Trump’s presidency was a bully pulpit for immoral leadership

Despite a few stone faces in the crowd, the audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library erupted in applause recently when U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., told them, “We have to choose, because Republicans cannot be both loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”

The Gipper would have approved. Cheney has been steadfast in warning Trump’s Republican supporters that their dishonor in supporting his lies will remain long after he’s gone. She has been a standout as vice chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, risking her own position in Congress. Her courage in defending American democracy, ironically from many in her own party, has been exemplary and commendable.

A staunch conservative, Cheney finds herself working closely with Democrats on the committee and championing the rarest of things in American politics these days: bipartisanship.

Americans of all political stripes would do well to remember what hangs in the balance when a president knows his supporters are armed and dangerous and still exhorts them to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of electoral votes.

As testimony before the Jan. 6 committee has shown, a con man in the Oval Office was ready to strong-arm the Justice Department, bully state officials, subvert the Constitution, stop the peaceful transfer of power and cheer on a violent mob to help him remain in office — despite the will of the voters, who fairly and overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden.

This morally bankrupt plan marked the first time in U.S. history a president tried to overturn an election and stay in office. It was unlawful, un-American and unconscionable.

“The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said during his 1932 presidential campaign. “It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at a time when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

For Trump, the presidency was more a bully pulpit for immoral leadership.

Under questioning by Cheney, former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee that senior White House officials were aware days in advance of the dangers posed by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and their plot to disrupt the certification in Congress of Joe Biden’s victory.

Worse, she testified that Trump knew the mob gathered for his speech at the Ellipse park that day was armed with knives, guns and spears, and yet, he still asked the Secret Service to remove the magnetometers to prevent authorities from taking the crowd’s weapons away before they marched on the Capitol.

Then an enraged Trump pitched a fit when his Secret Service detail told him he could not go to Capitol Hill to join the protest as he wished. That speaks volumes about his intentions that day.

His own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told Hutchinson, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.” Cipollone now faces a subpoena from the committee seeking to compel him to testify.

In her speech at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California, Cheney…