It would have been so easy.
So.
So.
So.
Easy.
In case you missed it, earlier today Barack Obama presented Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was a surprise for the outgoing vice president, and the ceremony was, well … as the wife just said, it was the stuff of movies. Just an emotional moment for an emotional man who has experienced great loss while maintaining an eternal sense of optimism and hope. There’s a lot of hate and mistrust in Washington, but little of it seems to be directed at Biden, who counts John McCain among his closest friends.
I digress.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom was a big deal. And it provided an easy, no-brainer moment for the incoming president to Tweet out something along the lines of this …
But, of course, Trump Tweeted nothing of the sort. The above is a fake. He didn’t mention Joe Biden, just as he didn’t mention Barack Obama on the night of his farewell address. Instead, we got this shit lineup …
And here’s the thing that so many Americans are missing right now: Decorum matters. It matters more than a wall. It matters more than Planned Parenthood. It even matters more than ISIS and Syria. Truly, decorum and decency are what keep us together and allow us to go forward, political differences be damned. Barack Obama is a president of tremendous decorum. George W. Bush was a president of tremendous decorum. Bill Clinton, and George H. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford—all presidents of tremendous decorum. You may well have loathed them. You may well have loathed their ideas. But they weren’t in this to mock you; to belittle you; to pretend they had all the answers while you had none.
I fear a great many things over the next four years. But what I fear most is that, with this awful man guiding the way, the United States will lose its heart.
Will lose its decorum.
