People watch a broadcast of U.S. election results at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, on Nov. 6.DAVE SANDERS/The New York Times News Service
President-elect Donald Trump’s most difficult diplomatic task does not involve Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, China and North Korea. It involves New York, California and the other states that Kamala Harris won in Tuesday’s election.
For it is diplomatic skills, a light touch and a sense of charity – none of which can be found in the standard MAGA portfolio – that will need to be applied to heal a divided country, salve postelection wounds and bring a semblance of unity to citizens who distrust their neighbours’ choices and who, as the election results reveal, want to send the country into very different directions.
“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech. “It’s time to unite, and we’re gonna try. We’re gonna try. We have to try.”
But actually doing it …
In his famous Checkers speech, which salvaged his GOP vice-presidential nomination in 1952, Richard Nixon said, in a reference to President Harry Truman: “You wouldn’t trust the man who made the mess to clean it up.” To the extent that Mr. Trump’s opponents believe he, his rhetoric and his supporters’ disdain for liberals and Democrats are responsible for the country’s mess, the president-elect may not be ideally suited to the role of domestic peacemaker.
Earlier presidents tried, with scant success. Jimmy Carter opened his 1977 inaugural address with a salute to outgoing president Gerald Ford, his rival in an especially bitter campaign, saying, “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” Eight years earlier, Mr. Nixon, one of the most divisive figures in American history, said in his inaugural address, “Greatness comes in simple trappings. The simple things are the ones most needed today if we are to surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us.”
Then Mr. Nixon – five years from being driven from office for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, which left the country riven into raging, opposing sides – offered counsel to the American people that might be useful today, saying that as a country we needed “to lower our voices.”
The country may need a whisperer. Mr. Trump does not do whisper.
Which makes this additional vow by Mr. Trump an even bigger mountain for him to climb: “Every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve.”
Joe Biden thanked presidential predecessors of both parties when he assumed the presidency, even though Mr. Trump did not attend the inauguration. He went on to say that to overcome the country’s challenges and “restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”
He was unable to provide it. Mr. Trump did his part, of course, to sow discord from the sidelines – unlike George H.W. Bush, he was not silent in his postpresidential years – but the failure remains Mr. Biden’s, just as it was Mr. Carter’s and Mr. Nixon’s.
One of the indicators of the difficulty of the task came in Mr. Trump’s victory remarks. His unity passage spoke of “the divisions of the past four years.” They reach far beyond that, to his own administration as well.
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And so whatever national unity comes out of this difficult moment might not be derived from the heights of power, but instead from the bottom, which in a democracy is actually the top. In short, from the American people.
“The days and weeks that follow this election,” said Thomas Dunion, a retired professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., “will give all of us here in these amazingly diverse states of our union an opportunity to reflect on viewpoints which have challenged us and, dare we hope, even to celebrate that we need not have uniformity of political sentiment to nonetheless stay united as one country.”
And perhaps there are some green shoots of optimism in the joint statement released by the Young Republicans and Young Democrats at Gettysburg College, whose Pennsylvania Hall was used as a hospital to treat the wounded of both the Union and the Confederacy in the great Civil War battle of a violently and tragically divided country.
“It is as true as ever that the two parties disagree on how our country will brave its problems and let them pass into history as moments of triumph for the nation,” the students wrote in the college newspaper, The Gettysburgian. “Yet that which divides us does not bind us to disunity above all, just as our forefathers overcame disunity and even violence of the highest order in their pursuit of a more perfect union. When we remain committed to future American triumphs, we commit ourselves to peace between neighbours and countrymen, and to making the most of the best parts of our democracy.”
That passage was written by students in their late teens and early 20s. It’s a start. It will be their country soon. They don’t want to inherit a broken one.