Dear John (Curtis)

This is a national emergency; will Utah's junior senator pull the alarm?

illustration by Beck Seamons

The world is full of tragic choices and compromises. But for this man? For this cause?

–Michael Gerson

Senator Curtis,

I do not know what President Trump will do in the coming months and years, but I have a pretty good idea of how, once his star has faded, he will be remembered. The broad strokes of future historians’ portraits of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States are already visible, and none of them are flattering.

When we as a nation move beyond this shocking deviation from good government—and we will—the first thing we’ll say about the repulsive man who brought us to the brink is that he had no respect for democracy. We’ll note that he tried to overturn the outcome of a free and fair election by baselessly claiming that it was stolen and by pressuring election officials across the country to invalidate legitimate results; that his efforts to undermine the 2020 election culminated in a violent assault on the Capitol that imperilled the lives of police officers and legislators alike; and that for years afterward, he tried to rewrite the history of that attempted coup by repeatedly lying about what happened and then pardoning all of the conspirators, even the most violent ones. 

Once we take stock of Donald Trump’s assault on rule by the people, we’ll ask ourselves how so many of us looked past the cruelty that is so central to that man’s character. Why, we will ask, did we allow him to debase the body politic by smearing immigrants as violent criminals, mocking a disabled journalist, stripping vulnerable public servants of their security details, and speaking of and behaving toward women as though they exist only to satisfy his sexual appetite? We will look back and lament the fact that we let a small and vicious man desensitize us to violent, extreme, and destructive language and behavior. We will lament that we twice elected as president someone who does not care about other people unless they are wealthy, powerful, or sycophantic. In hindsight, all of the excuses that we made for Trump’s beastliness—that he was just being honest, that he was in touch with the concerns of the working class, that this was all merely rhetorical—will seem pathetic when compared to the enormity of the crimes they tried to conceal.

Future historians will also dwell on the chronic incompetence of Donald Trump and his allies. The deadliest example of this was the first Trump administration’s bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic—a case study in how to mismanage a public health emergency—but the examples are legion, and they continue to accumulate. A more recent instance of incompetence was the executive order that intended to eliminate birthright citizenship, an order that was so obviously unconstitutional that the Reagan-appointed judge who froze it told Trump’s lawyers that “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles the mind.” It is not difficult to locate the origin of this incompetence: it is the inevitable consequence of Donald Trump’s arrogance and ignorance, and of his decision to staff his White House with people who have no idea what they are doing. Incompetence is just what happens when you select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense. 

Historians will point out that incompetence was a foreseeable outcome of the Trump presidencies because competence was not the point. The point was personal enrichment. And if personal enrichment is the goal, then corruption is the means. And corruption is everywhere you look in Trump’s universe. Already, he has suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, removed the head of the government’s ethics office, and fired the inspectors general of nineteen different agencies. Even before he entered office for the second time, Trump released his own crypto coin, thereby creating a mechanism for anyone wishing to do business with the president to pour money into his pockets. And this is just the beginning. Larry Diamond, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an expert on democratic trends around the world, recently suggested that over the next four years, we will see an “absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism unlike anything we’ve seen since the Gilded Age.” Trump’s understanding of the presidency as a personal business opportunity has been so apparent for so long that we’ve become inured to it, but as time passes and the scale of the graft comes into focus, corruption will become one of the defining features of Donald Trump’s legacy. We will follow the money and it will lead us to the Trump family’s coffers.

This, Senator Curtis, will be how we remember President Trump: as a corrupt, incompetent, and cruel strongman. But what of your legacy? How do you want your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to remember you? Do you want them to cringe as they watch clips of you on Face the Nation telling Margaret Brennan that you “don’t know what you want me to be more forceful on,” as though Trump’s lawlessness were difficult to detect? Would you have them laugh nervously as they see you justify Trump’s malice by saying that this is a “stop-the-car moment,” so nearly anything goes? Or would you have them flush with pride as they remember your refusal to be a rubber stamp for an aspiring autocrat? The choice is yours.  

This is a national emergency. Trump will be remembered as the one who started the fire. Will you be remembered for answering the alarm bells or for insisting that they weren’t ringing?

Zach Stevenson

John Curtis is scheduled to participate in a Q&A at BYU on Monday, March 17 at 11 a.m. One hour before the event, Utahns concerned with John Curtis’s sane-washing and enabling of President Trump will gather on the corner of Cougar and Canyon to protest. We encourage all interested readers to attend.