Opinion | Divider in Chief

I mean, all presidents are partisan. But prior to Trump, most presidents picked moments. Sometimes there were moments of national tragedy, sometimes they were anniversaries, and they use those moments to try and unify the country. And in this case, Donald Trump, because of his own peculiar sociopathy and psychology, uses everything to divide us. So a lot of the country is just checking out and that’s a shame. It’s interesting because when you think of the year 1976, that is very close to a period when our country was deeply divided. We think of the year 1968, when we had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam War tore us apart. We were in the midst of a vast cultural change, and so that division in the country could easily have played out in 1976. And there were interesting arguments that year. I mean, we shouldn’t sanitize the past and say we were completely united, but the incentives in politics were radically different at that moment. And in particular, as Pete suggested, the incentives for Gerald Ford, who felt that the right thing to do and the politically smart thing to do both was to bring the country together. That’s not the leadership we have at the moment.