Profiles in Courage in the Trump Era

Also by Kenneth Foard McCallion:

Shorham and the Rise and Fall of the Nuclear Power Industry

The Essential Guide to Donald Trump

Treason & Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual-1

COVID-19: The Virus That Changed America and the World

Profiles in Courage

in the Trump Era

Bryant Park Press

An imprint of HHI Media,Inc.

from the author of

Profiles in Cowardice in the Trump Era

Kenneth Foard McCallion

Bryant Park Press

An imprint of HHI Media, Inc.

Copyright © 2021 by Kenneth Foard McCallion

Published by Bryant Park Press

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Jacket and Book Design by Christopher Klaich

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-7371492-2-4

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died from injuries sustained while on-duty during the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob incited to commit insurrection by former president Donald J. Trump.

It is also dedicated to Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who diverted the insurrectionists from the United States Senate chamber. He and the other courageous men and women of the Capitol and Metropolitan Police forces put their lives on the line on January 6, 2021 to protect the lives and well-being of former Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress, as well as their staffs and their families.

These brave officers will be forever remembered by a grateful nation, and their Profiles In Courage are the first to be acknowledged and honored here.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the assistance of Aaron Jerome and Anna Freymann, who did much of the painstaking research, fact-checking, and countless edits. A special thanks to my editor, Alexandra Uth, who has made me a better writer and to Christopher Klaich for his excellent design work.

Preface

The peaceful transition of power has been a hallmark of American democracy. This tradition was never seriously threatened in the 144 years of our constitutional history—until January 6, 2021.

The tradition started with our nation’s first president, George Washington. At the end of his second term as president, there was nothing yet in the U.S. Constitution that limited a president to only two four-year terms in office. The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution setting the two-term limit was not ratified until February 27, 1951. Nevertheless, Washington voluntarily stepped down from this high executive office, turning a deaf ear to those who said that the people would willingly accept him as president for life, electing him every four years. Instead, Washington did not run for a third term, turning over the reins of power to the newly elected second president of the United States, John Adams. The tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next was thus born.

John Adams reinforced this tradition when, in the early morning hours of March 4, 1801, he quietly left Washington, D.C., for a well-deserved retirement in his native state of Massachusetts. Later the same day, Adams’ lifelong political rival, Thomas Jefferson, was sworn in by Chief Justice John Marshall at the new Capitol in Washington, D.C. Following the inauguration, Jefferson moved into the White House as the country’s third president.

The American miracle of self-governance continued, even when the states comprising this great country were bitterly divided in a bloody civil war from 1861 to 1865. More recently, during our own lifetimes, the close and deeply contentious election of November 3, 2000 ended with a peaceful transfer of power on January 20, 2001, when Republican George W. Bush was sworn in as the 42nd president of the United States. Democratic candidate Al Gore, who was also the country’s vice president at the time, won the popular vote. However, he was denied the presidency by the United States Supreme Court in the highly controversial and politically tinged decision of Bush v. Gore, issued by the Court on December 12, 2000. In order to effectively award Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes to Bush, the Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices who held a 5–4 majority on the Court had to reverse the Florida Supreme Court’s order. This order called for a selective manual recount of the state’s U.S. presidential election ballots.

Despite the urging of many of his advisors that he fight on, Al Gore conceded the election and conveyed his best wishes to President-elect Bush. Then, as the sitting vice president, Gore presided over the counting of the electoral votes in the Senate on January 6, 2001. When Gore then declared on that day that Bush was the 43rd duly elected President of the United States, he entered the pantheon of great American statesmen who put their country’s interests over their own, keeping alive the great democratic experiment called the United States of America that had persisted for so long.

Twenty years later, on January 5, 2021, the loser of the 2020 election did the exact opposite of what Al Gore had graciously done in January 2001. Trump posted a message on Twitter, falsely claiming that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the 2020 election results by rejecting what he referred to as fraudulently chosen electors.¹

Trump thus became the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept the peaceful transfer of power based upon the certification of electoral slates from all the states. Trump then incited a large crowd of his supporters to riot on the morning of January 6, 2021, telling them, We will never concede,² and that You will never take back our country with weakness.³ He stood by approvingly as his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the crowd that it was time for trial by combat.⁴ Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks went further, telling them that it was time to kick some ass, referring to the Democrats in Congress.⁵ Trump then encouraged the mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol, where a joint session of Congress was counting the electoral votes. The count was not going how Trump wanted it to. Against Trump’s wishes, Vice President Pence had already issued a statement saying that he did not have the unilateral authority under the Constitution to set aside and invalidate the electoral slates already submitted to Congress.⁶ Trump threatened Pence, saying that he was going to be very disappointed in him if he did not go along with the plan hatched by Trump and some of the Republican members of Congress to overturn the election results and to deliver a second term to Trump.

As directed by their leader, the angry pro-Trump mob then stormed the U.S. Capitol, causing the elected members of Congress and Vice President Pence, who was presiding over the Senate, to flee for their safety. The assault on the Capitol succeeded in interrupting one of the most solemn rituals: the certification of the electoral votes for president by a joint session of Congress. At least five people died as a result of the mayhem and destruction that followed, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick. Many other police officers were also injured, including one who was badly beaten with a flagpole. The rampaging insurrectionists roamed the halls of Congress, shouting Hang Mike Pence and Kill Pelosi, referring to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. A makeshift gallows with a noose was erected outside the Capitol, standing ready to carry out those threats if those or other elected officials could be located. Confederate flags were carried through Congress for the first time in history, and the Senate chamber where the Congressional proceeding had been taking place only moments before was occupied by the mob. Terrified members of Congress frantically called the White House begging the president to go on television to ask his MAGA troops occupying Congress to stand down. Many hours passed before Trump said anything. He was too busy watching the coverage and enjoying the unfolding coup at the Capital, which nearly succeeded.

Trump ultimately failed in his gambit to overturn the will of the people as expressed through their votes in the 2020 presidential election. Instead, he was forced to vacate the White House on the morning of January 20, 2021, before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as the next president and vice president of the United States at noon. Washington, D.C. was in lockdown, with thousands of national guard troops and police present to ensure that a repeat of the January 6 Capitol insurrection would not happen. At least for the time being, the United States’ fragile but resilient democracy had prevailed, although somewhat bloodied and bruised.

But this result was not inevitable. America’s democracy survived only through the effort of countless elected and appointed officials in Congress, as well as in federal, state, and local governments throughout the country. They courageously did the jobs that they had sworn to do, dutifully following the requirements of the U.S. Constitution and relevant state and federal laws. At the same time, they avoided political pressure and threats of intimidation to overturn the 2020 election results and to hand Trump a second term in office even though he had lost the election.

Profiles in courage of those who did what was right, often at a high personal and political cost, are presented here. They are sharply distinguishable from those who failed the basic tests of citizenship and leadership when their country needed them the most. These profiles in courage stand in vivid contrast to the profiles in cowardice and shame of those who failed to meet the challenge and, instead, took the easier—and dishonorable—path. May they be a lesson and inspiration to all of us.

Greenwich, Connecticut Kenneth F. McCallion

June 15, 2021

Courage is not the absence of fear but the capacity for action despite our fears.

– John McCain

Profiles in Courage

in the Trump Era

Introduction

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...

– Martin Luther King Jr.

America has always been a paradox. It is a raucous collection of conflicting and often incompatible forces, many of them noble and uplifting, and others vile and debasing. Our country’s Founders gave us a Constitution that has survived for 234 years. They also gave us a Declaration of Independence that has inspired generations of Americans and freedom-loving people around the world with the promise of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And yet, there has always been a dark side of America. The country’s history is stained with the original sins of slavery and the near-complete genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America. Not even a bloody civil war, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and countless treaties between the U.S. government and Native Americans (many of which were dishonored) were enough to make those stains disappear. Discrimination and systemic racism have become so embedded in the fabric of American institutions that they have proven difficult—if not impossible—to eradicate.

Throughout the history of the diverse, unruly, and often quarrelsome American people, we have been blessed with a series of men and women who have risen to lead in times of crisis and to keep this deeply divided country from falling apart. They have done so by rallying their fellow citizens to our common cause of freedom and democracy. Amazingly, through a combination of hard work and good fortune, the United States of America has had the longest-surviving uninterrupted democratic form of government in world history. This is no small accomplishment and was not inevitable.

Every generation of Americans has had to struggle to preserve our precious democracy. From every generation, there have emerged men and women who have led that fight against the forces of tyranny. The Founders, who understood the inherent fragility of a republic, created an elaborate government structure of checks and balances so that no one branch of government—neither the presidency, the legislature, nor the judiciary—could dominate the others.

The Founders understood that republics have often come and gone, and that the arc of history does not necessarily bend in the direction of freedom and democracy. The urge to be ruled by a strongman or a dictator and to sacrifice freedom for the false promise of security has persisted throughout human history. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships, including the Roman Republic in classical times, Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and the Second Spanish Republic in the 1930s. The Founders of this great nation, and in particular James Madison, spent much of their time and effort at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia devising an elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances to curtail the ability of any president with authoritarian tendencies from becoming a tyrant.

The four years of the Trump administration have perhaps proved the most challenging stress test yet on those constitutional checks and balances. It was not inevitable that the country would survive the Trump presidency with its democratic institutions still intact. After all, this was the first president ever elected in the country’s history to be both profoundly unqualified for the role, and contemptuous of democratic and constitutional norms. The nation was in grave peril throughout the entire four years of his presidency. This was true from the very start, when he gave his American Carnage inaugural speech on January 20, 2017, describing the country as a dystopian wasteland. On January 6, 2021, at almost the very end of his presidency, carnage and lawlessness became a reality inside the U.S. Capitol. Trump presented a constant domestic threat to the country and its institutions. He also displayed an unhealthy affinity for Russia, one of America’s major geopolitical adversaries. He could never quite bring himself to criticize the man he so clearly idolized: the autocratic president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Again, for the first time in American history we had a president with not only autocratic, anti-democratic impulses, but one who also seemed to be under the control, or at least within the psychological grip, of a hostile foreign power. This was the worst nightmare scenario ever conceived by the Founders, times two.

Fortuitously, or because the country’s voters were prudent enough for over two centuries to never elect a president with such severe anti-democratic and autocratic instincts, the United States never before faced the nightmare scenario that the Founders most feared. Perhaps the closest the country ever came to having a leader with a despotic temperament was Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States under President Thomas Jefferson from 1801 to 1805. Burr, who is best known for having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, was later charged with treason. He was accused of having conspired with Spain to raise a private army to annex a portion of the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase. Although he was twice acquitted on these charges, the entire episode highlighted the realistic fear that some strongman on horseback would come along and destroy our fragile democracy.

* * *

In 1956, John F. Kennedy, while still a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, published a bestselling book entitled Profiles in Courage. With the help of his friend and colleague, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy wrote this book over an extended period of time, with much of it taking shape while he was bedridden, recovering from back surgery.

The book presented the stories of eight former U.S. senators who demonstrated courage by standing up for their beliefs and what they believed was necessary for the public good, as opposed to what would have helped their political careers or what was expected of them based on party loyalty. Several of these senators took positions regarding the slave issue—the cause of our Civil War—that went against the grain of their own party’s views on this intractable and divisive issue, and often against the views of their own constituents too.

Kennedy selected these eight senators because they exhibited the integrity and boldness of politicians who withstood tremendous pressure by their political parties and public opinion, including many of their close friends and constituents who felt betrayed. Almost all lost reelection and ruined their political careers because a clear conscience and their constitutional duty mattered more.

Among the senators chronicled by Kennedy were Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Sam Houston of Texas. These two U.S. senators jeopardized their political careers and their lives by daring to oppose the drive toward secession in the South and Southwest during the 1850s, just prior to the Civil War. During the Trump era, the country faced a similar set of challenges. The divisive rhetoric and violent insurrectionist actions that we face today propel us to look for past examples of leadership and courage that we can hopefully replicate in the present. The examples of these two pre-Civil War senators, who put the health of our Republic before party and personal gain, are particularly relevant and instructive.

Thomas Benton joined the Senate when Missouri first became a state and by 1851 had already served in that role for an unprecedented 30 years. Benton’s unwavering commitment to the Union led him to be repudiated by his state party, stripped of most of his committee assignments, defeated for re-election, and nearly assassinated. Yet he always remained true to his allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the country he had sworn an oath to defend. He was contemptuous of his colleagues who shifted with the political winds and were only interested in gaining the kind of quixotic popularity that, in his words, is won without merit and lost without crime.¹ Benton would have approved of the great Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts when he explained an unpopular position to his irate constituents as follows: I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me.²

Senator Sam Houston was a similarly iconic figure, having served as commander in chief of the Texas forces that won independence from Mexico and then as Texas’s first president. In 1854, he became the only Southern Democratic senator to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the expansion of slavery into the Midwest and threatened to break the country apart. He did so in spite of all the intimidations, or threats, or discountenances that may be thrown upon me, which included being denounced by his state’s legislature and later almost shot. Houston called it the most unpopular vote I ever gave but also the wisest and most patriotic.³

On July 28, 2017, when Senator John McCain cast the decisive vote on the floor of the Senate against repealing the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, America bore witness to another moment of epic courage from the Senate. McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down gesture as he voted to preserve the signature legislative achievement of his one-time rival, Barack Obama, against the Trump-backed attempts to overturn it will forever be a symbol of moral courage. He will always be remembered as one of the few courageous immortals in America’s history books and in the hearts of his fellow citizens.

After Senator McCain’s tragic death to cancer on August 25, 2018, other brave public servants, American diplomats, and key government employees stepped forward in late 2019 to give sworn testimony at the Congressional hearings relating to the impeachment of President Trump. Trump was impeached for attempting to coerce the Ukrainian government into helping him dig up some dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. A series of government officials and U.S. diplomats bravely testified under oath in Congress as to how the proud diplomatic traditions of this country had been perverted by the Trump White House and its associated henchmen, including Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

When Trump was impeached for the first of two times in the House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, only one member of Congress who had been elected as a Republican had the courage to join with the Democrats in the House by voting to impeach President Trump. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who had recently quit the Republican Party, was the lone non-Democrat to vote in favor of the president’s impeachment. The articles of impeachment were then forwarded to the Senate for a trial, which started on January 22 and ended with an acquittal on February 5, 2020. On that day, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah cast the lone Republican vote in the Senate in favor of convicting President Trump on the article of impeachment charging him with abuse of power.

I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me,⁴ Romney said in his remarks on the floor of the Senate, calling Trump’s conduct grievously wrong. Romney added, We’re all footnotes at best in the annals of history. But in the most powerful nation on Earth, the nation conceived in liberty and justice, that is distinction enough for any citizen.

When Romney cast his vote, he knew that it would not make any difference in the outcome, since 67 votes (two-thirds of the senators) were necessary to convict. There were only 48 votes (47 Democrats plus Romney) in favor of convicting Trump on the abuse of power impeachment charge. But Romney knew that it was symbolically important for at least one Republican to vote in favor of impeachment, and it was also a vote that was dictated by his conscience.

As with McCain’s key vote on the ACA, Romney’s vote and his brief address to the Senate during Trump’s first impeachment trial was a moving and instructive moment in history. It has always been rare, although perhaps never more so than now, to see an elected public official take an action that they know is not politically advantageous to them and, indeed, is likely to be extremely damaging to their lives and careers. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii was so moved by Romney’s actions and words that he had to temporarily leave the Senate floor in tears. He literally restored my faith in the institution,⁵ said Schatz, a sentiment no doubt shared by countless other Americans.

Asked why he had acted differently from other Republican senators by voting to convict Trump, Romney responded with typical modesty, Because I’m old and have done other things. To be sure, Romney had already had his chance to be the standard-bearer of his party in the 2012 presidential election and was no longer holding any