American political leaders have forgotten how to be gracious to their opponents when people on the other side do something for which they deserve credit. Our antagonisms have become so deep and bitter that we are reluctant to give an inch to our political adversaries.
This is not good for democracy.
What we need is a new ethics of opposition. Its prime directive is simple: fight hard and unrelentingly for democracy and the rule of law. But when, for whatever reason, our opponents achieve something valuable, say so.
It pains us to follow this maxim at a time when so much that we care about is under attack.
Yet now is a good moment to follow it, even though, as Newsweek’s Bobby Ghosh puts it, “It isn't easy to praise someone (President Trump) who habitually, preemptively, and lavishly praises himself.” But there is no denying that the Trump Administration has just achieved a major and important foreign policy objective, a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of twenty hostages who were abducted during the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
As Ghosh argues, “(T)he guns in Gaza have quieted. And it isn't because of the nudgings of real estate developers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the promptings of Qatar and Egypt, the pleadings of Europe, the finger-wagging of human-rights organizations, or the hand-wringing of the United Nations alone.”
“The ceasefire,” he says, “is the gift of Donald Trump.”
Not sure that gift is the right word, for it is something given willingly with no expectation of payment or reward. Is that the right description for a president who is reportedly desperate to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Or for a president who was caught on a hot mic brokering a meeting between his son Erik and the President of Indonesia? Recall that Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., serve as executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.
Gift or not, Trump got done what the Biden Administration did not accomplish. He induced, threatened, or cajoled the Israeli government to make at least a temporary peace with Hamas.
He did so after wasting a lot of time before drawing a line in the sand for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Ghosh observes, if the president had not gotten lost in fantasies about “real-estate opportunities in Gaza, thousands of Palestinian lives might have been saved, and more of the Israeli hostages would be in the bosom of their families.”
Better late than never.
President Biden’s former national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, got it right when, on October 12, he said about the ceasefire and hostage deal, “’I give credit to President Trump, I give credit to [Steve] Witkoff and [Jared] Kushner and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio. These are hard jobs. The president of the United States is the hardest job in the world, and these other jobs, including the job I occupied, are tremendously difficult…. And to get to something like today takes a village, and it takes determination and really hard work, and so I, without question, offer credit for that.’”
He was joined in that by Arizona’s Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. “’I think,’” Kelly said, “he should get a lot of credit. I mean, this was his deal. He worked this out.’”
Late-night television host and frequent Trump critic embraced the ethics of opposition, which we are championing, when he said, “What a day for Donald Trump…You know what? He finally did something positive today and I want to give him credit for it … “
Kimmel twisted the knife a bit with a bit of sarcasm about the president, saying, “he’s not the type to take credit for himself,” but quickly added, “the fact is the bombing has stopped, the hostages have been released, and Trump deserves some of the praise for that. So I know it sounds crazy to say, but good work on that one, President Trump.”
To hue to this line, we have to be able to focus on what someone does, no matter how much we dislike the person who does it or other things they do.
This is harder than it should be, not just because of the things the administration is doing at home, but because the leader of the free world never misses an opportunity to kick sand in the eyes of people he considers his enemies.
For example, while basking in the glory of his Middle East accomplishments, Trump told a story about a meeting he had with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi a decade ago and attacked 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee Hilary Clinton while doling so. As the president put it, “We knew each other from the beginning…. I was going to meet him, and then Hillary Clinton was following me…. And he liked me so much he never even got to see Hillary. ... [Sisi] didn’t want to waste a lot of time. He knew what was going to happen.”
Later, he asked El-Sisi if he remembered “crooked Hillary Clinton.”
That followed on the heels of the president’s speech to the Israeli Parliament, when he went out of his way to call former President Joe Biden's administration “the worst in U.S. history,” then said former President Barack Obama was "not far behind."
It doesn’t help that Trump is so eager for credit and so angry and resentful when he doesn’t get the amount of credit he craves. What CNN observed during his first term is even truer today: “The funnel cloud of anger, score-settling, political chaos and divisive rhetoric that swirls around Trump at all times also has the effect of drowning out debate about the nature of his policies and any good press that he does get.”
Trump makes it hard for liberals to adhere to our ethics of opposition because he “makes it impossible, in practice, for liberals to be tolerant (egalitarian), rational, and optimistic about human nature—three things that are essential aspects of liberal ideology and liberal psychology.” AS John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady say, the president “oozes authoritarian ugliness.”
As hard as it is, giving the president credit when he deserves it is not only the right thing to do, it also helps blunt the criticism that those who oppose him on most things are driven by blind hatred or Trump derangement syndrome, a belief that Trump encourages at every turn.
If we are to have any chance of repairing and rebuilding our democracy in a post-Trump world, we need to learn the lesson that all great strategists understand. Giving ground does not mean surrendering.
Doing so at the right time is necessary to make victory possible in the struggle to preserve democracy, even if Trump’s recent success turns out to resemble Ebeneezer Scrooge’s fictitious benevolence on Christmas Day.
