantage than to the suggestion that pols in general are simpletons having no business being anywhere near the levers of power and responsibility.
I hope I’m wrong about all this. Like all new presidents, President Trump will inherit a nation and world requiring seriousness of purpose, attention to detail, and big-hearted democratic pragmatism. At minimum, Donald Trump needs to live up to the presidential oath of office.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.