In going after John Lewis, Trump fails another character test
By Paul Waldman January 16 at 1:43 PM
There are some “character” issues that have only an indirect relationship to the day-to-day job the president has to do; for instance, Donald Trump’s belief that women are objects for him to leer at or grope whenever he wants is contemptible, but it is unlikely to produce policies that substantially differ from what any other Republican president would pursue. Other character issues, however, have profound consequences for what kind of president he will turn out to be. And as the president-elect, Trump is throwing up one warning signal after another showing that we need to be extremely concerned about the place where his impulsiveness and his petty vindictiveness meet.
The latest episode came over the weekend, when Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), explaining why he wouldn’t be attending the inauguration, told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” citing Russian interference in the election. That criticism hits Trump right where it hurts, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps insisting he won a huge, historic “landslide” victory despite the fact that he actually got nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent and won the electoral college by a fairly narrow margin.
We all knew what was going to happen next: Trump would lash out at Lewis, because Trump is utterly incapable of letting any criticism roll off him. I don’t know whether that’s because of some deep insecurity lingering within him, or his own twisted narcissism, but it doesn’t really matter; what matters is what he does.
But here’s the thing: Even if Trump had felt an unstoppable compulsion to respond to Lewis, he could have done it in a way that no one would have taken umbrage at. He could have said, “John Lewis is wrong, I won fair and square!” That would have been a response to the substance of Lewis’ argument, and it would have been perfectly fine. You can make a case that the Russian efforts on his behalf didn’t affect the outcome, or at least that we have no idea how things would have been different had they never occurred, and therefore his legitimacy is intact.
But that’s not how Trump rolls. When someone criticizes him, his response is always to attack them personally. So when Meryl Streep went after him, he didn’t say she was wrong, he said she was “overrated” as an actor. In Lewis’s case, he said the congressman is “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!” He also said that Lewis “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).”
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