John Gruber: The Brutal Clarity of This Result

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.

I fully agree. I find Trump’s personal and political views to be distasteful and cruel, and I’m distressed what it means that so many people love those things about him, but the thing that makes him completely unfit for office in my view is that he literally tried to overthrow a free and fair election. We can not forget this, and we need to be vigilant to prevent him from further anti-democratic behaviors over the next 4 years.

Maybe you can shrug this off as “boys being boys” or whatever, but I simply can not. Forget everything that happened in his first term, his actions after the 2020 election all the way up to January 6 should have invalidated him from ever holding this office again.