No one expected Donald Trump to act any differently while leaving the White House than he did while inhabiting it.
So, we are left to witness the sorry spectacle of the president of the United States refusing to accept the overwhelming results of an election that even his own employees called the most secure in American history.
The weeks ahead are going to be ugly, anyone can see that, and not just because Trump hasn’t been to a coronavirus briefing in five months, even though the pandemic is surging to horrifying levels throughout the United States.
I won the Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 16, 2020
The only question is precisely how bad the end game will be. According to the New York Times last week, Trump had to be talked down from bombing Iran. Look for the presidential pardons of jailed loyalists to begin any day now. Meanwhile, his estranged niece, a clinical psychologist, told an interviewer, “Donald and his enablers ... are going to break as much as they can on the way out.”
This, I think everyone would agree, is no way to make an exit, peevishly whining and whinging, cursing the fates, casting blame far and wide.
Even Richard Nixon, who needed a pardon from his vice-president to be sure of escaping jail, departed the White House urging his staff “to serve our next President as you have served me and previous Presidents -- because many of you have been here for many years with devotion and dedication -- because this Office, great as it is, can only be as great as the men and women who work for and with the President.”
The classy and moving final speech by the late Cape Breton MLA Gordie Gosse, as he bids farewell to the legislature
I bring this up to show that it is possible to say farewell with class and grace. I still recall a former boss at this newspaper, who we knew to be on the way out, one Friday standing by the newsroom exit, saying simply, “Well, goodbye” and then pushing through the door, gone.
That of course is not as elegant as Pierre Trudeau telling reporters that he had taken a long, nighttime walk in the snow before deciding to retire as prime minister in 1984, or baseball great Lou Gehrig, ravaged by the disease that would soon bear his name, bidding farewell to a game that had made him a legend by telling a crowd at New York’s Yankee Stadium, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
It will not be remembered like Wayne Gretzky, wiping away tears unable to carry on at the news conference announcing his trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles.
It pales compared to the final speech by Gordie Gosse, the late working-class Cape Breton MLA, in the provincial legislature. If you haven’t watched it you should, because, as ill as Gosse was, the NDPer, seemingly without a note, thanked everyone by name from the legislature security guards to the nurses “on the third floor at the ENT,” before wrapping everything up with, “I guess it is time to say goodbye. God bless.”
Hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky announces he's leaving the Oilers.
Even when the occasion lacks that kind of emotional depth, there is something to be said for the woman or man who takes their leave without petulance, like an adult, or at very least just goes.
Not, then, like Grant Devine, the former premier of Saskatchewan who, even though a swath of his cabinet was jailed for expense-account fraud, was determined to run for the federal conservatives in 2004.
The federal party refused his nomination and expelled him, but Devine ran anyway, taking less than 30 per cent of the vote.
Instead, the model is those people who can take no for an answer, who understand the importance of saying goodbye when there is really nothing more to say.
In the days since the United States election, I’ve watched a lot of farewell speeches on YouTube, including John McCain’s conceding to Barack Obama which, for good reason, has gone viral.
John McCain concedes the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama.
“Tonight — tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Sen. Obama, I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president,” he said.
Then, as he often did during the campaign, he called on all Americans, “to not despair of our present difficulties but to believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.”
When you’re finished watching Gordie Gosse’s speech I’d suggest having a look at McCain’s too.
They’re both examples of how to make an exit; they both show how a person of dignity steps off the stage and says goodbye.
