Any comments on this excerpt from his book?
Read the section of his book below, which was first
flagged in a report by ABC News reporter
Will Steakin:
It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again.
I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.
Conservatives have their own victimhood complexes these days; we are, after all, a nation of victims now. All that differs is whom we see as our oppressors. The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen. Instead of distinguishing ourselves as the party that strives for excellence and rejects the easy path of victimhood narratives, we simply created our own.
I voted for Trump in 2020. I had some policy disagreements with him—for example, I disapproved of his large-scale government spending and his tariff policies—but I voted for him anyway because he refused to apologize for the things that make America great. Like many Americans, I hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our nation. To me, that was something worth voting for. Donald Trump was, notwithstanding his shortcomings, the candidate who best embodied American greatness.
…
But while Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican party whole.
When my candidate lost the election, I was dissatisfied, but I also felt a sense of peace. The election was done, and it was time to move on. No one likes a sore loser; that’s one of the worst victimhood complexes of all. Accepting the outcomes of elections and having a peaceful transition of power is part of what it means to be a constitutional republic: sometimes your team loses, but if you accept the result and prepare for the next election, eventually the scales will tip your way again. We fought, we lost, and I accepted the result.
So I was especially disappointed when I saw President Trump take a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’s. She claimed voter suppression, he claimed voter fraud. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn. In many cases, judges the president himself had nominated ruled against him, a sign of health in our nation’s institutions. Of the sixty-two lawsuits he and his supporters filed, he lost all but one, a minor victory in Pennsylvania that affected few votes. A Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority ruled against President Trump twice.
Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. The president fired the agency’s director a few days later. In a call with Georgia’s secretary of state, the president implausibly claimed to have won every single state—something unprecedented in the nation’s history, and a sign that his claims weren’t grounded in fact.
Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot. Our institutions did hold, in the end. But they shouldn’t have been tested.
