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At Newburgh in 1783, Washington walked into a room of soldiers who wanted to march on Congress and install him as a constitutional monarch. He reached into his pocket for his eyeglasses — the calculated theater of a man who understood exactly what the moment required — and said he had grown not only gray but nearly blind in the service of his country. Some men broke into tears. The conspiracy died in that room.
Nichols asks us to sit with what Washington chose not to do in that moment. A lesser man, he writes, would have nodded and taken the throne. Washington had the army, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to stop him. He chose to go home instead.
Trump stood in Arlington National Cemetery and looked at the graves of the honored dead and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He said that in the same country, about the same army, whose commander-in-chief he was.
The distance between those two men is not partisan. It is the entire argument for why the republic was designed the way it was.
Tom Nichols@RadioFreeTom
Donald Trump was everything Washington feared and despised could happen to the American presidency. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
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