Movie lines pop into my head all the time. This week, as more developments emerged from the moral and ethical swamp (pun intended) that is Donald Trump, I kept hearing the voice of Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall) from The Godfather Part II, booming out from the back of a crowded room that his client was owed an apology.
While the events of that film do not bear directly on what’s happening today, that scene conjures someone standing up, maybe at a Trump press conference or, if the person was truly willing to risk their own safety, at a Trump rally, and calling out, to paraphrase Tom Hagen: “ You owe the American people an apology, Mr. President.”
We’d never get one, of course. Trump would be more likely to go a full week without lying to the American people than to apologize for his actions, not that he’d do either. He’s now made more than 3,000 untrue or misleading statements just since taking office, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker. That’s about 6.5 per day, and if it seems like he’s been lying more often recently, that’s because he is: nine times a day in March and April.
This prompted some fantasizing about other apologies we’ll never hear. Boy, are there a bunch.
Picture the Republican presidential nominee at their 2020 convention. It was someone whose name is not Trump. Had Mr. Popular Vote Loser been removed from office? Had he resigned? Since this is a fantastical scenario that will never come true, I decided that he had sought re-election and been defeated by a groundswell among Republican voters disgusted with the fact that they had nominated someone completely devoid of principle or character four years earlier.
That 2020 nominee, we’ll call him Mr. NotGonnaHappen—actually, for a truly impossible scenario, let’s make him Ms. NotGonnaHappen—took to the podium, cleared her throat, and issued a heartfelt statement along the following lines:
On behalf of the Republican Party as an institution, as its chosen leader and nominee, I wish to sincerely apologize for our having chosen Mr. Trump as our nominee four years ago. We could have chosen other conservatives, other Republicans, but instead we nominated someone whom we knew was wholly inappropriate to wield the power of the presidency.
We knew the person he was before we nominated him, before we heard the tape in which he bragged about assaulting women, before he besmirched the great and honorable seal of the President of the United States by telling countless lies while standing behind it. We had already heard him denigrate large segments of the American family and use hate as a political weapon. We chose him anyway. For that, we are deeply sorry. We repudiate his legacy and all for which he stands.
Or something like that. Next up in my dream apology scenario would be the media. On a brief aside, plenty in the media owe an apology, not to mention a debt of gratitude, to Michelle Wolf. What a great ‘coincidence’ that just a few days after Wolf’s harsh but fair criticisms of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ lack of truthfulness, we learned that Sanders’ previous statements regarding Trump not knowing anything about payments to Stormy Daniels were completely false.
Returning to the main topic at hand, how about this kind of statement at an upcoming White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner from the organization’s president:
On behalf of all the journalists who cover the White House, and with the full endorsement of the country’s top 200 newspapers, (NOTE: hey, a guy can dream, right?), we’d like to say the following: we fucked up. Yes, the Republican Party nominated Trump, but we covered the campaign like a bunch of morons. Emails, emails, emails. Oh boy, are we sorry.
Although it’s in no way an apology from the media, what I saw in Friday’s New York Times was heartening. Take it for what it’s worth, but the first three paragraphs of their lead front-page story (top right, one of two articles under the main, bold headline) presented the last week’s developments in Trumpworld in a stark, harsh, yet utterly truthful way:
As of last week, the American public had been told that President Trump’s doctor had certified he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected.” That the president was happy with his legal team and would not hire a new lawyer. That he did not know about the $130,000 payment to a former pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him.
As of this week, it turns out that the statement about his health was not actually from the doctor but had been dictated by Mr. Trump himself. That the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the same new lawyer he had denied recruiting. And that Mr. Trump himself had financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as Stormy Daniels.
Even in the current political environment that some derisively call the post-truth world, the past few days have offered a head-spinning series of revelations that conflicted with the version of events Mr. Trump and his associates had previously provided. Whether called lies or misstatements, Mr. Trump’s history of falsehoods has been extensively documented, but the string of factual distortions that came to light this week could come back to haunt him.
You can almost hear the microphone hit the floor.
To shift back from truth to fantasy, how about an apology from James Comey? Well, he did say this:
“I have read [Hillary Clinton] has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that,” Comey wrote in his upcoming book, according to the Washington Post. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made.”
Really? That’s what you’re sorry for? How about, I don’t know, maybe you’re sorry that you violated long-standing policy that bars you from speaking about ongoing FBI investigations and instead dropped a bombshell 10 days before the election? Or how about you’re sorry that, at the very time you did speak about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails—you did not speak about an ongoing investigation by the very same FBI into her opponent, the man whom you helped become the most powerful person in the world?
None of these apologies are going to be issued. We know that. At this point, it would be enough to watch Trump leave office and to see, after the 2020 election, a progressive, Democratic president and strong progressive majorities in both houses of Congress. It’s frightening to think how much more damage Trump could do with eight years in office.
Apology or not, our country and our people need to heal from the wounds being inflicted on our body politic every day by Donald Trump. He has hurt us with his hate, he has hurt us with his complete distortion of the truth, and he has hurt us with his attacks on the institutions—starting with the media—without which we cannot be a free, democratic society. As for the people most responsible for his election, it’s doubtful we’ll ever hear anything close to what we’d really like to.
Forget about what we’d like. What we require is their help in undoing the harm they’ve inflicted.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).