Douglas MacKinnon, a former White House official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration, said that former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election because he “didn’t conduct himself with class and dignity” and his abhorrent behavior was an insult to the office of the president.
In an OpEd published by The Hill, MacKinnon referenced an except from forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender that reveals that “Trump angrily interrupted a policy meeting in the Oval Office to vent about Joe Biden by allegedly asking, ‘How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?’”
To paraphrase Peter Quill, “Normal people don’t even think about calling someone else a ‘mental retard,’” McKinnon wrote.
“Normal people don’t, but egotistical bullies who favor 1970s insults might have no problem spewing out a demeaning label that has made most people cringe for decades now. That’s one of the most important answers to Trump’s reported question: Live by the insult sword, die by the insult sword.
Don't Miss
“While this may come as a shock to Donald Trump, there are millions of Americans — including a large number of his supporters — who believe that a president should conduct himself with class, dignity and grace, if not for himself, then most certainly out of respect for the highest office in the land,” MacKinnon explained.
The former White House official said that Trump “insulted the presidency and those Americans who believe the office should represent the best in all of us.”
He added:
“If Trump truly wants to know why he lost, he must become self-aware enough to point a finger at himself. You can have the best policies in the world, but if you continually insult and demean other people, sooner or later that is going to become like the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard to many voters. They’re going to cover their ears and turn away from the source of the screeching noise.
A number of Republicans with whom I’ve spoken believe that Trump’s bombastic, bullying, unpresidential antics probably cost him as much as 10 percent of the vote. Let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say it was only 1 percent. That still equals about 1.5 million votes. And, again, he lost Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona by a total of just more than 42,000 votes.
Nobody likes a bully, and few people like an insult comic as a president. It’s quite logical to imagine that Trump’s churlish, unpresidential demeanor caused at least 1 percent of the electorate to flip its votes.
In 2020, Trump made the person in the mirror his No. 1 enemy. Because of self-sabotage, he surely knows who and what cost him reelection. He needs to accept that answer and move on with his life.”
