According to a Republican writer who has worked for three Republican presidents, President Donald Trump is more divisive than any of his partisan predecessors.
“All presidents are partisan,” explained Peter Wehner, who served Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, in a New York Times piece on Monday. “But prior to Trump, most presidents picked moments. Sometimes there were moments of national tragedy, sometimes they were anniversaries, and they use those moments to try and unify the country. And in this case, Donald Trump, because of his own peculiar sociopathy and psychology, uses everything to divide us. So a lot of the country is just checking out and that’s a shame.”
Wehner then compared America as it celebrates its 250th birthday under Trump with how it celebrated America’s 200th birthday under a different Republican president, Gerald Ford.
“It’s interesting because when you think of the year 1976, that is very close to a period when our country was deeply divided,” Wehner wrote. “We think of the year 1968, when we had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam War tore us apart. We were in the midst of a vast cultural change, and so that division in the country could easily have played out in 1976.”
Wehner emphasized that, although Americans were not “completely united” in 1976, Ford made good faith efforts to bring Americans together to celebrate.
“The incentives for Gerald Ford, who felt that the right thing to do and the politically smart thing to do both was to bring the country together,” Wehner wrote. “That’s not the leadership we have at the moment.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2021, Francis Marion University historian and Ford biographer V. Scott Kaufman elaborated on Ford’s efforts to unify the country after the tumult of the previous decade and President Richard Nixon’s resignation due to the Watergate scandal.
“He began things off on a good note,” Kaufman wrote. “He said our national nightmare is over. He reached out to groups like the Black Congressional Caucus to try to say, ‘Look, I’m not like Richard Nixon. I want to reach out to all Americans.’ He also approached things so he came across as just your average American, while Richard Nixon was very aloof, was not very gregarious.”
Gleaves Whitney, executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, reinforced Kaufman’s observation.
“In the wake of the Watergate scandal, President Ford knew the most important thing he could do to heal the nation was reinforce that he was trustworthy,” Whitney told Salon at the time. “He just had to keep being himself. That meant he would lead by example. He would be transparent with the media. He would talk straight with the American people. And he would work his hardest to reestablish trust, at home and abroad, in the office of the presidency of the U.S.”
In addition to saying Ford tried to bring America together, Kaufman also told this author that the president would have been appalled by Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election after he lost.
“After Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, President Ford departed the White House via helicopter,” Kaufman wrote. “As he flew over the Capitol building, he said, with tears in his eyes, ‘That’s my real home.’ For a person who had served in Congress for a quarter century, Ford knew that that ‘home’ was where the representatives of the people conducted business for American people. It is a hallowed place, a symbol of democracy. Had he been alive today and witnessed a group of thugs break into the Capitol, ransack it, and desecrate his statue by putting a Trump flag in his hand and a MAGA hat on his head, he would have been irate.”
